JOHN McCAIN: I GOT PLENTY OF THINGS WRONG, BUT I GOT PUTIN RIGHT
From early on, the late Senator warned that Putin was a dangerous foe and would try to take over Ukraine. Few listened.
In Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, there's a street that runs between two major roads, Velyka Vasylkivska Street and Lesya Ukrayinka Boulevard. It's mostly residential but there are a few old industrial buildings, too. For half a century, it was named after Ivan Kudrya, a Russian agent who led the resistance to the Nazi occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War. He was captured in 1942 and presumably executed.
Last April, the Kyiv City Council voted to change the name of Ivan Kudrya Street. It's now called John McCain Street.
photo credit: Gage Skidmore
In 2017, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Mark Salter, his long-time advisor and co-author, were writing The Restless Wave. It started out to be a book about foreign policy and national security. Then McCain was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and it became a memoir, his valediction. In it, he often talks about Vladimir Putin. They loathed each other.
"I have gotten plenty of things wrong in my long career," McCain wrote. "Putin isn't one of them."
It was February 15, 2000. The Republican presidential candidates were gathered in Columbia, South Carolina for a debate. They were asked about the new Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who had only recently been designated to succeed Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
George W. Bush said, "The verdict on Mr. Putin is out. We don't know enough about him."
McCain was wary. "We know that he was an apparatchik," he said. "We know that he was a member of the KGB. We know that he came to power because of brutality in Chechnya, I am very concerned about Mr. Putin."
A year later, as president, Bush would meet Putin for the first time and say afterward that he had looked the Russian leader in the eye and gotten a "sense of his soul." He found him to be "straightforward and trustworthy."
McCain had made up his own mind about the new Russian leader. He had seen in him all the warning signs of an authoritarian. Putin was ruthlessly cracking down on the domestic press and political opponents, then began adapting an expansionist foreign policy.
In a speech in November 2003, he called on the G-8 nations to expel Russia [They would eventually do so in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea].
"I am worried that what we are seeing in Mr. Putin's government is a continuation of autocratic state control, and repression," McCain said. "Since the end of the Cold War, many Western observers have optimistically argued the way Russia is governed has fundamentally changed. Sadly this appears not to be true."
For the rest of his life, he would be an ardent and persistent Putin critic. Long before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and occupied a slice of eastern Ukraine, McCain had warned it would happen. He predicted that Putin's intention of resurrecting the old Russian empire would likely mean an eventual move on all of Ukraine. At the time, he was sometimes dismissed as a shrill cold warrior unable to adjust to a new world order.
"John was right about him," Salter told me a few days ago, "He was right about him from early on. He had him figured out."
Richard Fontaine, former foreign policy advisor to Mcain and now chief executive officer of Center for a New American Security, attributes McCain's early suspicions about Putin to his having been a deep student of history, including Russian history. He also learned from his many meetings with Russian dissidents and refugees and people of all kinds in the former Soviet republics and neighboring countries, according to Fontaine.
"There was a special place in his heart for the former Soviet republics," Fontaine said. "We liked to joke that at one point he must've met every Belarussian dissident twice."
Photo credit: icus63, I-Stock Photos
At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin dropped the mask. In a half hour speech that stunned much of the audience, he lacerated the West, especially the U.S., which he accused of creating a unipolar world "in which there is one master, one sovereign."
"It wasn't really Putin's excoriation of the United States for hypocrisy after its invasion of Iraq that was notable; this was pretty much mainstream German, French and much American thinking," wrote Daniel Fried, an Atlantic Council fellow and former assistant Secretary of State for Europe, in Politico last year. "The real moment of revelation was a broader conclusion that the U.S.-led liberal order, a.k.a., the Free World, was of no interest or value to Russia. "Putin's speech came as a shock to those who had invested substantial effort in working with Russia to include it in a post-Cold War global stability system."
McCain would later say Putin, while speaking, had glared pointedly at him. In the recent PBS documentary, Putin and The Presidents, there is a brief video excerpt that shows Putin speaking as McCain, seated in the front, listens to the translation via headphones. He is looking directly at Putin with an expression of amused contempt.
"McCain wasn't intimidated by Putin at all," Salter said. "He was alarmed by what we were letting him get away with. But he wasn't intimidated."
I covered McCain's 2008 presidential campaign for more than a year. I must have heard him denounce Putin as a murderous thug and threat to global order dozens of times. It seemed like almost an obsession.
Late in 2008, Russia invaded and occupied its neighbor, Georgia.
