By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The 1999 Ukraine issue

The main issue highlighted by the crisis on the Ukraine borders over the past few months has predominantly focused on the role of Nato and the friction over the eastward expansion of the alliance. This has been a constant message emerging from the Kremlin: that the Nato membership of many parts of the old Soviet Bloc, and the prospective membership of Ukraine in the alliance, poses a threat to Russian sovereignty.

But the decision to accept former members of the Warsaw Pact, the defensive alliance which included the USSR and several eastern European countries, is subject to revisionist history. This is perpetuating a myth that Nato promised not to expand eastwards after the Soviet Union dissolved.

In 2014, the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by noting in an interview that Nato’s enlargement “was not discussed at all” at the time.

There was, he said, no promise not to enlarge the alliance, though in the same interview Gorbachev also stated that he thinks that enlargement was a “big mistake” and “a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made” in 1990.

Indeed, the only formal agreement signed between Nato countries and the USSR, before its breakup in December 1991, was the Treaty of Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. The promises made specifically related to Germany, and the territory of the former GDR, which were on the deployment of non-German Nato forces into eastern Germany and the deployment of nuclear weapons – and these promises have been kept.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had already formed one of his key foreign policy narratives—the critique of American global hegemony and its disregard for Russia after the Cold War—before his rise to power. For the first time  in  the past two hundred to three hundred years, [Russia] is facing  a  real  danger of sliding into the second and possibly third echelon of world states,” Putin wrote the day before his appointment as Acting President.1

That same year the Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk, visited Washington on September 25, 1991, the Ukrainian parliament, or Rada had both passed a declaration of independence and scheduled a public referendum on that declaration, to be held on December 1 as part of that day’s presidential election.2 Kravchuk was blunt in his remarks to Bush, making clear his view that central Soviet authority was “disintegrating” and that the USSR had no future.3 

In 1994 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl told President Clinton ‘I told Yeltsin that even any suspicion that Russia wanted to annex Ukraine would be catastrophic.’ ” Clinton agreed, saying that “ ‘if Ukraine collapses, because of Russian influence or because of militant nationalists within Ukraine or any other reason, it would undermine the whole theory of NATO’s Partnership for Peace. Ukraine is the linchpin of the whole idea.’ ” Indeed, “ ‘one reason why all the former Warsaw Pact states were willing to support [PfP] was that they understood what we were saying about Ukraine’ ” and the importance of not drawing new dividing lines across Europe.

NATO’s fiftieth-anniversary was the largest gathering of international leaders in the history of Washington, DC.4 On April 23– 25, 1999, the members of the alliance, along with a wide array of guest countries— forty-four states in all, including Ukraine— descended on DC.5 They attended a ceremony in Mellon Hall, the very location where the twelve original alliance members had first signed the North Atlantic Treaty back on April 4, 1949.6

Putin viewed the weakness of the state and its internal economic turmoil as existential threats to Russia. “For the first time  in  the past two hundred to three hundred years, [Russia] is facing  a  real  danger of sliding into the second and possibly third echelon of world states,” Putin wrote the day before his appointment as Acting President.7

However since the alliance frowns on allies joining NATO to pursue preexisting military disputes, Putin decided to escalate just such preexisting conflict in Ukraine in 2014 in a violent fashion. The hope that such armed conflicts were gone for good had characterized much of the post–Cold War era. Moscow’s action signaled that the era was over. Putin also expanded Russia’s conventional military budget, developed new missile defense and space capabilities, and began modernizing Russia’s nuclear arsenal. In response, the alliance’s leaders suspended not only the NATO-Russia Council but “all practical cooperation between NATO and Russia.”

In 1993, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then led by veteran Soviet diplomat Yevgeny Primakov, put out a report warning against NATO enlargement and staked out what would become the established Russian position. “This expansion,” Primakov argued, “would bring the biggest military grouping in the world, with its colossal offensive potential, directly to the borders of Russia.… If this happens, the need will arise for a fundamental reappraisal of all defense concepts on our side, a redeployment of armed forces, and changes in operational plans.… The new Russia,” he insisted, “has a right to have its opinion taken into account.”8 

 

