Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus

To another influential thinker, Samuel P. Huntington, creating a “new dividing line through Europe” looked logical, justified, and historically inevitable. The “logic of civilizations,” he argued, dictated that Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia should join the European Union and NATO. The region thus defined by these organizations “would be coextensive with Western civilization as it has historically existed in Europe.” But he opposed extending the alliances to the territories “where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin”—including Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and, of course, Ukraine. [20] Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations , 158, 161.

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Boris Yeltsin and his cabinet protested but were not really in a position to argue. Post-revolutionary Russia was in the throes of deprivation: the economic collapse due to Gorbachev’s misconceived perestroika coupled with the inevitable hardship of a socialism-to-capitalism transition had resulted in an ineffectual and highly exploitative economy run by oligarchs and organized-crime dons, all but indistinguishable from one another. The price of oil was so low that it had stopped being a substantial revenue source. If Russia was to stay afloat, it needed American money, and therefore Bill Clinton’s friendship. [21] Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic, 2008), 264–269.

In May 1998, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times: “There is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992—the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. …And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.” [22] Friedman, “Foreign Affairs; Now a Word from X.”

The Clinton administration also aggravated Russian insecurities with its global military interventions. In Russians’ eyes, no case epitomized this brazen geopolitical engineering more strongly than Kosovo.

In Yugoslavia, Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. The idea behind the autonomy was to acknowledge the rights of a minority, Albanians, who shared the region with Serbs. Together with the rest of the mini-empire of Yugoslavia, in the 1980s Kosovo descended into ethnic strife. By 1998, clashes had grown into war between Albanians’ Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo Serbs’ paramilitary units. The president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, sent in federal troops—not for peacekeeping, but to crush the Albanian rebels in the most brutal way. Milošević rejected all the United Nations resolutions of protest, explaining that Kosovo was an integral part of Serbia and that he would not consider Albanian rebels anything but terrorists. [23] Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 (New York: Penguin, 2012), 652–662.

NATO countries, led by the United States, wanted to use military strikes against Serbia to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia expressed outrage. In the words of Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Russia adviser (and an avid supporter of a NATO military campaign against Serbia), Kosovo became the “substantiation of all the Russians’ reasons for fearing NATO and opposing its expansion.” [24] Talbott, The Russia Hand , 301.

Another great power with several potential Kosovos on its territory, China, also vehemently objected to any military campaign. Russia’s and China’s objections meant that the U.N. Security Council could not pass a resolution authorizing “humanitarian” intervention in Serbia. So NATO went in unilaterally. To use Madeleine Albright’s language, that was a new, post–Cold War “common endeavor.”

By doing so, the alliance was taking on an entirely new function, that of a policeman on a foreign territory not even bordering any NATO country. As the British author Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote: “Whether or not a military response in the former Yugoslavia was desirable, it’s hard to see what it had to do with NATO. Under the crucial Article 5 of the 1949 treaty [that created the alliance], the members agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,’ and whatever else Milošević and [Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko] Mladić might be accused of, they had not attacked any NATO member.” [25] Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Who Needs NATO?” New York Times , June 15, 2011.

Still furious, but willing to cooperate with NATO in order to play at least a limited role in the Balkans, Russia agreed to send peacekeeping troops to Kosovo. The uneasy partnership led to a brief all-out war scare. One day, Russian peacekeepers were found in a place they were not supposed to be, and the commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, General Wesley Clark of the United States, ordered his British subordinate General Mike Jackson to attack and “overpower” them. Jackson famously told Clark off: “Sir, I am not going to start World War III for you.” [26] Glenny, The Balkans , 670.

If for the NATO powers the intervention in Kosovo was a straightforward matter of rescuing the Kosovar people from a murderous Serbian regime—and for the United States in particular, an effort to prevent in Kosovo the genocide it had conspicuously failed to prevent a few years earlier in Rwanda—for other nations the matter was more complicated. When Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia in 2008, many U.N. members objected. As of 2016, Kosovo had been recognized by 108 states, but among those that still ignored its existence were the powerhouses of the developing world—Russia, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Mexico, and Singapore—as well as several U.S. allies, including Greece, Israel, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain. All of these states contained minorities striving for nationhood that might be inspired by Kosovo’s example to try to cleave off chunks of territory and declare independence. One of the nations objecting to Kosovo’s recognition was Ukraine. If American diplomacy remained blissfully unaware that by crafting an independent Kosovo it had opened a Pandora’s box, politicians in Kiev knew very well that they had their own potential Kosovo in Crimea.

As edited by Western advisers, the declaration of Kosovo independence emphasized that Kosovo was a special case, not a precedent to be exploited by secessionists worldwide. Yet as Timothy Garton Ash pointed out, all sixty-eight other members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, “from Abkhazia to Zanzibar,” were “special cases too.” The “Kosovo precedent” became a rallying cry in every separatist hotbed: Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Dniester in the former Soviet Union; the Basque Country and Catalonia in Europe; Northern Cyprus; Quebec. [27] Timothy Garton Ash, “The Kosovo Precedent,” Los Angeles Times , February 21, 2008.

The enthusiastic American support of the breakaway republic had prompted Russians to take the attitude, “if they can do it, so should we.” After a brief war with Georgia in 2008, Russia sponsored “sovereignty and independence” for the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. [28] “Russia Resurgent,” The Economist , August 14, 2008.

On George W. Bush’s watch, NATO membership was extended to Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and three post-Soviet countries—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. U.S.-Russia relations plummeted. But bigger challenges were to come: the candidacies of both Ukraine and Georgia for admission to NATO.