MOSCOW — A former chief of staff to President Vladimir V. Putin denied Wednesday that anyone in the Russian leader's administration had received oil payoffs from Iraq in exchange for opposing United Nations sanctions or the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.
Alexander S. Voloshin, once considered the second-most-powerful man here, did not rule out that Russian businesspeople might have falsely led Iraq to believe that they were acting on behalf of the Kremlin. But he insisted that his country opposed the war as a matter of principle, not as the result of bribery.
"Russia thought the war was a mistake in principle and that there was no real proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And all the subsequent investigations proved us right," Voloshin said in a briefing with a small group of foreign journalists.
In his meetings with President Bush and other top administration officials in Washington shortly before the war began in March 2003, Voloshin said, "I explained to the Americans that of course [Iraq] is a dictatorship, Saddam Hussein is a complete dictator, but this was no threat to the United States or anybody close. And when this dictatorship falls, chaos will envelop the country."
When he arrived in Washington, Voloshin said, U.S. officials quizzed him repeatedly.
"They had an idea that we should bargain," Voloshin said. "They were asking: 'What are your interests in Iraq? What can you say?' And despite all the talk, Russia didn't have a lot of interests in Iraq.... There was no strong reason for Russia to support the regime of Saddam."
Voloshin's account was presented in response to a report last week by a U.S. Senate committee on the U.N. oil-for-food program, under which Hussein's regime was allowed to sell oil despite international sanctions in order to provide food for the Iraqi people.
The report says the Russian presidential council, headed by Voloshin until October 2003, received illegal oil allocations worth more than $16 million under the program from 1999 to 2003. Voloshin and the council were said to have walked away with nearly $3 million in exchange for working to lift U.N. sanctions.
But the onetime senior Putin aide, often referred to as the "gray cardinal" of the Kremlin before he resigned in protest over the arrest of former Yukos Oil Co. chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said he was never the beneficiary of shipments under the program, never received money and never met with Iraqi officials.
