Strongman, The

of his trip leaked out, there was speculation that he might have been trying to persuade Saddam to destroy his Al Samoud 2 missiles. The foreign ministry, forced to say something, said his purpose was to ‘explain Russia’s position on Iraq and receive an assurance it would fulfil UN resolutions and cooperate “completely and unconditionally” with weapons inspectors’.
    In fact, his mission was much more dramatic than that. Putin had charged him with only one task: to persuade Saddam to stand down and thereby save his country from invasion. Saddam listened to Primakov, took notes, asked him to repeat the message in front of his deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, then stood up, pressed his hand on Primakov’s shoulder and left.
    Primakov flew back to Moscow and reported the bad news – first to Putin, then to a full meeting of the Security Council in the Kremlin. They had one last trick up their sleeves. It was agreed that Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, should fly immediately to Washington to try one last time to talk the Americans out of their plan for war.
    He arrived late at night and went to a restaurant with the Russian ambassador, Yuri Ushakov. They drank into the small hours, and then Voloshin suddenly got a call to meet the CIA director, George Tenet, at 8.15. ‘I’d only just got to bed,’ he recalled later, with a smile. From the CIA he was taken to the White House to meet Condoleezza Rice, and during their conversation President Bush ‘dropped by’ (the only way diplomatic protocol allowed the president to meet someone of Voloshin’s rank). ‘He made a ten-minute speech about the threat of international terrorism,’ says Voloshin. ‘He was very passionate, standing up rather than sitting. Then pleasantries. Twenty minutes in all. I told him we didn’t agree, but I felt he was not interested in my answers. He had made up his mind already so he wasn’t much worried about the arguments – only in whether we would support him.’ An American official confirms that ‘the president wasn’t there to listen to what Voloshin had to say and reply’.
    Voloshin was granted access to every top official – Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, the Senate leader. But it was his meeting with commerce secretary Donald Evans that astonished him most. Evans asked if they could speak privately, and they went to his office. Evans said: ‘You are close to Putin, I am close to President Bush, and he has asked me to put it to you – what do you want in exchange for supporting us?’
    Voloshin understood that they were offering a bribe: Russia stood to lose billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq, and Washington was offering to compensate. ‘We don’t want to bargain,’ Voloshin said. ‘This is a bad war which will harm everyone. And Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism.’
    In a final, rather pathetic, move the Americans tried to prove to Voloshin that there was a connection between Saddam and Chechnya. An American official recalled in an interview: ‘We thought this would be an issue that would catch the Russians’ attention, but Voloshin came out at the end saying, “That was totally uninteresting, there is nothing new in this presentation.” ’
    Voloshin confirms: ‘They told me a long, touching story about a terrorist who fought in Chechnya and later turned up in Iraq. It was pretty primitive, but they tried it on.’
    Even scratching Putin’s rawest itch achieved nothing. The two sides were poles apart. Operation Shock and Awe began on 19 March.
    Putin snubbed
    For Putin, Iraq was not the be all and end all. There were still important prizes to aim for: the cancellation of America’s missile defence plans, WTO membership, increased trade, and so on. He decided not to let his failure stand in the way of his friendship with Bush.
    Another opportunity was coming to impress the world with his openness and ‘Europeanness’. At the end of May, his home town of St Petersburg – built by Peter the Great as Russia’s ‘Window on the West’ – would celebrate its 300th anniversary. No wall was left unpainted, no stucco ornament ungilded, as the city was refurbished for a long weekend of partying, to which every major leader was invited. Putin planned to bask in the glory of St Petersburg’s Italianate avenues and palaces.
    On the Friday he opened a Baltic youth festival, hosted a summit of Asian leaders on board a river ship, and took the leaders of