What Putin’s ‘america Guru’ Taught Me About His Country — And Mine

The man sitting closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska will be Yuri Ushakov, his top foreign policy adviser and ‘America guru.’ During the summit, he’ll be a largely silent presence, perhaps occasionally providing some information or clarification to his boss. After the summit, he will explain Putin's objectives going forward to foreign leaders and the western media.

Ushakov spent 10 years in Washington serving as Russia’s ambassador to the United States and for much of that time, I’d have lunch with him every few months at his favorite Italian restaurant on P Street, near Dupont Circle. Of course, I wouldn’t actually know where we would meet until the last minute; we would agree in advance on the time but not the location. The morning of our lunch his assistant would call to tell me where to go. I always assumed Ushakov wanted to minimize the possibility of our table being bugged by either American or Russian security agents. All the same, he assumed that I would share information about our lunches with my former colleagues at the Department of State or the National Security Council. Which, of course, I did.

Looking back, I can see now how my interactions with Ushakov reflected larger trends in U.S.-Russian relations.

I don’t recall any hints of Ushakov ever disagreeing with the Kremlin’s foreign policies, though in explaining them to me he would try to make them less antagonistic and hold out the possibility of finding common ground. Good diplomats everywhere are like that, of course, but in Ushakov’s case, loyalty to “the party line” was inculcated in him and others of his generation — he’s now 78 —when they joined the Soviet diplomatic service. Yet he was flexible enough to adjust to the post-Communist transition under former President Boris Yeltsin and then to the changes made during the early Putin era. He told me he approved the moves toward a market economy — under ultimate state control, of course — because he understood that American businesses would invest in Russia only if they could make money and if Russia provided a congenial environment for their businesses and their employees. But then again, that was the new party line.

For this reason, he always wanted to know how he could encourage U.S. businesses to invest in Russia. By this time I worked in the private sector as a senior adviser on international issues for the law firm Akin Gump. My boss was the legendary Robert Strauss, the preeminent Washington insider and kingmaker, a former ambassador to Russia, and chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council. So it made sense that U.S.-Russian business development was a central theme of our lunches. Ushakov believed then that better business relations would better advance Russia’s interests. Concurrently, he believed that “politics” should not interfere with business, and that western governments should not intervene even in cases where businessmen were arrested or assets seized by the state-controlled courts.

That was, you might say, the “old” Yuri Ushakov. He didn’t hate the West; in fact, he sent his beloved grandson to school in Europe. Then he went back to Moscow in 2008 and joined Putin’s presidential administration as his foreign policy adviser. On my subsequent trips to Moscow, he would continue to meet me, now hosting me in his spacious and elegantly furnished office near the Kremlin. And the more time he spent there, in the Kremlin, the more I watched his view of the United States evolve, increasingly influenced not only by a distinctly darker view of America, but also by domestic concerns, particularly as Russia entered a period of turmoil around parliamentary elections in 2011. The Kremlin seemed to be caught off-guard by the appeal of opposition candidates, and they attributed that to western interference and financial support for civil society groups who provided support for the opposition.

According to my notes from April 2013, for example, he already sounded very much like other Russian (and Soviet) bureaucrats: The “new” Ushakov tended to blame the United States for every problem in the world, resisting criticism of Russia's own policies, both foreign and at home, in the Middle East, Afghanistan and increasingly by then, western interference in Ukraine.

A few months later, in 2014, I was surprised when Ushakov asked me why Americans hated Russians — a question he didn’t and wouldn’t have asked me in Washington a few years earlier. This is what I replied (I think in Russian): “I don’t hate Russians. I love the language. I sing Russian folksongs. I read Russian literature… I liked some of what Yeltsin tried to do and pressed my government to take Russian concerns seriously. I didn’t lose my hope for a more tolerant, more open Russia.” And then I added, “Frankly, I couldn’t believe when in 2005 President Putin referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a ‘catastrophe’ — you know far better than I how much suffering the Russian people endured under that regime.” Ushakov defended his boss, and our conversation on that subject ended.

Still, despite the growing tensions between the U.S. and Russia particularly over Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Ushakov saw me again the next year, when one of our main themes was the upcoming 2016 U.S. presidential election. Ushakov was curious about all the Republican candidates, but what I remember most was his favorable comments about Donald Trump — especially as compared to Hillary Clinton. He is “refreshing,” Ushakov said. The U.S. needs a “new approach” to the world.

Ushakov’s attitude toward me was still cordial, but trade issues were no longer high on the agenda. We continued to see each other until 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was then that almost all bilateral contacts with Russia — business, scholarly and Congressional exchanges and tourism — ceased.

