In July 2009, Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev,
a bit of a computer geek,
posted a blog on the Kremlin website.
But now, a new American president was in charge
and he was coming to town.
To get the President to go to Moscow
in the first six months of his administration
was a major achievement.
The most valuable commodity that we have is the President's time,
and we fight over it vigorously, every single minute of his time.
It was the President himself that finally intervened to say,
"We're going to do this. We have to do it at this time, in this way."
Obama was making a big investment in the Russian president.
But was he talking to the right man?
Mr Prime Minister.
Every American president comes into office
determined to change the world.
But what Barack Obama proposed was unique.
As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon,
the United States has a moral responsibility to act.
So today, I state clearly and with conviction,
America's commitment to seek the peace and security
of a world without nuclear weapons.
I'm not naive.
This goal will not be reached quickly,
perhaps not in my lifetime.
But now, we too must ignore the voices
who tell us that the world cannot change.
We have to insist, "Yes, we can."
As soon as he became president,
Barack Obama called in his National Security Adviser.
We talked about Russia.
He was unusually insistent
on the issue of arms control and a nuclear threat.
He said the two countries that ought to lead
are the two countries who have the biggest stockpile.
And by example,
we have to show the world that we really are interested
in reducing and eliminating, ultimately, nuclear weapons.
Convincing Russia was going to be difficult.
Obama had inherited a military programme the Russians hated.
It would put new anti-missile bases in Poland, on Russia's doorstep.
The day Obama was elected,
President Medvedev addressed the nation.
He didn't congratulate America's new leader, he threatened him.
But Obama wasn't interested in confrontation.
This administration,
my administration is seeking a reset of the relationship with Russia.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, organised a press event
at which she presented Russia's Foreign Minister
with a symbolic reset button.
We want to reset our relationship.
Let's do it together. We will do it together.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?
You got it wrong. I got it wrong.
It should be peresagruskaya.
This says peregeruskaya, which means overcharge.
We won't let you do that to us, I promise.
Obama and his team had to do better.
Secretly, he made a decision the Russians would love -
to put on hold the plans to build missile defence bases in Europe.
But how best to tell them?
We were trying to think of a way you could drive home
the seriousness of the President's and Secretary Clinton's interest,
in trying to explore a fresh start in relations.
And one way to do that,
was to have a serious presidential letter
and have it delivered by reasonably high officials.
I though it was a silly idea.
I live in the Silicon Valley, we don't deliver letters ever.
There's no such thing as a paper letter any more,
let alone you would fly across the other side of the earth
to deliver it.
I proposed we should send an e-mail.
But Bill was right, I was wrong.
The symbolism of the two of us coming together,
to the resetting of the relationship, was very dramatic.
Bill was somebody that they knew well.
I, being the new guy with the new Obama team from the White House,
that sent a very positive message.
Three months before Obama's proposed trip to Moscow,
the two new presidents met in London,
where the leaders of 20 of the world's biggest economies gathered
to tackle the global recession.
It seemed like love at first sight.
Out of the blue,
President Medvedev proposed to expand the supply route
for our forces in Afghanistan.
And he suggested we expand it to allow for military flights
through Russia.
It was quite shocking. We didn't expect it.
I took it to be that this is a sign
of him trying also to reset the relationship.
Let me just make a brief comment.
Obama raised a problem the US and Russia
had long been fighting over - Iran.
President Obama said,
"We have some great concerns about Iran's nuclear programme.
"We believe there's evidence
"that they are in fact seeking to weaponise nuclear capabilities
"and we're concerned about it."
President Medvedev said, off the cuff,
I'm sure it wasn't in the speaking notes, but, off the cuff, said,
"Well, you know, on Iran, you may have been more accurate than we."
For American ears, it was astounding to hear.
It was not Iran's nuclear capability,
but their own, that was the main issue before them.
The agreement which limited Russian and American nuclear weapons
would expire in eight months.
