By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Finland, Sweden to receive enhanced access to NATO intel over Ukraine, and NATO is no longer bound by past commitments to hold back from deploying its forces in eastern Europe, the US-led alliance’s deputy secretary-general Dan Mircea Geoană said on 29 May, 2022. Moscow itself has “voided of any content” of the Nato-Russia Founding Act, by attacking Ukraine and halting dialogue with the alliance, Geoana told AFP.

 

Understanding the Kremlin’s worldview

The fall of the Ukrainian government and its replacement with one that appears to be oriented toward the West represents a significant defeat for the Russian Federation. What started the current trajectory was that Ukraine voted overwhelmingly (92.3%) for independence in a referendum on December 1. On December 8, Leonid Kravchuk, the newly elected President of independent Ukraine, signed the Belavezh Accords (a document that later went missing) with Boris Yeltsin for Russia and Stanislau Shushkevich for Belarus, thus dissolving the Soviet Union.

 

This was then followed by the Orange Revolution of 2004 and several “color revolution”-style uprisings. In 2005, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko and Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka agreed on March 4 on a project to extend Ukraine’s Odesa-Brody oil pipeline to Plock, Poland. Extending this pipeline allowed Poland to diversify its oil supply, making it significantly less dependent on Russian oil.

 

Although Vladimir Putin has undoubtedly worked hard to craft this image, it is a mirage. Russia is doomed over the long term, and its short-term maneuvers aren’t enough to compensate for this fact.

Traditionally, Russian power has rested on four pillars: population, energy, weaponry, and geography. Three of these are diminishing.

 

The backbone of modern Russian power has been its massive population. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in WWII. Russia undoubtedly played a leading role in orchestrating Hitler’s demise, starting with its legendary stands in Leningrad and Stalingrad. However, Stalin sapped the military might of Nazi Germany less because of the strategic or tactical genius he possessed and almost entirely through his willingness to expend the lives of his citizenry.

 

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. Referring to the 1999 Kosovo War, then-Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Putin argued that “a group of countries is actively trying to change the world order that was established after World War II … The UN is being removed from the process of solving of one of the most acute conflicts” in Europe.1 Putin would continue to accuse “the so-called ‘victors’ in the Cold War” of trying to “reshape the world to suit their own needs and interests” throughout his terms in the Kremlin.2

 

Putin believed that if he conceded to calls to decrease the intensity of his military operations, Russia would face disintegration. His broader narrative reflected a core fear of state collapse and loss of territory. This rhetoric also tied back into earlier sentiments within the Kremlin that Russia was weak after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and risked losing sovereignty to external forces—in particular, the U.S.3 It followed, according to this view, that Russia must assert itself on the global stage to maintain its independence. The Kremlin began to view a less active foreign policy as another sign of lost sovereignty, a view that persists to the present day.                                                               

 

Putin and the main opponent

But Putin had not always characterized NATO as the enemy. When he first took office, he did not rail against NATO. Indeed, he reached out to Western leaders and gave them the impression that he was genuinely interested in developing a more productive relationship with them after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. This included the possibility that Russia might consider joining NATO. The United States and its allies had reiterated that any European country was eligible to join NATO if it met the criteria for membership, and Putin seemed to be testing this claim. He had raised the issue of Russia joining NATO with Bill Clinton,4, and then with NATO secretary-general George Robertson, who had told him that Russia would have to apply for membership.5 In a July 2001 press conference, Putin said the alliance could “include Russia in NATO. This also creates a single area of defense security.” Senior Russian officials believe that Putin was serious about exploring Russia’s NATO membership.6

Over the years, officials from various NATO countries have suggested that NATO should invite Russia to join. This would answer the question of where Russia belongs. When the George W. Bush administration came into office, it reviewed Russia’s policy. As part of this review, officials in the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning (including the author) suggested a more creative approach to the NATO issue. NATO, they argued, had always been an adaptable, protean organization. The twenty-first-century challenges led them to conclude: “It is in our long-term interests to have Russia as a partner, not a spoiler.” They laid out a road map of how negotiations with Russia should proceed while NATO was preparing its second round of enlargement to include the Baltic states. According to Richard Haass, then director of the Office of Policy Planning, “Having Russia inside NATO was a big idea. NATO had become a set of discretionary relations, and having Russia close to NATO is not inconsistent with what NATO has become.” 7

Shortly after that, former secretary of state James Baker, the man whose assurances to Gorbachev in 1990 had been misinterpreted by many, wrote an article arguing that Russia should be offered NATO membership. He trenchantly reminded his readers that NATO is “a coalition of former adversaries—one sad lesson of the twentieth century is that refusing to form alliances with defeated adversaries is more dangerous than forming such alliances.” 8 His authoritative voice should have borne some weight, but the Bush administration did not pursue this track.