Opening Nato's door

Perhaps more important than what was or was not said about NATO to Gorbachev in 1990 was what was said to Boris Yeltsin in 1993, just before the Primakov paper. In October 1993, shortly after Yeltsin had used deadly force to disband opposition groups in the Russian parliament, US secretary of state Warren Christopher visited Moscow to explain the idea of the Partnership for Peace. As the Clinton administration and its allies began to debate how to reorganize European security in the 1990s in such a way that gave Russia a place, it remained committed to retaining NATO. While many Russians and some in the West advocated scrapping the organization as a Cold War relic and replacing it with a pan-European organization that included Russia, Washington, and Brussels, others saw no reason to dissolve a successful alliance in which all members had a stake. And despite Russian complaints, Russia never proposed any positive agenda for redesigning European security architecture. NATO instead decided to create the Partnership for Peace (PfP), a bilateral outreach program for former Warsaw Pact countries focusing on defense and military cooperation and on the democratization of post-communist armed forces. Each country would develop its own program with NATO for PfP, and for some, it could become the first step on the path to eventual membership. Some US officials intended for PfP to be an alternative to NATO membership, but for many Central European countries, membership was the goal.

When Christopher explained to Yeltsin that nothing would be done to exclude Russia from “full participation in the future security of Europe,” Yeltsin approved. But then Yeltsin asked Christopher to promise him that PfP meant partnership, not membership, for the participating Central European states. Christopher assured me that this was the case. “This is a brilliant idea, it is a stroke of genius,” replied Yeltsin. Subsequently, Christopher said that the United States would be “looking at the question of membership as a longer-term eventuality,” but it is unclear how Yeltsin reacted to that.9 Russia signed its PfP agreement on June 22, 1994, the anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR.

But others in Moscow from the outset were much more skeptical about PfP. Its great flaw, they argued, was that it offered Russia the same deal as every other post-communist state, meaning that it did not recognize Russia’s special status as a great power. Defense Minister Pavel Grachev declared that if Russia were to join PfP, it should have a special role and special relations with NATO. But, he was told, that kind of deal was not on. Russia would sign its PfP agreement on the same basis as everyone else. Two US ambassadors—James Collins and Thomas Pickering—later admitted that Washington reneged on its promises by subsequently offering membership to Central Europe.10 Yeltsin was correct in believing that explicit promises made in 1993 about NATO not enlarging for the foreseeable future were broken when the Clinton administration decided to offer membership to Central Europe.

Russia had barely absorbed the implications of PfP when the debate about European security leaped forward to planning NATO enlargement. The United States government was divided on this issue, as were the governments of other NATO countries. It is important to remember the context in which these debates took place. The former Warsaw Pact countries were undergoing a painful and contentious transition away from communism. The ghosts of the interwar authoritarian past of most of these countries continued to haunt them. Nativist nationalist parties, seeking to revive their ethnic agendas from the interwar years, were challenging the new democratic parties. There were several unresolved territorial disputes—for instance, between Romania and Hungary—and irredentist groups were agitating to resolve them on their terms. US and Western European officials feared that without effective structures to combat these movements, the European order could once again be threatened. EU membership was a long way off, and NATO, by imposing strict conditionality—including the resolution of territorial disputes—could serve as a democratizing instrument. Faced with the dilemma of reconciling two contradictory goals—integrating Central Europe into NATO to enhance European security and reassuring Russia that it too had a role to play in expanded Euro-Atlantic structures—the West chose to prioritize the first. Not surprisingly, while Washington told Russia that this was a win-win solution, Moscow viewed NATO enlargement in zero-sum terms.11

The Clinton administration embarked on NATO enlargement with the first group of countries—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—believing it could assuage Russian concerns by offering Russia a series of compensatory incentives. These included joining the G-7 and offering Russia its own agreement with NATO, the Permanent Joint Council, which was signed in Paris in 1997. The PJC was designed to give Russia a unique relationship with NATO, whereby Russia had a voice, but not a veto, in NATO deliberations. In 2002, after the US and Russia had cooperated in the war in Afghanistan, the PJC was redesigned as the NATO-Russia Council. The PJC had operated on the basis of “nineteen plus one,” with Russia meeting NATO after NATO’s then-nineteen member states had taken decisions of interest to Russia. The NATO-Russia Council was supposed to operate on the basis of “twenty,” meaning that Russian officials would meet with NATO officials to make their views known before NATO took decisions, to ensure that NATO took Moscow’s interests into account. While Russia has sometimes spoken approvingly of this special relationship with NATO, in practice, the NATO-Russia Council has never worked very well, despite periodic cooperation on issues such as search-and-rescue missions, civil emergencies, and counterterrorism. Russia’s ambivalence about interacting with an organization whose agenda it had to accept and its suspicions about NATO’s intentions persist, and no amount of NATO attempts to create a more cooperative environment could overcome them.