They had to set terms for its renewal.
Medvedev wanted it to stop American missile defence in Eastern Europe.
We were categorical
that we're not going to have this conversation together.
We can have a conversation about missile defence over here,
but over here,
we're going to talk about reducing offensive strategic weapons.
That's what the negotiations had to be about.
The Russians wanted to do it all together.
We said, "No."
Obama persuaded Medvedev they should instruct their officials
to start work on a new agreement to cut nuclear weapons.
In return, Obama promised talks on missile defence.
But he was vague about whether the two negotiations would be linked.
The next day, Medvedev explained his position.
When Obama got to Moscow,
he would face another negotiating partner
who would be harder to charm.
Okey dokey.
Prime Minister Putin still has a lot of sway in Russia.
I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business
and one foot in the new
and to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people
a sense that the US is not seeking an antagonistic relationship,
we'll end up having a stronger partner.
Obama knew that prime ministers in Russia don't do foreign policy.
But Putin was used to being in charge.
Minister Lavrov is always correcting the translator.
He's somebody with some excellent English skills.
We have plenty of those.
President Obama began the conversation
with a very straightforward question
about what Putin thought about the relationship,
what had gone right, what had gone wrong.
And characteristically,
Prime Minister Putin responded at some length.
Prime Minister Putin thought instead of working with the Russians,
previous presidents, and he said PRESIDENTS,
not just President Bush, by the way.
He talked about the bombing campaign in Serbia.
President Clinton was president at the time.
He said instead of working with Russia, we dictated to them.
"Well, we're going to do this, so it's our way or the highway."
Putin said, "You young guys, I know your reset and all that.
"But I've been through this before and I know how this movie ends
"and it doesn't end well."
The meeting had been scheduled for an hour.
Obama had yet to get a word in edgeways.
At the end of the hour, the President suggested
that we might want to extend our visit,
so we could have more dialogue.
Because I think it gave me important insights into the '90s
and on into the last eight years.
And the President pushed back.
He said, "I'm different, this is a new time.
"Whatever the past of the Cold War
"and whatever your experience in the 1990s,
"we're going to reset this relationship."
Obama decided he would now deal only with President Medvedev.
But his next step
showed he had listened to both of Russia's leaders.
As Commander-in-Chief,
I ordered a comprehensive assessment
of our missile defence programme in Europe.
This new approach will provide capabilities sooner,
build on proven systems,
and offer greater defences against the threat of missile attack.
Obama's new approach to missile defence
seemed to address Russia's concerns.
Now, their nuclear negotiators could forge ahead.
They needed a deal before the current nuclear weapons agreement,
the START Treaty, expired.
If they failed, the right to monitor each other's arsenals would expire.
We were worried about what would happen if we missed this deadline.
I'll be brief. Today, the Presidents met for the fourth time.
VOICEOVER: I was put before the cameras.
Questions?
On START, the commitment is to have it in place by the end of December,
but doesn't it expire in the beginning of December?
Yes, it does expire on December 5th.
And in parallel, we have a bridging agreement
that we also are working with the Russians.
I fully suspect we will be able to get that into place by December 5th.
You're definitely not going to make the December 5th deadline?
I don't know that for sure,
but I do know we won't have a ratified treaty by December 5th.
That has to go through our senate, their Duma, so that is for sure,
we need a bridging agreement, no matter what.
We were very nervous about it, to be honest.
My political leadership was very nervous about it.
In Geneva, the traditional home for arms talks,
the negotiators had easily agreed to cut in half
the number of nuclear missiles each side held.
On the other part of the deal,
how arms inspectors could verify that neither side was cheating,
they were not quite there.
The December 5th deadline loomed.
We wanted to get the Treaty finished in time
to be in place and signed by the Presidents.
We could see that there were certain critical issues
that had to be resolved.
Anatoly said to me,
"We need to go back to Moscow and talk to them,
"but we think we've got the pieces falling into place now."