I have been asked over the years, again and again, and especially now, before the Alaska summit: "Do the Russians understand us?” Hard to say. But what we must keep in mind is that there is a difference between what they “know” and what they say, even in one-on-one conversations. But I know this: They feel the U.S. is the enemy; their hope had been that making money would always be more important to us than anything else. That hope was misplaced. As the Russians see it, the U.S. is now driven by hegemonic aspirations.

Are we better at understanding Russia than we used to be? I think our academic scholarship is very good on Soviet history, including the vicissitudes of Russian politics. I’m much less sure about our politicians. With due respect to the exceptions, American foreign policy is all too often intended to satisfy limited and at times unrelated political concerns, including isolationist impulses and Congress’s penchant for micromanaging issues like sanctions. Perhaps naively, I wish we could act and not just say we act according to our national interests, including on moral and human rights considerations.

Another question I hear is: What do Putin and his team think of President Trump? As early as 2015, Ushakov spoke positively of Trump because he saw him — in his words — as a “disrupter.” My best guess is that they are now having second thoughts. It’s not only that Trump changes his mind so often about whether Russia or Ukraine is the aggressor. The issue is that they don’t know for sure what Trump might do or say on any given day. (Many in America don’t either.) He is neither the enemy they need nor the friend they can trust.

So, whatever affection or nuanced understanding Ushakov might once have had of the United States is long gone. On the critical issue of Ukraine, Ushakov is unlikely to tell Putin what to do or how to proceed. Like his boss and the rest of his team, Ushakov views a strong, independent Ukraine as a threat to Russia, and under no circumstances can NATO be allowed to station its troops on Ukrainian soil. Simply put, in their minds, Ukraine “belongs” to Russia. It has no right to exist as an independent state for reasons clearly spelled out in new textbooks for all Russian high school students, on Russian propaganda TV stations, and in background papers undoubtedly prepared for the Alaska Summit. On that issue, the Russian political elite is united. As they see it, Russian soldiers captured Crimea and then Russian soldiers died to secure a large chunk of Ukraine’s eastern territory and the return of these territories is not negotiable.

And so, if there is any disagreement among Putin’s team at all, it’s on how to deal with Trump, whether they will achieve their ends better by flattery, stonewalling or threats. However well-informed Putin’s America gurus like Ushakov may be, they cannot be sure which Trump will show up in Alaska: the one who calls Putin a friend and a genius or the one who agreed he was a “killer.” Can they convince Trump that the problem is Ukraine’s unreasonableness, not Russia’s unwillingness to stop bombing Ukrainian cities and agree to a ceasefire?

Putin may approve of much of what Trump is doing to improve U.S.-Russia relations and to stifle democracy in the U.S. and around the world; after all, Trump’s policies are likely to enhance Russia's influence in the world by alienating America's traditional friends and enacting erratic trade and tariff policies. And so Trump is the best thing that Russia has going for it — for now — and is certainly better than any Democratic president would be.

Still, some of the savvier Putin advisers and Russian pundits seem to be paying growing attention now to Vice President JD Vance — a true isolationist — as the man of the future. Russians always play the long game: Even if Trump decides to keep the U.S. in NATO, they are likely asking themselves: Is it not possible that a future President Vance might be willing to end that alliance? While it may not be his first choice, Putin is perfectly capable of embarrassing the U.S. president in Alaska if Trump is not sufficiently accommodating — and wait for a potentially more accommodating successor.

No matter what the tactic, then, the end game is for Putin and his team to press for an outcome that furthers their main goals: a sharp reduction of western influence in Ukraine, the fracturing of the western alliance and the eventual realization of Putin’s vision for the restoration of the Russian empire. That last goal, as the late Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out so well, cannot be reached if Ukraine retains an independent existence.

Putin is surrounded by experts like Ushakov who know what the boss wants and have worked together as a team for many years. They also know the United States very well. The Russian diplomatic team has almost 100 years of combined experience in dealing with the U.S.

Trump and his team lack comparable expertise — no one on his team has spent any time living in Russia, much less decades cultivating contacts inside the Russian government. The American team is inexperienced, focusing on "real estate” issues in Ukraine, as if a settlement of the conflict depends on an exchange of acreage, not on cracking the hardened ideologies and animosities that led to the invasion in the first place.

Yet what really matters, sadly, is the all-but unbridgeable gap between Ukraine’s legitimate desire for independence and security and Russia’s determination to win at the negotiating table what it has been unable to achieve on the battlefield.