Russia and Ukraine: “For decades there have been warnings of the provocation that NATO expansion is for Moscow”

As the fighting unfolds in Ukraine, two versions of the reality underlying the conflict peer across a deep divide, granting no truth to the other.

The most widespread and familiar view in the West, particularly in the United States, is that Russia is and has always been an expansionist state, and its current president, Vladimir Putin, is the embodiment of that essential Russian ambition: build a new russian empire.

“This was…always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary,” US President Joe Biden said on February 24.

The opposing point of view argues that Russia’s security concerns are, in fact, genuine, and that Russians view NATO’s eastward expansion as directed against their country.

Putin has made it clear for many years that if it continues, the expansion is likely to meet with serious resistance from the Russians, even with military action.

That perspective is not only held by the Russians; some influential American foreign policy experts have also signed on.

Among others, Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion in Russia since 1995. It was then that Burns, then a political officer at the US embassy in Moscow, reported to Washington that “hostility to NATO’s early expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”

NATO advances towards Russia

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance formed by the United States, Canada, and several European nations in 1949 to contain the USSR and the spread of communism.

Now the opinion in the West is that no longer an anti-russian alliancebut rather a kind of collective security agreement designed to protect its members from external aggression and promote the peaceful mediation of conflicts within the alliance.

Recognizing the sovereignty of all states and their right to ally with any state they wish, NATO eventually acceded to requests from European democracies to join the alliance.

The former members of the Warsaw Pact established by the Soviets, which was a Soviet version of NATO, also joined NATO in the 1990s, along with three former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in 2004.

The Western view is that the Kremlin is supposed to understand and accept that the alliance’s activities, including war games replete with US tanks staged in nearby Baltic states and rockets stationed in Poland and Romania, that the US is targeting. says they are directed at Iran, they do not in any way represent a threat to Russian security.

Many warnings about Russia’s reaction

The Russian elite and public opinion in general have long opposed such expansion, the placement of US missiles in Poland and Romania, and the military provisioning of Ukraine with Western weaponry.

When President Bill Clinton’s administration moved to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best and unnecessarily provocative at worst.”

“As the Russians were consumed with their grievance and sense of disadvantage, a growing storm of ‘stab-in-the-back’ theories slowly circulated, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would endure for decades,” Burns said.

In June 1997, 50 leading foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton stating: “We believe that the current US-led effort to expand NATO…is a political mistake of historic proportions” that will “disturb European stability”.

In 2008, Burns, then the US ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukraine’s entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just for Putin). In more than two and a half years of talks with key Russian actors, from the knuckle-draggers in the dark corners of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who sees Ukraine in NATO as anything more than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Responding to Russia’s insecurity

There are different conclusions to the current crisis depending on whether Russian imperialism or NATO expansionism is seen as the cause.

If you believe that the war in Ukraine is the work of a determined imperialist, any action other than defeating the Russians will be seen as a 1938 Munich-style appeasement and Joe Biden becomes the reviled Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who agreed to Hitler’s territorial demands in Czechoslovakia only to be duped as the Nazis marched to war.

However, if Russia is believed to have legitimate concerns about NATO expansion, then the door is open for discussion, negotiation, compromise and concessions.

Having spent decades studying Russian history and politics, I believe that in foreign policy, Putin has generally acted realistically, unsentimentally and amorally, taking stock of power dynamics between states.

It looks for potential allies willing to consider Russia’s interests – it recently found such an ally in China – and is willing to resort to armed force when you think Russia is threatened.

But he has also at times acted on the basis of his ideological predilections, which include his invented stories about Russia.

Sometimes he acted impulsively, as when he seized Crimea in 2014, and other times rashly, as in his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine.

The annexation of Crimea after Ukraine’s pro-democracy Maidan revolution in 2014 combined a strategic imperative to maintain the Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol and a nationalist justification, after the fact, to bring the imagined cradle of Russian Christianity and a historic conquest of the tsars back to the fold of the “motherland”.

Putin’s sense of Russia’s insecurity in the face of a much more powerful NATO is genuinebut during the impasse over Ukraine, his recent statements have become more feverish and even paranoid.

Usually a rationalist, Putin now appears to have lost his temper and is letting his emotions get the better of him.

Putin knows enough history to acknowledge that Russia did not expand in the 20th century, losing parts of Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and eastern Turkey after the 1917 revolution, except for a brief period before and after World War II when Stalin annexed the Baltic republics, parts of Finland, and the united lands of interwar Poland with Soviet Ukraine.

Putin himself was traumatized by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the loss of a third of its former territory and half of its population. In an instant, the USSR disappeared and Russia found itself much weaker and more vulnerable to rival great powers.

Many Russians agree with Putin and feel resentment and humiliationIn addition to anxiety about the future. but overwhelmingly they don’t want warsay Russian pollsters and political analysts.

Leaders like Putin, who feel cornered and ignored, can attack. He has already threatened “political and military consequences” if currently neutral Finland and Sweden try to join NATO.

Paradoxically, NATO has endangered small countries bordering Russia, such as Georgia in 2008, that aspire to join the alliance.

One wonders, as American diplomat George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine who warned against NATO expansion in 1998, did, whether moving eastward by that alliance increased the security of nations. European states or made them more vulnerable.