Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

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.” 28To 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.” 29He 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 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, 30and then with NATO secretary-general George Robertson, who had told him that Russia would have to apply for membership. 31In 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 at that point serious about exploring Russia’s NATO membership. 32

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 conducted a review of Russia policy. As part of this review, officials in the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning (including the author) suggested a more creative way of approaching the NATO issue. NATO, they argued, had always been an adaptable, protean organization. The challenges of the twenty-first century 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 at the same time that 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.” 33

Shortly thereafter, 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.” 34His 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 taken into account as those of an equal partner.” 35But 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.

Yeltsin had objected to the first round of NATO enlargement, and Putin’s attitude toward the second round was similarly critical, even more so. After all, NATO was now 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 take place. 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 he or she would feel more secure 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. 36

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, as a consequence of this joint action, Russia could indeed secure the “equal partnership of unequals” that it sought.

With hindsight, NATO enlargement to include the Baltic states was undertaken without fully thinking through 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 apparently thought through the possibility that Russia might one day pursue more confrontational 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 to Kaliningrad, the exclave that is part of the Russian Federation but 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 basically accepted the states’ NATO membership, Russia was bent on raising questions about whether indeed NATO would come to their defense. In response to these aggressive moves, President Obama traveled to Tallinn in September 2014 to offer words of 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.” 37

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 better deter a Russian invasion, while recognizing that this could not sustain a longer-term defense of the area. 38A British former deputy supreme allied commander in Europe wrote a novel describing a Russian invasion of the Baltic states in which NATO is both unwilling and unable to answer with an Article 5 response, and the locals have to rely on their own defense. 39In ten years, NATO had gone from welcoming seven new members to having Russia actively challenge its credibility as a defense organization.