THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY-JUNE 2026 57 That was not Putin’s intention. The Americans were brought into a formal meeting room with local press present to report the meeting. Putin began by saying the Gore visit was very positive for U.S.-Russia relations and for St. Petersburg in particular. There were some security and protocol problems, he said, but those were “purely technical in nature.” He then added that there was one incident that did go beyond technicalities. It involved the deputy consul general allegedly pushing the Russian general who commanded the Leningrad military district out of the way during the airport arrival ceremony. The DCG would, Putin announced, not be invited to any city events in the future. The meeting, and the sanctions on the DCG, were widely covered by St. Petersburg media and made the front page of local newspapers. Mayor Sobchak was out of town, and when the consul general tried to reach him, his private secretary knew nothing about the meeting. When told that it was Putin’s meeting, she responded, “Oh, that explains it.” After the mayor returned, he told the consul general that this incident was a misunderstanding and the DCG would not be sanctioned. The incident was discussed a few days later when Sobchak met with Ambassador Thomas Pickering in Moscow. Pickering “regretted” the incident but did not apologize, and both agreed to move forward. By the end of 1993, Putin had established an identity independent of his patron Sobchak. His distaste for Americans was clear, as was his use of perceived insults to portray himself in the press as a defender of Russian honor. Putin’s business interests, his personal corruption, and his growing personal network were all clear. What is particularly striking in retrospect is Putin’s early exposure, although he was only a deputy mayor, to a parade of senior U.S. government and corporate officials. By the mid1990s, Vladimir Putin was already an experienced interlocutor with senior members of the Bush and Clinton administrations. And when Boris Yeltsin picked him to be his prime minister in 1999, Putin knew a lot more about Washington players than they knew about him. When President George W. Bush invited him to the White House in 2001, it was not Putin’s first time there—and would not be his last. n
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