Three weeks after Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, NATO launched its bombing campaign against Serbia, fulfilling the Kremlin’s worst fears. The United States and its allies hailed the enlargement as a victory for freedom and democracy. For Yeltsin, “NATO was making a mistake that would lead to a new confrontation between the East and the West.”12 

 

The Balkan wars and Russia's conflict with NATO

The split between Russia and the West came in the Balkans, the same cauldron of competing ethnicities and religions that had given birth to World War One. Much of Russia’s suspicion of and opposition to NATO was rekindled during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yugoslavia was a patchwork state made up of historically hostile ethnic groups constructed in 1918 after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. During most of the twentieth century, it survived as a unitary state, first under the rule of monarchs and then, after the communists took over in 1946, under the iron hand of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. After his death, the presidency rotated among the major ethnic groups, but the system began to break down at the same time as the USSR opened up and Gorbachev unwittingly encouraged greater ethnic self-determination in the USSR.

After the constituent republics of Yugoslavia began to declare their independence, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic supported the Bosnian Serbs, who unleashed an ethnic war against Bosnia’s Muslim population, including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Initially, Washington hoped that its European allies would intervene themselves and halt the carnage in their backyard. But the Europeans could not agree on the modalities of a possible military operation, and under US leadership NATO intervened to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia in 1995. Russia reluctantly agreed to cooperate with NATO via the Contact Group for the former Yugoslavia, which was created in 1994 and met regularly to discuss the progress of the military operation. The US was determined to include Russia in NATO’s planning, although Russian ambivalence was clear. Russia consistently presented itself as the historical ally and defender of the Serbs. After listening to the US arguments about why Russia should support action against the Serbs, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev snapped, “It’s bad enough you people tell us what you are going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by telling us that it’s in our interest to obey your orders.”13

Moscow invoked its special relationship with the Serbs—their common Orthodox faith and historical and cultural links—but nevertheless at this point agreed the Serbian leader had to be stopped. The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, negotiating the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War, understood the importance of including Russia. What Russia “wanted most was to restore a sense, however symbolic, that they still mattered in the world.… Behind our efforts to include Russia in the Bosnia negotiating process lay a fundamental belief on the part of the Clinton administration that it was essential to find the proper place for Russia in Europe’s security structure, something it had not been part of since 1914.”14 The Dayton Accords created a three-headed government based on Bosnia’s three ethnic groups: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims). The peace was enforced by a multinational Implementation Force, in which Russian troops, surprisingly, served directly under an American commander, since they refused to serve under a NATO commander. This unprecedented military cooperation worked well. Yet today Russian officials recall the Bosnian intervention as inimical to Russia’s interests with a peace imposed by NATO.

NATO next intervened in the Balkans in 1999, during the Kosovo conflict. At issue was the right of the Muslim Kosovars living in Orthodox Serbia to declare their independence from Serbia and form their own state. At this point, Russia’s position toward the alliance had considerably hardened, and Yeltsin himself was seriously ailing and facing growing domestic opposition to his policies after the ruble collapsed in 1998, causing an economic meltdown. NATO-Russia tensions in the former Yugoslav states were much more intense during the Kosovo War. Though Russia had been part of the solution in Bosnia, it had no intention of acceding to another NATO military operation to save beleaguered Kosovars from Serbian attacks.

In March 1999, as tensions between the United States and Russia increased, former Soviet intelligence chief and diplomat Yevgeny Primakov, by now prime minister, was on his way to the United States to discuss Kosovo, in the hope of de-escalating tensions. During his flight, he received the news that NATO had begun bombing Belgrade. He immediately turned his plane around midway over the Atlantic and flew back to Moscow in a rage. Yeltsin’s opponents were warning him that if NATO could bomb Belgrade, “Today Yugoslavia, tomorrow Russia!” “Wasn’t it obvious,” Yeltsin wrote, “that each missile directed against Yugoslavia was an indirect strike against Russia?”15

Despite vigorous Russian opposition to the Kosovo campaign, former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin joined with Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari to broker a peace deal. But even as Chernomyrdin was putting his signature on the agreement, Russia and NATO almost came to direct physical blows at the end of the war. Contrary to the piece of paper Chernomyrdin had just signed, Russian troops rushed to the airport in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and occupied it, before NATO troops had entered Kosovo. This was in direct contravention of the terms of the cease-fire they had just helped to negotiate. At this point, the supreme allied commander in Europe, US General Wesley Clark, was in favor of NATO directly confronting the Russians. But British general Michael Jackson, who was in charge of NATO troops on the ground, told Clark that he was “not starting World War Three for you,” and eventually the crisis was defused.