I was able, that week, to give a pretty good message to Washington.
It seemed like a triumph.
In her secret cable,
the US negotiator reported that her opposite number had
"cabled Moscow and lobbied for the signing ceremony to be in Geneva."
She had told him that President Obama
was scheduled to be in Europe in 10 days' time.
But the next day, Medvedev put the draft agreement
before Russia's National Security Council.
There, Putin and the top generals would pronounce.
I got a telephone call from Anatoly on Saturday morning.
He said, "I've just gotten new instructions in from Moscow."
He said, "We need to have a special plenary meeting."
And I said, "All right, Saturday afternoon? That's unusual."
At the plenary session, Anatoly said to me,
"Well, here is what we've heard from Moscow."
He read through what he had received back.
I said, "Well, this is a step backwards."
Anatoly said to me,
"You are questioning what we heard from the Kremlin?"
The 5th December deadline passed.
There was no bridging agreement, so the two sides
no longer had the right to inspect each other's nuclear sites.
That month, the two presidents attended the global warming summit
in Copenhagen.
The nuclear negotiators were there, too,
to try to remove the sticking points that had made Moscow back away.
The biggest sticking point was whether each side
would have the right to inspect the other's missile bases.
He was like,
"We don't need all this verification.
"The reset baby, why do we need that?"
And my view was the opposite, that if we're fine,
then what do you have to hide?
And Anatoly just exploded in anger.
Deadlock.
The negotiators called their Presidents away
from the climate change talks.
Once the two presidents started talking, the obstacles melted away.
The President put the onus back on Medvedev to say,
what's the big deal here?
And President Medvedev saw the logic of President Obama and said,
"I agree."
I'm confident that it will be completed in a timely fashion.
I'd like to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Thank you, everybody.
So, as soon as the New Year holidays were over,
Obama sent a huge delegation to Moscow, led by America's top brass.
They met in the centre of resistance,
the Russian Ministry of Defence.
We read through the talking points that we had
and expected there'd be the beginning of a big debate going on.
General Makarov simply said, "We agree."
The American delegation called President Obama to tell him
that he was, at last, going to get his treaty.
The President was very happy, it was clear to me,
in talking to General Jones afterwards that,
that he was happy that the President's happy.
We're always happy when the President's happy.
The next day, the American delegation flew home,
except the chief negotiator, who met her counterpart one-on-one.
She thought they had only minor details to sort out.
I came in that day, and Anatoly said to me that missile defence
was still a major issue for the Russian Federation.
Putin and the generals feared that the US
would so improve missile defence,
that they could shoot down even Russia's sophisticated missiles.
When I heard that, I was outraged and I was like,
hey, well, wait a minute.
We just flew half the US government to Moscow
to finish negotiating this thing.
We went through what the agenda was at the beginning
and nobody raised a peep and suddenly this is now not done.
There was only one way to break the deadlock.
The President's over at his desk on the phone, with Medvedev,
we're over at another phone in the Oval Office, listening.
I have to say, for this phone call, we didn't quite understand
what Medvedev thought this phone call was about.
Because I speak Russian,
I can hear the Russian before it's translated,
and it was clear to me
that Medvedev thought we'd agreed to something on missile defence
that we had not agreed.
Medvedev was asking for a new section in the treaty,
to stop America improving its missile defence.
That would be a huge problem in the US Senate.
I jumped up and wrote a hand note to the President
saying, "We cannot agree to what Medvedev was saying,
"specifically about this linkage."
Our President said, "Dmitry, I've...
"I've told you at every turn that this treaty will not pass
"if it's linked to missile defence, our missile defence.
"And you have to believe me. You...
"you just have to understand, this is not a technique
"or a negotiating ploy, it's just, it is reality."
And I think he said, "I have counted the votes,
"and...it just simply is not something I can negotiate."
The President then said, quite forcefully,
"If this is going to be a red line for you,
"then we'll call the negotiations off."