Yet how serious was Putin in discussing NATO membership? In a 2000 BBC interview, TV host David Frost asked him, “Could Russia ever join NATO?” To which Putin replied, “I don’t see why not. I would not rule out such a possibility—if and when Russia’s views are considered as those of an equal partner.” 9 But beyond Putin’s perception of NATO as the “main opponent,” there was another problem. Russia would have to accept NATO’s rules if it joined. These were rules written in Washington and Brussels. Putin, seeking to regain Russia’s position as a great power, bristled at accepting the Western agenda. Russia wanted to interact with the United States as an equal, with the power to co-determine how NATO was run. 

 

The “big bang” enlargement, 2004

Putin’s attitude toward the second round of NATO enlargement was critical. After all, NATO was proposing to take in seven new members, including three former Soviet republics—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—which some believed would be a red line for the Kremlin. During Putin’s visit to Brussels in October 2001, at the height of US-Russia cooperation in Afghanistan, he expressed his dismay at the prospect: For example, the NATO enlargement will occur. Some new members will be adopted into that organization. Whose security will that action enhance? Which country of Europe, which country of the world, and citizens of which country of the world would feel more secure? If you go to Paris or Berlin and ask a person in the street whether they would feel more confident after the expansion of NATO enlargement of NATO and whether that person from the street would feel secure against the threat of terrorism—the answer most probably would be no.10

Nevertheless, he proceeded to discuss further cooperation with NATO in Afghanistan. At that point, joint work on defeating the Taliban meant Russia was interacting with the United States and its allies as an equal. There was still the expectation that Russia could indeed secure the “equal partnership of unequals” that is sought as a consequence of this joint action.

In hindsight, NATO enlargement to include the Baltic states was undertaken without fully considering its implications. Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that established NATO guarantees the collective defense of each member. If one state is attacked, all the other states will come to its defense. But are the Baltic states defensible? In 2004, few in NATO thought through the possibility that Russia might one day pursue more aggressive policies toward these neighbors. As soon as the Baltic states joined, NATO introduced a system of air policing for the three countries, a defensive, rotational 24/7 surveillance to secure their airspace. Russia was not enamored by the presence of NATO aircraft so near Kaliningrad. This exclave is part of the Russian Federation but is physically separated from it by Lithuania and Poland. After the onset of the Ukraine crisis, Russia began a campaign of naval and air harassment of the Baltic states and continued its cyberattacks, which had been going on for some time. A decade after Putin had accepted the states’ NATO membership, Russia was bent on raising questions about whether NATO would indeed come to their defense. In response to these aggressive moves, President Obama traveled to Tallinn in September 2014 to offer reassurance: “We will defend our NATO Allies, and that means every Ally.… And we will defend the territorial integrity of every single Ally.… Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all.” 11

Nevertheless, a 2016 RAND study based on a series of war games playing out a Russian invasion of the Baltic states came to a sobering conclusion: Russian forces could reach the outskirts of Tallinn and Riga, the capital of Latvia, in sixty hours. “As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members.” The world’s most powerful military alliance would face a painful dilemma: either abandon its allies to Russian occupation or face a war with a nuclear superpower. The solution, in response, was to enhance NATO’s military posture to deter a Russian invasion better while recognizing that this could not sustain a longer-term defense of the area.12 A British former deputy supreme allied commander in Europe wrote a novel describing a Russian invasion of the Baltic states. NATO is unwilling and unable to answer with an Article 5 response, and the locals have to rely on their defense.13 In ten years, NATO had gone from welcoming seven new members to having Russia actively challenge its credibility as a defense organization. 

The initial abandonment of the Warsaw Pact concerns one of the first critical steps in Germany but in Hungary, where reformist leaders showed open willingness to cooperate with the West in the teeth of opposition from their more hard-line Warsaw Pact allies. Settling historical differences with Russia only exacerbated these fears and brought further misunderstandings. The most important of these were the two countries’ distinct visions of European security. Having favored pan-European solutions based on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) for many years, Poland quickly opted to seek NATO access. After all, the CSCE could only provide mild security, just like the EU - whose Eastern enlargement appeared soon even more remote than NATO’s potential opening to the East.