The Kosovo campaign and its aftermath have been a consistent source of Russian criticism, from Yeltsin to Putin. Kremlin leaders have argued that NATO defied international law as enshrined in the United Nations Charter by bombing Serbia, including the inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which caused an outcry in Beijing. Russians believe the subsequent history of Kosovo exemplifies the worst excesses of NATO imposing its will on Europe against Moscow’s core interests. After the end of the war, Kosovo was administered by a United Nations body. But by 2004, there was renewed violence between Serbs and Kosovars, and Ahtisaari again began to negotiate the difficult issue of Kosovo’s future status. Between 2006 and 2008, Moscow blocked UN decision-making on Kosovo, claiming that Serbia’s interests were being ignored and highlighting a possible Kosovo precedent for other unrecognized states, including the frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet space. It refused to support the negotiated plan after most Western countries decided that the only solution to the violence was for Kosovo to become an independent state.

Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in 2008, and the United States recognized it, as did twenty-two out of the then twenty-seven EU member states. Russia declared the independence declaration illegitimate, with Putin warning, “This is a harmful and dangerous precedent.… You can’t observe one set of rules for Kosovo and another for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”16 To prove his point, Russia recognized the independence of those two breakaway regions after the Russia-Georgia War in 2008. Kosovo became a touchstone for Putin. The Kosovo precedent was the gift that kept on giving. In his speech announcing the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Putin declared: “Our western partners created the Kosovo precedent with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea they recognized Kosovo’s secession from Serbia as legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country’s central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence is necessary.”17 He also rejected the Western argument that Kosovo’s independence was the only way to end ethnic bloodshed and that, in contrast to Russia’s actions in Crimea, nobody had annexed Kosovo and incorporated it into their own state. NATO’s actions were, therefore, a source of both criticism and legitimacy for Russia’s own actions in Georgia and Crimea. 

 

Putin’s revisionist worldview Part One.

 

1. Vladimir Putin, [“Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,”] Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 30, 1999, http://www.ng(.)ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_millenium. html. 

2. Memcon, Bush– Kravchuk, September 25, 1991, BPL online. Even though there was a question mark over the Ukrainian declaration of independence pending the referendum, that declaration was still a profound shock for Moscow. It was one thing for the Baltics but quite another for a large Slavic republic such as Ukraine to take such a step; Plokhy, Last Empire, 168– 70. See also Budjeryn, “Power,” 210– 11. 

3. Memcon, Bush– Kravchuk, September 25, 1991, BPL online; Plokhy, Last Empire, 206– 7.

4. On April 23– 25, 1999, the members of the alliance, along with a wide array of guest countries— forty-four states in all, including Ukraine— descended on DC. 

5. They attended a ceremony in Mellon Hall, the very location where the twelve original alliance members had first signed the North Atlantic Treaty back on April 4, 1949.

6. A video of the event, including insert of historic footage from April 1949, is at https:// www.c-span.org/ video/? 122737-1/

7. Vladimir Putin, [“Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,”] Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 30, 1999, http://www.ng(.)ru/politics/1999-12-30/4_millenium. html. 

8. Steven Erlanger, “Russia Warns NATO on Expanding East,” New York Times, November 26, 1993.

9. James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken?” https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-matters/.

10. Angela E. Stent, The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 161.

11. “Pochemu Rasshirenie NATO Predstavliaet Ugrozu dlia Rossii: Memorandum,” Pravda, March 15, 1999, https://www.pravda.ru/news/world/15-03-1999/903901-0/. 

12. Boris N. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 131. 

13. Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2000), 76.

14. Richard C. Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 117. 

15. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 259. 

16. Angela E. Stent, The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 161. 

17. “Putin: Crimea Similar to Kosovo, West Is Rewriting Its Own Rule Book,” RT, March 18, 2014, https://www.rt.com/news/putin-address-parliament-crimea-562/.

 

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