President Donald Trump is very good at reading human characters, and I don’t believe he needs my advice ahead of his planned meeting with Vladimir Putin. However, as someone who has had more than 30 face-to-face meetings with the Russian leader, I would like to share with a wider audience what it’s like to sit down with one of history’s most notorious dictators.
The thing I understood during our very first, several-hours-long meeting in the Kremlin is that the Russian president is not an ordinary politician. In fact, he is hardly a politician in the classic sense. He remains a true KGB officer who studies his interlocutor. Long conversations with him were more like recruitment sessions, where he tried to extract maximum information from me while giving away very little in return.
For Putin, lying isn’t just something he resorts to from time to time; it’s a permanent language of communication. What’s worth noting is that he doesn’t particularly disguise his deception — it’s as if he’s saying, “I’m not telling the truth, so what?” One of the most frequent tricks Putin has resorted to with me, as well as reportedly with other leaders, is to refer to some nonexistent past commitment that was not met by his adversaries. He uses this to try and gain the moral high ground in current talks.
If Putin detects weakness or is very unhappy with what he is hearing, he goes on the attack. He has used this tactic not only with me and other leaders of post-Soviet countries but also with former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
During their first meeting at the G8, Putin went on the offensive, using the f-word multiple times, to the astonishment of the French. In 2008, when Sarkozy tried to mediate between me and Putin after Russia attacked Georgia, Putin suddenly took Sarkozy by his tie and shook him while menacingly threatening to hang me “by my genitals.” In May 2008, during a meeting in Sochi, Putin threatened then-President George W. Bush with a war if he would not stop supporting Georgia and Ukraine in their bid for NATO membership.
One can be pretty sure that Putin knows better than to treat Trump this way. Putin is in a very vulnerable situation now, both economically and militarily, and he knows that Trump is capable of truly radical decisions and doesn’t have the same “red lines” as his predecessors. Trump’s larger-than-life, dominating personality is immune to Putin’s foolishness. Putin will likely try to flatter the US leader and deceive him in his usual way. However, Trump has already said publicly that he is no longer buying that behavior.
In dealing with Putin, one must keep in mind that he absolutely hates the United States. He sees it as the main problem for Russia, no matter who is in the White House. The first long tirade I heard from him, way back in February 2004, was a warning not to listen to any American advice if I wanted to stay friends with him. Putin regards any war he is fighting as a proxy war with the US. There is not a single chance to convince him of the opposite.
Putin is not rational to the extent that he doesn’t care about any promise of economic benefit and perks. He only believes in fear and sheer force. He also sees any concessions from America as a sign of weakness, as he did with the Reset Policy from the Obama administration. This led him to the annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria.
Russian Ceasefires and Deception
Another issue not to be mistaken about is Russian ceasefires. Russia has proclaimed numerous ceasefires in the ’90s in its proxy wars against Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya, and also in 2008 in Georgia. Every time, the ceasefire was used to deceive the victims of Russian aggression, only to restart the war and seize more territory.
A Vindictive Personality
Another trait that is part of Putin’s personality is his vindictiveness. I know this better than many others, as I was jailed for almost four years by Putin’s Georgian stooge, oligarch Ivanishvili. I was poisoned and tortured in prison, with Putin’s figure looming large behind my ordeal as a reminder of what happens to leaders who dare to challenge him.
TRUMP MUST TURN THE TABLES ON PUTIN IN ALASKA
Looking at my prison cages, I often remember the phrase Putin told me at our last meeting in February 2008 — “Your western friends promise you lots of nice things, but they never deliver. I don’t promise you anything nice, but I always deliver.”
Mikheil Saakashvili, a political prisoner in the country of Georgia where he was president. A prominent advocate for democratic reform in the post-Soviet space, he also served as Governor of Ukraine’s Odesa region has been a vocal opponent of Russian aggression and authoritarianism.
