Deciphering Putin’s NATO Blame Game

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified.

For his assertion, he gives two reasons: First, NATO’s expansion to include former Warsaw Pact countries. And second, the possibility that Ukraine could join NATO, which he sees as a threat to Russian security.

But Putin has never given a clear explanation as to how NATO’s expansion and Ukraine’s possible membership might be a threat to Russia.

True, Ukraine was promised future NATO membership way back in 2008. But there was no specified date, and the issue subsequently moved to the backburner.

In other words, before Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, NATO membership was quite simply not on the horizon.

Misrepresenting the role of NATO

Most fundamentally, in trying to draw a link between NATO and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin is misrepresenting the role of NATO. It is a purely defensive organization, not an offensive one.

Moreover, NATO makes decisions by consensus, and members like Hungary and Turkey would be highly unlikely to allow NATO to threaten Russia. And most of the military assets of NATO countries are not assigned to NATO but remain national assets.

The greatest threat that NATO members pose to Russia

The greatest threat that NATO members pose to Russia is by their example of successful democratic capitalism, a success which Ukraine has the potential to realize, provided it can maintain its independence and join the EU and NATO.

Even today, if Russian citizens enjoyed free media, they would rightly wonder why their country, with all its natural resources, is so much poorer than Western countries.

Merkel’s big mistake

The big blunder of the West was not offering Ukraine (and Georgia) full NATO membership in 2008. This would most likely have prevented a Russian invasion.

The halfway house promise of NATO membership sometime in the future was mainly due to Germany’s Chancellor Merkel buckling under pressure from President Putin and was an unsatisfactory solution.

Ironically, Ukraine has now moved much closer to NATO membership as a result of Russia’s invasion.

Democracies can choose their alliances

In blaming the West for the expansion of NATO to central and eastern Europe starting in the 1990s, Putin overlooks the reality that the main pressure for their NATO membership came from the new members themselves.

These first new members chose a time of Russian weakness to join NATO, a wise move given their past experiences with an oppressive, interventionist Russia.

Their legitimate fear was that Russia may regain strength and revert to its old imperial ways. And of course, they were correct.

Russia’s right to veto?

Putin seems to think that Russia should be allowed a veto over these countries’ applications for NATO membership, even though Russia is not a member of NATO.

Russia is also not happy about Finland and Sweden joining NATO. But not only should these countries be fully entitled to make this decision, free from Russian coercion.

It was also Putin’s attack on Ukraine that caused the two Nordic countries to end many decades of neutrality and apply to join NATO.

Putin also seems to deliberately disregard the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act by which a new relationship between the Alliance and Russia was created.

According to the preamble, NATO and Russia do not consider one another adversaries. Russia was to have no veto over NATO decisions, and the Act was to have no impact on NATO enlargement.

This agreement was of course forged under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership of Russia but binds Russia. However, it seems not to have been taken seriously by President Putin.

Putin would like to negotiate a settlement with the West over Ukraine’s future, in which Ukraine would commit to not joining NATO.

Russia’s “deep state” remained in place after 1990

But the level of trust between the West and Russia has hit rock bottom, and justifiably so. From the very early days of the “post-Cold War” era, there were plenty of signs that Russia had adopted an adversarial posture.

Specifically, Russia never stopped its hybrid warfare activities. The Baltics, Poland and Ukraine gave leading Western countries plenty of warning of this.

But the “old” West chose to ignore those warnings about Russia’s systematically nefarious activities — even as there was an acceleration of cyber-crime, financial crime, political influence and interference operations.

Not to forget the constant disinformation campaigns, intellectual property theft, hiring influential locals to do its bidding, as well as murdering perceived enemies within Western countries.

Why not follow Churchill

Some have argued that expanding NATO violates a wise principle enunciated by Winston Churchill, namely “In victory, magnanimity.”

In reality, the “end of the Cold War” is in no way comparable to the end of World War II that Churchill experienced.

For good reason, the U.S. wartime leader Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted on the “unconditional surrender” of both the German and Japanese fascist regimes. Democratic political regimes were then imposed on these countries following the Allied victory.

In Russia’s case, much of the political establishment, especially the intelligence services, remained in place at the end of the Cold War. Even so, the Western countries naively seemed just to hope that Russia would democratize.

The naivete of the Western Europeans

In my view, the fundamental problem is that while the West firmly believed that it had “won” the European Cold War, much of the Russian elite, particularly those within the orbit of President Putin, never accepted that.

Russian elites were not happy that their country lost lots of territory and geopolitical status. As a result, it was no longer being treated as a great power. No surprise that those elites saw Gorbachev as a stooge of the West.

Conclusion

In sum, the proposition that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was driven by concerns about NATO expansion over-simplifies the situation. We may never know the real motivation for Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

A more plausible hypothesis is that an unpopular President Putin imagined that a quick conquest of Ukraine might provide a boost to his popularity among the nationalistic Russian population — much as Russia’s annexation of Crimea did in 2014.

But like many authoritarian leaders who only like good news, Putin did not appreciate the complex reality of the challenge of invading Ukraine.