It was that dramatic.
After an hour and a half, the phone call ended in stalemate.
The negotiators went back to work.
They pushed hard, we said no.
At that point, we really were,
I think, at the end of where we could go on this stuff.
And, you know, they pushed and pushed and then decided, "OK, we're done."
BAND PLAYS INTRODUCTORY FLOURISH
The two presidents signed the treaty,
which cut the number of their nuclear missiles in half,
warheads by a third,
and set in place a system of inspections for the next decade.
Obama's decision to deal only with Medvedev was paying off.
APPLAUSE IN HALL
And it looked as though the West
had years more co-operation with him in prospect.
But even before Medvedev became president,
he and Vladimir Putin had struck a deal.
Putin had offered the presidency to Medvedev for one term only.
Before the next election, they would talk.
The unexpected arrived just months after Medvedev took over.
The price of oil, Russia's key export,
fell from $138 a barrel to $34.
The 2008 global financial crash had hit Russia.
Medvedev's advisors suggested they dip into Russia's reserve fund,
earned by years of oil profits,
to keep the economy afloat.
In 2008-9, the state spent about $200 billion to stave off disaster.
But five times as much, over a trillion dollars,
was wiped off the Russian stock exchange.
Thousands of businesses collapsed.
ANGRY SHOUTING
The global recession revealed that Russia's economic success
had been more the result of high oil prices
than eight years of Putin's presidency.
Hardest hit were the old Soviet-era one-factory towns.
Pikalyovo, outside St Petersburg,
depended entirely on a vast cement works.
The owners received a government bailout,
but three months later, the factory was still shut.
In June, the townspeople blockaded one of Russia's key motorways.
Vladimir Putin strode into town.
Unlike Medvedev, Putin confronted the factory owners.
He demanded the owners, including billionaire Oleg Deripaska,
sign an undertaking to restart the factories.
Classic Putin.
But if a country as big as Russia
needed a personal visit from the boss
to get one factory back to work, then it was in serious trouble.
But President Medvedev was not convinced that structural changes were impossible.
When Putin was president, oil money poured into Russia,
but he failed to use it to modernise the economy.
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev.
FANFARE PLAYS
Medvedev chose his second annual speech to the national leadership
to set out his vision of where he wanted Russia to go.
And it didn't sound like Putin's Russia.
APPLAUSE
Medvedev's goal was a Russia
in which its world-class education system,
scientists and engineers would create a dynamic, high-tech country.
And that required, he said, genuine democracy
and equal justice under the law.
These changes would unravel Putin's system of top-down control.
Medvedev was signalling it was time for a change.
A human rights lawyer and a young journalist
who worked for Novaya Gazeta,
the leading opposition newspaper, were shot by nationalist skinheads.
Three years earlier, Russia's most famous crusading journalist,
who worked for the same paper, was also murdered.
But a few days after the funerals,
the editor was called to the Kremlin.
Medvedev found that having to divide domestic policy with Prime Minister Putin,
he could do little to make Russia more democratic.
On foreign policy, though,
the President had shown he was in charge.
One of his biggest challenges was Russia's neighbour, Iran,
an important client for Russian arms.
Iran's nuclear ambitions brought Russia into conflict with America.
It had begun back in 2006, when Putin was President.
I told Sergey Lavrov that if the Iranians got a nuclear weapon,
the first place they might use it is the Caucasus.
They'd caused all kinds of trouble there.
How in the world could they see an Iran with a nuclear weapon?
And sanctions would give us one way to do this without war.
Three years later, during the UN General Assembly,
the Americans saw a way to break the impasse.
They had discovered a secret nuclear processing facility
hidden in Iran's mountains.
They hoped this would convince Russia of the need for sanctions.
We now had enough evidence to conclusively show them
graphically what the Iranians were up to.
Then I showed him a few of the overhead photos.
And he reacted in a way that I would have reacted
had I been on the receiving end of very troubling information.
