Back To The Future | Is a Trump-Putin bromance enough for a miracle in US-Russia ties?
As George W Bush discovered, a flourishing personal friendship counts for little in a bilateral relationship as complex and intricate as the Washington-Moscow one
At George W. Bush’s first meeting with Vladimir Putin at the elegant Brdo Castle in Slovenia in June 2001, the US president broke the ice with a nice touch.
The relationship between the two countries was fraught with tension. Bush had repeatedly denounced Russia’s war in Chechnya and accused the Democrats of “going soft on Russia” during his election campaign in 2000. Putin, for his part, was fuming about Washington’s plan to deploy anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe and its open criticism of human rights abuses in Russia.
After a frosty exchange of greetings, the Russian leader was about to launch into formal policy discussions. Unexpectedly, the American president leaned towards him and asked about the cross Putin’s mother had given her son. The Russian president’s face lit up. Setting aside the documents, Putin recounted the story of the miraculous recovery of his mother’s cross.
It was a simple aluminium cross that Maria Ivanovna Shelomova gave to her son on his first trip outside the Soviet Union to Israel. She asked him to have the cross blessed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and Putin dutifully did so. Years later, just as Putin was struggling with the most difficult spell of his career in 1996, calamity struck. One day, Putin and his family were in their lakeside dacha outside St Petersburg when the sauna burst into flames. Putin, naked from a bath, had to escape from a second-floor balcony using sheets as a rope.
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He watched helplessly as the house burnt “like a candle” to the ground. All his belongings inside the dacha were destroyed. Yet, as the firefighters rummaged through the ruins, they found his mother’s cross in the ashes of the remnants. It was perfectly intact. Putin later called this a “revelation” and a sacred experience. Ever since, he has carried the cross wherever he goes. His luck also turned. A year after the fire, he was called to Moscow by the ailing president, Boris Yeltsin, who named him deputy chief of staff. Two years later, Putin became the premier.