Barack Obama, of course, defeated McCain that fall. Once in office, he announced that he would attempt to "reset" relations with Moscow. McCain thought that naive. Then, Obama drew a "red line" in Syria, vowing a military response if Syrian leader Bashar Assad used chemical weapons. When Assad did, Obama hesitated.
Eventually, Russia stepped in to remove Syria's chemical weapons stocks.* But Putin surely noted the hesitation.
"He views the United States as weak and thinks he is emboldened by that and he is going to take steps to ensure that Ukraine, particularly Crimea and probably Eastern Ukraine will remain part of Russia," McCain told a British interviewer.
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Over the years, McCain had developed a deep interest in the fate of Ukraine, which was geographically, politically and historically caught between East and West, between Russia and Europe. He also developed affection and admiration for its people.
In 2013, Ukraine's democratically elected and egregiously corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych scrapped a pending agreement that would have drawn Ukraine closer to the European Union, in favor of closer ties to Russia. It led to massive anti-government street protests. The police reacted violently, which led to even bigger demonstrations.
In late 2013, McCain and Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT), went to Kyiv and addressed the protestors gathered in Kyiv's main plaza, Maidan (Independence) Square.
Anti-government protestors in Kyiv, Ukraine, 2014 photo credit: Nessa Gnatoush
"To all Ukrainians, America stands with you," McCain said. The crowd went wild. "People of Ukraine, this is your moment. This is about you. No one else. This is about the future you want for your country. This is about the future you deserve… The free world is with you. America is with you. I am with you."
In The Restless Wave," McCain recalled, "I had asked staff to find an appropriate line or two from a Ukrainian poet that I could use to end my remarks. 'Love your Ukraine,' I quoted the poet Tara Shevchenko, 'love her in cruel times, love her in cruel moments, pray to God for her.' Every politician likes to flatter themselves that they can move an audience. I don't succeed at that as often as I sometimes pretend to myself that I do. I didn't need to pretend that day. It wasn't my delivery that had the effect, just the message and the moment."
McCain in Kyiv, photo credit: McCain Institute for International Leadership website
A few months later, in early 2014, Russia took over the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine. McCain frantically lobbied for the United States to send weapons to Ukraine. It went nowhere.
"In the immediate aftermath of Crimea, he was begging, pleading, beseeching, urging, arguing, kicking and clawing to get weapons to the Ukrainians and we said, 'No, we aren't going to give them any,''" said Salter.
Next, the Russians seized Eastern Ukraine, just as McCain had warned.
"I'm ashamed of my country," McCain said in February 2015 on the CBS show Face The Nation. "I'm ashamed of my president and I'm ashamed of myself that I haven't more to help these people."
McCain returned to Ukraine at the end of 2016, spending New Year's Eve with Ukrainian troops in the war-shattered, empty town of Shyrokyne, east of Mariupol. That month, he was one of 27 Senators who sent a letter to President-elect Trump urging him to be tougher on Russia because of its "military land grab" in Ukraine. It called for the U.S. to provide Ukraine with defensive lethal weaponry.**
By the summer of 2018, when Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, McCain was dying.
At their joint appearance before the press, Trump declined to criticize Putin for Russia's interference in the 2016 American presidential election. McCain was incensed.
From his sick bed, McCain issued a statement saying that Trump had "abased himself ... abjectly before a tyrant." He called it "one of the most disgraceful appearances by an American president."
Salter said, "That was probably the harshest thing I ever heard him say about a president."
McCain died on August, 25 2018 just short of his 82nd birthday.
At his funeral, one of the people he had chosen to be a pallbearer was Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent Russian critic of Putin.
Kara-Murza would write in the Washington Post, "Much has and will be written about McCain's military courage, his patriotism, his famed bipartisanship and his unimpeachable personal decency. His long-standing position on Russia deserves a special tribute."
One year ago, the Russian invaded Ukraine, just as McCain had feared. In April, Kara-Murza was imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war. He remains jailed to this day.
Last spring, in retaliation for economic sanctions by the U.S., Russia permanently banned 963 Americans from entering their country. It was an odd and eclectic list. It included President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros, and actors Ben Stiller and Morgan Freeman.
Also on the black list, despite no longer being alive, was the name of John McCain.
* Several former Obama administration officials concede the red line incident was handled clumsily and hesitantly, but insist it was ultimately a success.
** President Trump would authorize sending Javelin anti-tank missiles in 2017, but held up $200 million in military assistance by Congress in 2019.
I love that there’s a street in Kiev named after John McCain.
Learned something new, nice piece Ron.