He was shaking his head,
and Mike McFaul translated the words he was using
which just means bad, really bad.
When the presidents joined them, the Americans knew they'd won.
As we were standing, one of the Russians said,
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I said, "We thought you knew! These are your guys, not ours."
If Iran does not respond to the international community
that it's meeting its commitments,
and is not developing nuclear weapons,
then we will have to take additional actions.
For the first time, Russia accepted the need for stringent sanctions.
Obama pushed for more.
He wanted Medvedev to cancel a billion-dollar arms sale to Iran.
It's not a small thing for the Russians to, in essence,
return an $800 million down-payment.
It wasn't just, you know, "I'll give you a billion for a billion." It was to say,
"Dmitry, you and I can be partners in a geopolitical way
"that will be more valuable to you over the long run
"than your relationship with Iran."
In June 2010, Russia voted for new UN sanctions.
Medvedev cancelled the billion-dollar arms deal.
Now he set out to redeem some of the credit he had earned.
He was seeking Obama's help to advance his pet project -
a Russian Silicon Valley called Skolkovo, just outside Moscow.
I recently extended an invitation to President Medvedev to visit
the United States in late June.
And one of the things we hope he's going to be able to do
is not just visit Washington, but also to travel, for example, to Silicon Valley.
Thousands of Russians had come to America
in search of the capitalist dream.
This young woman was seeking contacts on Wall Street.
Anna Chapman, a Russian immigrant, was a budding businesswoman.
She was also one of ten spies Russia had planted in the US years earlier.
The FBI was watching their every move.
They learned that some suspects were planning to leave the country.
It was five days before Medvedev's visit.
The President convened the National Security Council -
no-one wanted a spy scandal.
Talk about relics from another time.
They hadn't really done any real damage, but they were clearly here
under other pretences than what they presented themselves to be.
The President wanted to handle this in a way that was professional
and did not feel like it was the Cold War.
It was a delicate moment.
The President asked the FBI if they could wait
until Medvedev had left the country.
Meanwhile, the Russian entourage was given a crash course
at some of the world's most successful companies, where ideas could flourish openly
and businesses did not need to bribe friends in high places.
Next stop - Washington.
Here, he addressed his next agenda item -
Russia joining the World Trade Organisation -
the WTO.
Medvedev hoped that once Russia was in the WTO
and obeying its rules, foreigners would feel safe and start investing.
But Russian membership in the WTO was blocked by a billion dollars' worth of chicken.
Russia had been America's largest export market for chicken.
Then Russia banned it.
Half a million American voters work in the poultry industry
so Obama wanted the ban lifted.
The Russians, in return, wanted all the other trade issues settled
within three months.
The President weighed in and said, "I want to get this done by then.
"I agree with, you know, the President of Russia here.
"We're... I'm hungry.
"Dmitry and I are going to go have a burger. You guys sit here
"and you get this done."
You can leave your jacket in the car. Is it safe?
It's safe. It's OK. Nobody is going to steal it.
Hi, guys!
APPLAUSE
We're going to turn him on to a real American burger.
Barack, can I assist you? No, these are on me.
While the presidents chomped on burgers,
the problem of chicken exports and the other trade issues
were left to those close aides who couldn't get out of it.
Well, it was interesting cos a lot of people left!
It was like, "Hey, wait a minute!"
Secretary Clinton left to host Minister Lavrov for lunch
and General Jones, I remember, was part of that delegation
and some of us were left like, "Who's going to do this?"
By the time they drove up in the limousine...
And I saw them out of the corner of my eye, and we walked over
to the computer in his office - in the little office in front of the Oval Office -
and we typed it up as he walked in the doors.
Good afternoon, everybody. Please be seated.
We just concluded some excellent discussions -
discussions that would have been unlikely just 17 months ago.
Sometimes it's odd when you're sitting in historic meetings
with your Russian counterpart to spend time talking about chicken.
