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

There has been only one Russian attempt since the Soviet collapse to put forward a positive plan for reorganizing Euro-Atlantic security, and that came in June 2008 at the start of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency. On a visit to Berlin, he proposed a new European security initiative and later produced the draft of a treaty to implement his proposals. In Berlin, his speech was rather vague as he called for a new, inclusive European security system and criticized NATO:

NATO has also failed so far to give new purpose to its existence. It is trying to find this purpose today by globalizing its missions, including to the detriment of the UN’s prerogatives, which I mentioned just before, and by bringing in new members. But this is clearly still not the solution. 40

For the next year, Russia worked on producing a treaty to formalize the Medvedev ideas. It was published in late 2009. 41Many of its provisions remained vague. Most Western countries rejected the idea that there was any need for another legally binding Euro-Atlantic super-treaty.

Shortly thereafter, Foreign Minister Lavrov presented the draft of a new NATO-Russia treaty designed to increase Russia’s role in NATO decision-making on defense planning and military deployments, especially missile defense deployments, which were of particular concern to Moscow. NATO members raised questions about the contentious issue of whether the steps one country would take to enhance its security could actually harm the security of another state. Since Russia and the West have such different definitions of security, the interpretation of a security threat would be subjective and potentially contentious. 42

The NATO-Russia relationship, by contrast, experienced a modest improvement under the reset policy of the first Obama administration, but Russia’s contradictory attitude toward NATO posed serious obstacles to closer cooperation. At the very same time as Russia and NATO were cooperating to counter narcotics in Afghanistan and piracy off the coast of Africa, Russia’s 2010 military doctrine named NATO as the number one external threat to Russia, whereas NATO’s new strategic concept talked about the desire for a “strong partnership” with Russia. 43

While NATO sought to reach out to Russia in the NATO-Russia Council, it made a major mistake in 2008. It mishandled the issue of further enlargement, thereby exacerbating Russian fears and ultimately provoking a military response from Moscow. In 2008, at the NATO Bucharest summit, the Bush administration tried to secure a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for both Georgia and Ukraine. This issue was contentious within the Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were both against granting the two post-Soviet states a MAP, which would be the first step toward NATO membership. It was one thing to admit the Baltic states to NATO. After all, the United States had never recognized their incorporation into the USSR in 1940. But Georgia and Ukraine had been integral parts of both the Russian Empire and the USSR, and granting them a MAP would surely raise Russian ire—and countermeasures. Because of this, many of the United States’ key allies—most importantly France and Germany—were adamantly opposed to granting the MAPs. Bush insisted to Rice that it had to happen. “I have to deliver this,” she realized. “This is going to be really hard.” 44

The Bucharest summit was the most contentious and dramatic NATO meeting ever—that is, until Donald Trump came to power—with the German and Polish foreign ministers hurling thinly veiled barbs at each other. As the deadline for the opening plenary neared, President Bush and his advisers tried to hammer out a compromise that would be acceptable to everyone. Angela Merkel finally broke the deadlock when she proposed the following compromise: Georgia and Ukraine would not receive MAPs. But the communiqué would say: “We agree today that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO.” 45

But what did that sentence really mean? In many ways it was the worst of both worlds. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine were granted the MAP, but Russia could assert that they would eventually join NATO and use this promise as an excuse to undermine both countries. In retrospect, this was an unnecessarily provocative sentence that did little to assuage the security concerns of either Ukraine or Georgia and everything to redouble Russian determination to reassert its domination of the post-Soviet space.

Vladimir Putin arrived in Bucharest the next day for a NATO-Russia Council meeting. It was the first time a Russian leader had attended a NATO summit. He was angry about the language in the communiqué, particularly the prospect of future NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In a private aside with Bush, he uttered the fateful sentence: “George, you have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part was given to us.” 46Six years later Russia would invade Ukraine to prove this point, and just four months after the summit Russia invaded Georgia. Yet the 2018 NATO Brussels summit communiqué reiterated the promise of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine.

Russia’s reaction to NATO’s eventual promise of membership for Ukraine and Georgia was to use military force to ensure that neither country would remain territorially intact and that the frozen conflicts in both countries would make it difficult for their governments to function effectively. The West’s acknowledgment of the limits of its support for either country in face of Russia’s military action against them reinforced the inescapable fact that NATO had no treaty obligations to defend them.

In August 2008, after months of mutual provocations, Russian troops marched into Georgia after Georgian troops attacked the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. South Ossetia was a disputed enclave within Georgia—a mélange of ethnicities—that had declared its de facto independence from Tbilisi in the early 1990s. Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili was determined to reincorporate it into Georgia. Putin was equally determined that this would not happen, since these unrecognized statelets under Russian protection gave Moscow leverage it wanted to preserve. Saakashvili was also determined that Georgia should join NATO and was apparently backed by the majority of his population.

During this short war, Russian and American troops came closer to facing one another on opposite sides of an armed conflict than at any other time since the Cold War. US military personnel had been training Georgian troops who were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the war, the White House convened a Principals’ meeting to discuss whether the United States should respond to Russia’s invasion with military force. The participants in the meeting agreed that the US should not go to war with Russia over Georgia. 47Although the West would not acknowledge Russia’s right to a sphere of influence in its backyard after 1992, it nevertheless recognized that since Georgia and Ukraine were not NATO members, there was little the alliance could do to help them. After defeating the Georgian army, which was no match for the Russian military, Moscow recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia’s other unrecognized statelet. Even though only a handful of other countries recognized their independence, Georgia had now lost its territorial integrity, making eventual NATO membership even more remote.

Russia’s actions in Ukraine were more far-reaching and disruptive to the European peace order than those in Georgia. Between 2008 and 2014, Moscow’s relations with the West significantly deteriorated. Although the question of further NATO enlargement receded into the background, and Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych reaffirmed Ukraine’s non-bloc status, Putin and other officials continued to invoke the specter of further enlargement as a threat to Russia’s vital interests. 48When Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014, the NATO threat once again came to the fore. The Kremlin may have feared that, with Yanukovych gone, Ukraine might revisit its bloc-free status. 49In his March 18, 2014, speech announcing the annexation of Crimea, Putin invoked the NATO threat as one of the reasons for Russia’s moves: