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3.8  |  Development of UK strategy and options, 8 to 20 March 2003
maximum co-operation with the inspectors. Russia could not accept a proposition
giving a green light to war.
176.  President Putin also warned of the risks of military action.
177.  Following Mr Blair’s discussion with President Putin on 7 March (see Section 3.7),
Sir Roderic Lyne, British Ambassador to Russia, had advised Mr Ricketts on 10 March
that he had been considering whether there was “anything to be done at the 11th hour
to turn the Russians on our current text”.61 He had concluded that Russia would “only
move if”:
the French moved;
and/or major amendments were made to the resolution;
or if the Americans had brokered a bilateral deal so heavily weighted towards
Russian interests that it outweighed the downside of splitting from the
French position.”
178.  Sir Roderic added that “the Americans have now left it too late”. President Putin
did not “want a breach with the Americans, for well known reasons; and this explains the
repeated Russian encouragement … to just go ahead and do it in a way which does not
involve Russia in approving war”.
179.  Stating that he was “deliberately over-simplifying”, Sir Roderic advised that
President Putin was not now going to “put himself out” or “take risks”, because:
The Americans had “not picked up Russian hints from mid-2001 onwards that
there is a price tag attached”.
The Americans “… did not cut the Russians in on the discussion. They
proclaimed the ‘axis of evil’, which worries the Russians mightily; they deployed
their forces; they then demanded acceptance of their resolution within a tight
time-frame and without a smoking gun or trigger. If the Russians buy into this,
what else are they buying into? War on N. Korea or Iran? (It’s not impossible
that the Russians could be brought to subscribe to a tougher approach to
proliferation, but they would need to be carried along stage by stage.) So the
Russians are very susceptible to the French line of argument that the Americans
are trying to drag us down a very dangerous road … and the time to make a
stand is now.”
Russia had “not been given its due reward for supporting the Americans on
various issues, or for not opposing them on others”.
Russia wanted freedom to act on Chechnya.
Russian domestic opinion thought France and Germany were right to stand firm
against the US.
61  Email Lyne to Ricketts, 10 March 2003, ‘Iraq/Russia’.
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