Writing in the Washington Post Strobe Talbott recalls a tense time during the days of the Kosovo crisis (and how many crises ago was that?) when he had a brief but telling encounter with Vladimir Putin, then a mere security chief but plainly a man on the make and someone to watch … carefully. At one point:
In our meeting, he managed to seem both relaxed and on guard … His personal touches were pointed. For no reason other than to show he had read my KGB dossier, he dropped the names of two Russian poets I had studied in college.
Talbott mines that vignette for insights into the character of the man who is now our adversary if not our enemy and concludes that:
Putin’s role in that narrowly avoided military collision 15 years ago remains a mystery, but his attitude was clear then and relevant today. During a dangerous power vacuum in Moscow — when partnership between Russia and the West was at the breaking point; when Russian armed forces, fed up with having to make nice with NATO, took matters into their own hands and tried to rush to the aid of fellow Slavs — Yeltsin’s soon-to-be handpicked successor seemed to be relishing the moment.
Certainly doesn’t sound like the sort of man whose morale will crumble if he is kicked out of the club.
