In October 2014, the Guardian journalist Seumas Milne arrived in the Russian city of Sochi on the Black Sea coast, near the Georgian border. He was there to attend the annual Valdai international discussion club where Russia experts from across the world – academics, diplomats, journalists – meet and sometimes question President Vladimir Putin and some of his top officials and advisers. The theme of that year’s conference was “The World Order: New Rules or No Rules?”. Milne, his expenses paid by the Russian business people who organise the event and started it a decade earlier, was there to talk about the Middle East, a subject of which he has compendious knowledge, derived from a lifetime interest in the region.
To his surprise, Milne was asked, while in Sochi, to chair the meeting’s key session, where Putin was to make a 40-minute speech – later described by the Financial Times as one of his “most important foreign policy statements” – followed by a lengthy question-and-answer session. Milne agreed and opened the questions by asking two of his own. Were Russia’s “actions in Ukraine and Crimea” (which Moscow had recently invaded) “a response to [a] breakdown of rules and a sort of example of a ‘no-rules’ order”? And would Russia alter its position that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it “can’t lead in the current global order but it can decide who leads”?
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