The circus of American and European diplomats in Moscow loved Dmitri Trenin while he was on their side. Trenin was a former colonel in a Soviet intelligence agency. He became known in the early 2000s for writing books that argued Russia, diminished after the Cold War, should get friendly with the West by joining Nato and the European Union. He was a pro-West Russian, and it earned him the directorship of the Moscow branch of a rich American think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trenin built contacts in the Kremlin, wrote for the New York Times, and was in the phone book of every foreign ambassador in the Russian capital. He was telling westerners what they wanted to hear. ‘A Russian who is ahead of his time and the vast majority of his countrymen’, is how a lofty American book reviewer described him in 2001.
Today, Trenin’s hope that his country will become part of the West is finished. Russia has invaded Ukraine and Moscow is edging closer to direct conflict with Nato. ‘There is no going back to where we were’, he messages me on WhatsApp. He’s unwell with a cold so won’t do an interview on the phone. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, many of Trenin’s Carnegie colleagues escaped Moscow to Europe, but he abandoned everything he worked for and decided to back Vladimir Putin’s war. His Carnegie centre in Moscow was shuttered by the Russian government, and no American or European diplomat wants to speak to him anymore. Trenin now says the West is ‘the enemy’, and says it wants ‘not just a change in the political regime in Russia, but also the elimination of Russia as a major independent entity on the world stage’. In the Russian media he toys with idea of detonating a nuclear weapon in Europe.
Trenin blames the West for the last two years of war in Ukraine, and tries to explain his strange about-turn. ‘I was a strong advocate of a very close partnership between Russia and the US, Russia and the countries of Europe’, he prefaces. In The End of Eurasia, published in 2001, he wrote that Russia should try and join the EU within 30 years, and in the meantime it should ‘harmonise… economic, political, legal, and humanitarian practices with those of the European Union.’ It should try and join Nato too. ‘A confrontation with Nato is something Russia cannot afford and should never attempt.’
Perhaps Trenin’s fantasy Russia would have adopted the euro or welcomed an American military base in Vladivostok, but now this happy future will never arrive. He believes everything went wrong in the 2010s. ‘I saw adversity replace partnership at an ever-quickening pace.’ That decade, the Russian military went to Syria to support Bashar al-Assad’s incumbent regime, while America sent CIA agents to southern Turkey to direct weapons from arms dealers to Syrian rebels. America passed the Magnitsky Act, and European leaders helped Ukrainian protesters oust their Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. ‘Western countries would only accept Russia if it followed Western political, societal, and ideological models, and then only in a position of a rules-taker, faithful follower, and vassal slash client’, Trenin says.
In this retelling of the last two decades, bad things happened to Russia, and it did nothing wrong. Trenin rattles through other mistakes of the West: ‘The drive to extend Nato membership to Ukraine’, ‘Demonisation of Putin and Russia’, ‘subverting the Minsk accords’, and ‘a selfish desire by the US to keep and strengthen its sudden position of the world’s first ever hegemon.’ Trenin suggests that Russia was trying to find a new, benign place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the West wouldn’t let it. (The West and Europe and America are all used interchangeably by Trenin.) Russia was so threatened that in 2022 Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine. ‘I must admit that I was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction in the West to the Russian military intervention’, he says. Surely we saw this coming? A former colleague: ‘I speak to him and think, this is crazy. He must know better than this BS.’
Trenin went silent for the first month of the war, then backed Putin. Some of his colleagues and contacts were leaving Russia, and Kremlin officials were being sanctioned. ‘Every day was worse than the day before’, says John Foreman, Britain’s military attaché in Moscow until September 2022. Some think the Russian government put pressure on Trenin to support the war. Carnegie was the most respected think tank in the Russian capital – ‘the best in its field’, says the former colleague – and Trenin’s writing was read inside the Kremlin by officials close to Putin. Western embassies would include Trenin’s opinions in their dispatches back home. ‘He would be wheeled out to speak to VIP visitors’, says Foreman. What Trenin said mattered.
Foreman now thinks Trenin was just ‘an opportunist’ who changed his stance to stay close to the Kremlin. He calls him ‘a weathervane’, ‘a classic inveigler’, ‘a man without insight nor integrity’ and ‘loathsome’. But Trenin’s support for the war is sober and grim – he doesn’t show the same wild madness of Putin’s popular state TV backers. Trenin says at one point: ‘As for the question of a Russia-Nato war itself, I think that unfortunately and tragically it might be provoked by those seeking to fundamentally weaken both Russia and Europe. Russia has absolutely no interest in such a war.’ He talks about using nuclear weapons to try and scare people into not using them – he doesn’t want apocalypse. ‘Woe to us if we grow out of fear.’
Trenin says I can refer to him as the ‘Research Director of the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy (affiliated with the Higher School of Economics)’. He doesn’t seem to be backing Putin for wealth and status. One of Trenin’s old colleagues, Anatol Lieven, explains his decision to support Putin by quoting a Puritan noble refusing to desert King Charles I in the English civil war. ‘I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years’, Edmund Verney wrote, ‘and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him.’ Trenin chose to support the motherland, but loyalty is lonely.
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