At the precise moment American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, I was standing in the corridor of a Moscow hotel, waiting impatiently with several other journalists for a press briefing to begin with Douglas Feith, President George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He was in the capital negotiating missile defense issues at the Russian Defense Ministry and he was running late. 

My mobile phone rang. It was CNN Moscow bureau producer Maxim Tkachenko sounding somewhat confused and concerned: “A plane just hit the World Trade Center in New York.”

“Was it an accident?” I asked him. “Not clear,” he responded. 

Suddenly, the door to the briefing room opened and we were ushered inside. I grabbed a seat toward the front. Later, I learned that Feith, on his way over in a US Embassy car, also had heard the news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center from an embassy press officer who was listening to CNN breaking news. As he later described it in his book, War and Decision, Feith initially was skeptical: “First reports are almost always wrong.”

The briefing began, but, just a few minutes later, my phone rang again. I bent down over my backpack, trying not to disturb Feith’s comments. It was Maxim again: “Another plane just hit the Pentagon.”

I raised my hand and repeated what seemed at that moment incomprehensible. Feith’s aides cut short the briefing and hurriedly led him out of the room. My cameraman and I raced back to the bureau where Maxim and I, along with the other staff, called our CNN supervisors in Atlanta and London to decide what our next steps should be. Part of my mind was on my sister Joan, who lived in New York and worked several blocks north of the Trade Center. I had tried to reach her by phone from the car, but there was no answer. A few hours later she called to say she had been able to walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge, glancing in shock over her shoulder at the clouds of black smoke billowing from lower Manhattan.

Two days before the attack, our bureau had reported on the assassination of Shah Massoud, a renowned Afghan guerrilla leader who, two decades before, had fought the Soviet occupation and now was the military head of the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban. As CNN later reported, citing a declassified cable from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, “Massoud gained limited knowledge regarding the intentions of the Saudi millionaire, Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, al-Qaida, to perform a terrorist act against the US.”

That evening, I helped to quickly dispatch a CNN news crew to northern Afghanistan. It was the beginning of the biggest story that would determine our news coverage for years to come: the War on Terror. One of the key actors in that war was Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Putin had been elected president of Russia just a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had a famously friendly, although often unpredictable relationship with Bill Clinton, but the Kremlin chafed at American criticism of Yeltsin’s brutal efforts to subdue the break-away republic of Chechnya. His First Chechen War ended in stalemate. Putin launched the Second Chechen War even before he assumed the office of president, and it was marked by even more human rights abuses. 

Putin saw the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to make common cause with the United States. After all, he claimed, both countries were fighting a common enemy. Putin was the first head of state to call George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, offering assistance and expressing solidarity with the American people.

Nine weeks later, he visited New York and the site where the Twin Towers had stood, “as debris clearing went on round the clock,” the Kremlin reported.

“Mr. Putin went next to the Memorial Wall, which bore the flags and names of countries whose citizens perished in the terrorist attack of 9/11,” the report continued. “The Russian flag was among them. Mr. Putin laid a wreath of red, blue and white flowers—the colours of the Russian and US flags—and wrote on the wall: ‘I bow to the victims’ memory, and admire New Yorkers’ courage. The great city and the great American nation will win!!!’”

Immediately after 9/11, Putin offered Bush humanitarian assistance and rescue personnel. He also promised to share Russian intelligence about the attacks and about terrorist organizations. He cancelled a military exercise that simulated a conflict with the US. Importantly, he tacitly allowed the US to use former Soviet air bases in Central Asia to launch possible retaliatory strikes against Al-Qaeda. 

And yet, as Dr. Angela Stent notes in her book, The Limits of Partnership: US-Russia Relations in the Twenty First Century, “the partnership forged in the shadow of a catastrophic attack on the United States soon began to unravel as Russian recriminations about unfulfilled expectations grew and American officials pushed back.”

By 2007, Putin had slammed the door on the West. In his February speech to the Munich Security Conference, the Russian leader decried what he said was “a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law.”

“One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he said. “This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

From that moment on, Russia’s relationship with the US was headed for the rocks. By 2022, the Russian president was blaming Washington for escalating tensions, leaving Moscow no choice, he claimed, but to defend itself by invading Ukraine.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the war on terrorism that seemed to promise cooperation and perhaps even comradely relations between the United States and Russia is no longer at the center of either country’s security policy. The biggest war on the European continent since World War II rages on, with Russian forces employing the same “scorched earth” strategy against Ukraine that Vladimir Putin used against Chechnya. Scenes of flattened houses in Ukraine look eerily like the devastation I witnessed in the Chechen capital, Grozny, at the end of Putin’s Second Chechen War.

The Trump administration now is renewing its efforts to bring the Ukraine War to an end, but the prospects for peace seem painfully distant. And on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, any prospect of a new Russian-American partnership seems impossible.