THEY LAUGH
But our ability to get resolved a trade dispute, was, I think,
an indication of the seriousness with which President Medvedev
and his team take all of these trade and commercial issues.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Medvedev went home with a new trade agreement
and American backing to join the World Trade Organisation.
Two days later, in a New York coffee shop,
Anna Chapman met a man she thought was a fellow Russian agent.
He was really an undercover FBI man.
The Americans were springing their trap.
I had to call the National Security Advisor and tell him
that we were in the process of arresting...
I think it was ten people.
They took it well. They didn't try to deny anything.
We were able to not only send them back, but also recover
some people that were, in fact, confined in Russia that now are free.
The spies were welcomed back to Russia as heroes.
Putin's United Russia party cheered on Anna Chapman,
who basked in her new celebrity.
CHEERING
The campaign season was beginning.
Elections were due in March 2012.
The BBC asked the President's closest advisor who would be the candidate - Putin or Medvedev.
They didn't take the final decision yet. But again, from what
I heard from President Medvedev, he has not excluded the possibility
that he will go for elections, and certainly he wants to do that.
Putin had made Medvedev president in 2007 on the understanding
that one of them would stand in 2012. But which?
They continued to say they were close allies,
so they could only compete at photo-ops.
CAMERA SHUTTERS WHIRR
MUSIC: "Blueberry Hill"
# For you were my thrill... #
For Putin, these stunts came naturally.
He was consistently 5 to 10% ahead in the polls.
Medvedev could never beat Putin at such games.
What Medvedev could do was tackle the corruption that flourished under Putin.
In his first two years, Medvedev fired 63% of the Kremlin's bureaucrats
and 40% of the country's governors.
Then he fired Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow mayor for almost two decades,
whose wife had become the richest woman in Russia.
Within a month, his poll ratings - for the first time - drew almost level with Putin's.
Even the liberal media were impressed.
CROWD CHANTS:
A trial in Moscow would be the decisive test of Medvedev's power
to stand up to Putin on the rule of law.
Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky had been jailed for fraud
after challenging Putin.
As he came to the end of his sentence,
the state charged him with new crimes.
In November, Medvedev and Obama met, one on one.
They're both trained in the legal profession. They've talked about Khodorkovsky and what might happen
and what would be the reaction to a second verdict in his case.
What has happened to him is a symbol of all the things
that are wrong in terms of Russia's commitment to the rule of law.
At their meeting, Medvedev promised that Khodorkovsky would get
a fair trial, free from political interference.
But on the day the verdict was to be delivered,
the judge postponed his ruling.
The next day, Putin held his annual press conference and was asked about the case.
To many, his answer sounded like an instruction to the court.
THEY CHANT IN RUSSIAN
Khodorkovsky was given seven more years in prison.
The public lost patience with Medvedev's inability to stand up to Putin.
Then, at the end of September, the ruling United Russia party
held its annual conference.
Putin assumed he would move back to the Kremlin as President.
Medvedev would be his Prime Minister.
Everyone took it granted that their machine would ensure
the voters rubber-stamped the deal.
The first sign it would not be so easy came two months later.
Putin joined 20,000 fight fans at a title bout.
This mainly male, working class crowd were his usual supporters.
CROWD BOOS
State TV quickly edited out the boos,
but by then the video was on the internet.
Millions of Russians logged on.
In December, the protests moved to the streets.
The ruling party had been declared
winners in parliamentary elections.
Well-documented accusations of fraud were brushed aside.
The protesters wore white ribbons.
Putin tried to laugh it off.
Vladimir Putin had first become president at the turn of the millennium,
when Russia was still recovering from the collapse of Communism.
Russia and the United States should work together.
He repaired much of the damage,
but undermined democracy and the rule of law.
The West learned to tread carefully around him.
I mean, since when does Russia own a piece of Georgia?
GUNFIRE
He could now remain in office until 2024.