Strongman, The

that Russia has nothing to fear and everything to gain from having strong, stable democracies on its borders, and that by aligning with the West, Russia joins all of us on a course to prosperity and greatness.’ In a flagrant display of double standards, Cheney then flew to Kazakhstan where he praised the Putinesque dictatorship of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, expressing his ‘admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the past 15 years, both in terms of economic development as well as political development.’
    It was not the sort of thing that Vladimir Putin could let pass without comment. Six days later, in an address to parliament, he made a cryptic remark that left the Americans scratching their heads, although its target was clear. During a long passage devoted to the importance of the military, he snarled: ‘We can see what’s going on in the world. We can see it! As they say, “Comrade Wolf knows who to eat.” He keeps on eating, and listens to nobody. And apparently doesn’t intend to listen.’
    The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, traditionally suave and restrained, lost his cool at talks in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The meeting was about Iran, which the US suspected was trying to build a nuclear weapons capability by developing civilian technology provided by the Russians. The previous year Russia agreed to join a troika of EU nations (the UK, France and Germany) plus the United States and China in elaborating a joint approach. At one point Moscow had helpfully suggested that it could enrich fuel for Iran’s as yet uncompleted Bushehr power station and have it shipped back to Russia. But in April 2006 the Russians announced the sale of an advanced air-defence system to Iran, infuriating the Americans.
    Now, at the Waldorf, the six foreign ministers of the Iran group were exploring the possibility of sanctions against Iran. But after Cheney’s Vilnius speech the gloves were off. Condoleezza Rice and her political director Nicholas Burns faced an increasingly agitated Lavrov across the dinner table. Burns recalls: ‘Ordinarily in diplomacy people are polite to each other. And they don’t personalise things. But at some point, midway through the dinner, Lavrov became very red in the face and very angry, and kind of pounded on the table and attacked me over public statements I had made, objecting to Russia’s arms sales to Iran.’ Lavrov invoked Cheney’s speech and demanded that the Americans keep their criticisms to themselves. Burns was about to respond in kind, and Rice had to grip his arm to calm him. 4
    Such was the fraught atmosphere when the simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted into violence. In September 2006 South Ossetian forces fired on a military helicopter carrying Georgia’s defence minister, Irakli Okruashvili, causing him to make an emergency landing. Okruashvili had earlier promised to celebrate the following New Year in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali – in other words, to accomplish the reincorporation of the region into Georgia by the end of 2006. Skirmishes broke out between Russian-armed South Ossetian soldiers and American-trained Georgians. Then, at the end of the month, Georgia arrested four Russian officers and accused them of espionage. International mediators were brought in, and after a few days the Russians were released – but not before they were paraded in front of television cameras, handcuffed and escorted by female Georgian police.
    ‘The message of Georgia to our great neighbour Russia,’ Saakashvili proclaimed, ‘is: enough is enough.’
    The Russians took it as a deliberate humiliation and retaliated with the harshest of sanctions: they recalled their ambassador, and cut all rail, sea, road, air and postal links. Georgians living in Moscow began to feel the heat: hundreds who could not produce legitimate papers were rounded up and put on planes bound for Tbilisi; schools were asked to provide lists of children with Georgian-sounding names so that the authorities could investigate whether they were illegal immigrants.
    Murder of Anna Politkovskaya
    Western governments were only getting into their stride with criticism of Russia’s démarche against Georgia when something much more shocking happened. On 7 October 2006, Putin’s 54th birthday, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya – known around the world for her bold reporting from Chechnya and criticism of the Kremlin – was shot dead in