By: Chandrashekar Bhat
ommented to me that this was ‘a terrible idea’ that could only complicate our efforts to handle the crisis.”
The India-Pakistan stand-off, following a terror attack on India’s parliament in 2001, threatened to escalate into a war between the two nuclear powers.
The newly released files also show Blair gifted silver cufflinks to Putin on his birthday.
Blair described Putin as a “Russian patriot” and advocated that the West should take him on board.
At a meeting with vice-president Dick Cheney at Camp David, Blair said “it was better to allow Putin a position on the top table and encourage Putin to reach for western attitudes as well as the western economic model”.
A Downing Street memo in January 2001 summarises Blair’s contacts with Putin, who had become Russia’s president less than a year earlier.
It says: “On NATO, Putin told the Prime Minister in Moscow that he did not want to be viewed as anti-NATO and would not try to slow down the process of NATO enlargement”.
However, the Russian defence minister Igor Sergeyev told his Nato counterparts any further expansion of the US-led military alliance would be a political error and his country would “take appropriate steps” in response.