 

1. On the 2008 Bucharest summit, see the NATO press release of April 3, 2008, “NATO Decisions on Open-Door Policy,” https:// http://www.nato.int/ docu/ update/ 2008/ 04-April/ e0403h.html, which states that “at the Bucharest Summit, NATO Allies welcomed Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership and agreed that these countries will become members of NATO”; and Matt Spetalnick, “Bush Vows to Press for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO,” Reuters, April 1, 2008, https:// www.reuters.com/ article/ us-nato-Ukraine-bush/ bush-vows-to-press-for-Ukraine-Georgia-in-nato-idUSL0141706220080401. For more on the NATO Liaison Office in Georgia, see https:// www.nato.int/ cps/ en/ natolive/ topics_81066. htm. See also Frye, Weak Strongman, 162, which notes the following about the 2008 summit: “After much internal debate, NATO pledged that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members,’ but did not offer a Membership Action Plan with any details or start date. The open-ended commitment was the worst of all worlds. It encouraged Moscow’s suspicions that NATO wanted to surround Russia, disappointed governments in Ukraine and Georgia that wanted NATO to move more quickly, and caused resentment among alliance members” who were “divided on the issue”; and Marten, “NATO Enlargement,” 409.

2. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 107– 8; Alexander Vershbow and Daniel Fried, “How the West Should Deal with Russia,” Atlantic Council, November 23, 2020, https:// http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/ in-depth-research-reports/ report/ russia-in-the-world/. President Barack Obama later changed course and did not put the above-described systems into Poland and the Czech Republic, instead installing the first land-based defensive missile launcher in Romania (for operation by NATO). See Peter Baker, “White House Scraps Bush’s Approach to Missile Shield,” New York Times, September 17, 2009; Ryan Browne, “US Launches Long-Awaited European Missile Defense Shield,” CNN, May 12, 2016, https:// www.cnn.com/ 2016/ 05/ 11/ politics/ nato-missile-defense-romania-poland. At the time of writing, a delay-plagued ground-based missile defense system was being built in Poland as well; see Anthony Capaccio, “The Pentagon’s New Poland-Based Missile Defense System Is Now Four Years Behind Schedule,” Bloomberg, February 12, 2020.

3. Russia 24, [“Putin: Film by Andrey Kardashev. Full Video,”] YouTube, March 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Pu0yrOwKI; [“Putin: Russia Has Maintained Sovereignty and Made Breakthroughs in Important Areas,”] RIA Novosti, December 19, 2017, https://ria(.)ru/20171219/1511255375.html; [“2013: Vladimir Putin’s Red Lines,”] Rossiyskaya Gazeta, September 26, 2013, https:// rg(.)ru/2013/09/26/valdai.html; [“The Best Moments of Putin’s Interview,”] Argumenty i Fakty, March 14, 2018, http://www.aif(.)ru/politics/russia/ne_imeyu_ prava_slabost_proyavlyat_samye_yarkie_momenty_iz_intervyu_putina; DenTV, [“Alexander Dugin: Russians Are on the Verge of Losing Their Identity,”] YouTube, March 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7dzL3IodxQ. 

4. “Putin Rasskazal, chto on obsuzhdal s Klintonom vistuplenie Rossii v NATO,” June 3, 2017, https://ria.ru/politics/20170603/1495759550.html.

5. Interview with Lord George Robertson in Putin, Russia, and the West, TV documentary, produced by Norma Percy, BBC, aired January–February 2012 on BBC Two.

6. Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 75. 

7. Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 75. 

8. James A. Baker III, “Russia in NATO?” Washington Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2010): 93–103. 

9. “BBC Breakfast with Frost Interview: Vladimir Putin,” transcript, BBC News, March 5, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/breakfast

_with_frost/transcripts/putin5.mar.txt.

10. “Speech by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, and the Russian President Putin,” transcript, NATO On-line Library, last modified October 4, 2001, http://nato.int/docu/speech/2001/s011003a.htm. 

11. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama to the People of Estonia,” news release, September 3, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/03/remarks-president-obama-people-estonia. 

12. David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank, research report, RR-1253-A (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016), http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1253.html. 

13. Richard Shirreff, War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command (London: Coronet, 2016).

 

 

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