NATO and the Origins of the Russo-Ukraine War: A Reply
In a recent piece in Australian Outlook, Michael Lawriwsky criticises some of the points I made in an earlier article suggesting that the question of NATO expansion was crucial to the onset of the Russian invasion. His arguments are either partial or incorrect, and do not address most of the questions I raise.
Lawriwsky’s suggestion that most Ukrainians did not understand how important NATO and the question of its expansion was prior to the Russian invasion in 2014 makes no sense. Maybe much of the Ukrainian populace was ignorant of this, but that was certainly not the case for the political elites, who are the relevant political actors. Ever since NATO’s formal acceptance in April 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would become members, Russian opposition was made plain both publicly and privately. Ukrainian elites, including the new government installed by the Maidan rising in 2014, were well aware of it. Furthermore, although as Lawriwsky argues, Ukraine was neutral when the 2014 invasion took place, the new government had made its plans to re-orient the country away from Russia toward the West clear.
He further argues that Ukraine could not accept a negotiated peace with Russia because past Russian promises to observe Ukrainian borders had not been observed. There is some truth to this, although at least in the case of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the situation is a little more complex than he suggests. Certainly, Russia’s invasion breached that memorandum, but days before the 2022 invasion at the Munich Security Conference, Volodymyr Zelensky foreshadowed possible reconsideration of that memorandum and the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons. This occurred within the broader international context of discussions about possible Ukrainian entry into NATO, something that does not seem in accord with the Memorandum which spoke in terms of international guarantees of security and borders. Furthermore, the Russians have not been the only ones to breach undertakings. For example, the Ukrainians have admitted (via former president Petro Poroshenko and Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, and confirmed by Angela Merkel) that they signed the Minsk II Accords in 2015, designed to end the fighting in Donbas with no intention of abiding by them but to provide themselves with a breathing space to build up their military. In any case, scepticism about whether Vladimir Putin would keep his word is not an argument for not entering into negotiations, but for ensuring that Ukraine has serious security guarantees from the West. And the Ukrainian leadership seem to have understood this.
Lawriwsky also suggests that, because according to Mary Sarotte (Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of a Post-Cold War Stalemate) at the time of the settlement on German unification there was “no clear prohibition on NATO adding more members” and the USSR agreed to this, there is no merit in Putin’s claim that Russia has been cheated. It does seem bizarre to argue that an agreement that was not designed to deal with all aspects of the future of NATO should be considered to do just that. This is particularly the case given that at this time, as we know from the US archives and the statements of former heads of state, the Soviets believed they had been given a guarantee that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO. The fact that no such guarantee had actually been made formally (but had been both implied and directly spoken of in discussions with Gorbachev on multiple occasions) does not mean that the Soviets did not believe it. Furthermore, they hoped, unrealistically, that NATO could be transformed into a broader continent-wide security architecture which would make the issue of expansion irrelevant. The claim that Russia felt it was misled is not without foundation.
Lawriwsky also makes the point that NATO could not allow Russia to exercise a veto power over who became a member. Clearly it is not the case that a non-member of an alliance can dictate who can join that alliance. However, if the leaders of NATO had been more intent on defusing a crisis rather than continuing to confront Russia and ignore its strategic concerns (on this see the work by Thomas Graham, former director for Russia on the National Security Council under George W. Bush, Getting Russia Right) a different approach would have been possible. Central to this is the notion of a security dilemma: the defensive strengthening of one side may be seen as offensive by the other side, and thereby lead to a response and escalation. NATO leaders knew this, and they were reminded of it by leading US figures including the architect of the Cold War policy of containment George Kennan and current head of the CIA William Burns who argued that the eastern expansion of NATO was foolhardy and bound to provoke Russia. If the question of possible Ukrainian membership had not been seen in terms of a Russian veto but in terms of the dangers of a security dilemma, the question may have appeared in a different light. And thousands of people might not have died.
Lawriwsky rejects the argument that there was any provisional agreement arising from the March-April 2022 discussions, calling this a “conspiracy theory.” This provisional agreement among the negotiators was brought to light not by the “pro-Russian advocates” he lists, but by the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett who acted as a major go-between. It was confirmed by, among others, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, several senior US officials cited by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent in an article in Foreign Affairs, statements by a number of national leaders, and reports in leading European and American newspapers including the New York Times, Berliner Zeitung and Financial Times. For the terms that were agreed, see the Istanbul Communique of 29 March 2022 (apparently comprising Ukrainian proposals turned into a draft treaty by the Russians); also see Zelensky’s public support of the negotiations two days earlier and Ukrainska Pravda 5 May 2022. Putin and Sergey Lavrov both also confirmed this. Clearly the negotiators reached a form of agreement, and this seems to have initially been signed off by Putin and Zelensky. In the event, the main point of what I said was that NATO expansion was a main concern of the Russians and was central to the discussions.
Finally, on culture (or as he terms it, language and identity), Lawriwsky purports to discuss “assertions made by Gill and other analysts,” and then cites a number of statements, none of which appear in my published piece to which he is responding. However, the broader question of culture underpins his whole approach. He argues that “Russia” denies that Ukraine exists as a separate nation and its imperialist nature has led to a “genocidal war of aggression” aimed at bringing Ukraine into a broader Russian polity. This sort of culturalist view is the core of the argument of most spokespeople for the Ukrainian cause. Of course, “Russia” does not possess a view and in fact within Russia there is a broad spectrum of views on this question of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, including elements that do express the sort of imperialist view just outlined. And Putin has said things consistent with this view. But he has also at times publicly acknowledged the right of an independent Ukraine to exist, while the preconditions he has elaborated for the opening of negotiations (despite being seen as extreme and unrealistic by the Ukrainian and NATO side) do assume the existence of a truncated Ukrainian state with Western security guarantees. In other words, despite the trenchant opinions of many Ukrainian spokespeople, we don’t know Putin’s real view on this question, nor the balance of opinion among those surrounding him. In any case, while cultural orientations (including historical views) are clearly important in explaining historical events, individual decisions made by political actors cannot be explained by culture alone. The decision to invade in February 2022 cannot be explained only by Putin’s view of the nature of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia even if his view was that attributed to “Russia” by Lawriwsky. Culture alone cannot determine individual action. And any attempt to explain the Russian invasion without acknowledging the importance of the question of NATO expansion is clearly deficient.
Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and a long-time student of Soviet and Russian history and politics. He is the author of 25 books on these subjects.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
