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Bill Clinton’s digital library removed the secrecy mark from the transcript of the conversation between former US president and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Documents revealed in August last year for decades kept records of conversations between the two leaders, over the phone and live, from 1999 to 2001, and one of them concerned the tragedy in which 118 people died.
A meeting between Clinton and Putin took place on September 6, 2000, in the presidential suite of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, and its subject was the nuclear submarine “Kursk” that sank a month earlier. Most of the 118 crew were killed instantly, but 23 sailors managed to retreat to safety in the ninth section of the ship, where they survived for several more hours, or perhaps even days. before they themselves died.
Just nine days after the incident, on August 21, a team of British and Norwegian divers approached the ship and found the entire crew dead. Two decades later, the catastrophe that changed the Russian political system is still shrouded in mystery and the consequences of the cover-up that followed.
At the beginning of the meeting, Clinton expressed his condolences to Putin at the beginning of the meeting, reported the Russian “Medusa”.
– I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. When something like this happens, people all over the world identify with the victims and their families, but I also identified with you. You must have had to endure a lot of speculation and speculation. Always happens. After Oklahoma City, many people asked if the building was properly protected and if we allowed terrorists to enter the country. This is how my heart went to the people at the bottom of the sea, but also to everyone else – Clinton said.
Putin explained that he faced an impossible choice in that situation, thanked him for his support, but continued to speak about the potential impact of the accident on his rating.
– There was no good option for me. I could choose between the bad and the worst. Some people have told me that if I let a little submarine get in there right away and at least try to rescue the guys, my grade would go up. Something like this cannot be allowed to be driven by public relations. Priority must be given to the actual rescue of people. I appreciate your sincere support. It seems unbelievable, but subsequent polls actually reveal that the incident did not affect my rating. But my great fear is that something like this could happen again – Putin said.
The Russian leader added that he felt powerless at the time.
– The sailors seem to have died in 60 or 90 seconds. We could not tell the relatives, but there was a hole in the hull about two meters wide that flooded the first three parts of the submarine. I’m not even sure how we can extract bodies. That water is full of cod and they may not have meat left on their bones. We tried to stop all this chaos, but some people continued to feed it, Putin revealed.
“Sank down”
Two days after meeting with President Clinton, Vladimir Putin gave an interview to CNN host Lrri King. At first, King asked the Russian president what happened to Kursk.
“It sank,” Putin said with a cynical smile that would become his trademark for decades to come.
When asked what he could have done differently, the Russian president said that he would “cancel business meetings” in Sochi and “behave differently” because his actions were “used for certain attacks and undermining the executive himself, thereby which is essentially bad and detrimental to the state. “
How did the Kremlin “hit the brakes”?
At the time of the sinking of the “Kursk”, Putin was on vacation in Sochi. The president was informed about the catastrophe the following day, but it was not announced to the public until August 14. Putin ended his vacation only on August 18, when he went to Crimea (still under Ukrainian sovereignty) for an informal meeting with other leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Due to the accident in the Barents Sea, the summit was interrupted and Putin returned to Moscow after only a few hours. On the same day, he explained that he wanted to travel to the disaster site immediately, but abstained because high-ranking state officials tend to retaliate in such situations more than they help.
– Everyone should run their own station – argued the president.
The Russian authorities did not officially acknowledge the death of the “Kursk” crew until August 22, although they already had that information on August 14. Despite this intelligence, Putin said on August 16 that the Navy was doing everything it could to save the crew. Even on August 20, in a meeting with the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, the president repeated these statements.
“We will fight for each life and hope for the best,” he said then.
On August 22, Putin signed an executive order declaring a day of mourning for the losses in the Barents Sea. On the same day, he flew to the Murmansk region and visited the town of Vidyaevo to meet the families of the crew members, many of whom were still waiting for some sailors to be rescued. Addressing relatives in private, but the journalist’s microphone noted that Putin first discovered that the damage sustained by the submarine left a “very large hole” in the ship’s hull.
A declassified transcript of Putin’s conversation with Bill Clinton suggests that the Russian president knew for a time that most of the sailors had died, but waited to reveal this information.
The ORT television network (later renamed Pervia Kanal) broadcast Sergei Dorenko’s last evening show on September 2, 2000. Dorenko devoted the entire show to the catastrophe, harshly criticizing the president’s behavior during the rescue operation. He was later fired.
Three days later, shortly before Putin sat down with Clinton in New York, Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky publicly addressed the Russian president and told him that he had been ordered to sell his 49 percent stake in ORT.
– The reason for the proposal is your dissatisfaction with the way ORT reported on the events related to the accident of the submarine “Kursk”. “The president himself wants to run ORT,” his representative informed me, Berezovski said in his open letter.
At the end of the appeal to Putin, Boris Berezovsky said that the ORT would entrust it to “journalists and other representatives of creative intelligence.” In reality, however, the television network ended up under state control.
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