Who is to blame for the crisis over Ukraine? According to the Biden administration and just about every other politician in the United States, the responsibility lies with one man, Vladimir Putin. Whether he is trying to restore the Russian Empire, destabilize the West, pump up his domestic approval, or some combination of the above, Putin has decided to gamble the fate of millions. So the story goes, at least.
The reality is very different.
In the early 1990’s, as the Soviet Union dissolved into fourteen independent nations, American leaders were faced with a choice. The newly established Russian Federation was too weak to exert much influence outside its borders, so the United States was primarily responsible for building a new security order in Europe. One option was to maintain a buffer zone of neutral countries between Western Europe and Russia. Another option was to integrate the independent states of Eastern Europe into Western military structures, solidifying American geopolitical gains at Russia’s expense.
Starting with the Clinton years, successive American presidential administrations chose the latter course. In 1999, President Clinton welcomed Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO over the vigorous objections of Russia’s then-president, Boris Yeltsin. Five years later, President Bush celebrated the entry of seven new Eastern European nations into the alliance, this time pushing NATO directly to Russia’s borders. Putin, who had by then taken power, warned American leaders that repeated NATO enlargement would exacerbate tensions with Russia. But Presidents Obama and Trump each expanded NATO further into Eastern Europe, again over Russian objections.
Though it has not been granted NATO membership, Ukraine has played a significant role in the contentious issue of NATO expansion. At a 2008 NATO summit, President Bush pressured his allies to release a joint statement declaring that Ukraine would one day gain entry into the alliance. For Russian leaders, the notion that their most strategically significant neighbor would join NATO was unacceptable, and Putin had told American diplomats before the summit that NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded as a “hostile act toward Russia.”
In 2014, the dispute over Ukraine came to a head after the Russian-aligned president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in a revolution. Groups directly funded by the United States government had supported the movement that toppled Yanukovych, ostensibly in the name of democracy promotion. The new government quickly made clear its intentions to move closer to the West, which raised the likelihood of NATO membership considerably. Putin responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatists in the Donbas region. His primary goal was to sufficiently destabilize Ukraine in order to halt its entry into Western military and political structures. So far, he has been moderately successful. Ukraine has not joined NATO nor the EU, but over the past seven years, Kiev has tilted even more toward the West. Ukrainian leaders have openly stated their desire to join NATO, attempted to ban the Russian language in official use, and received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms from the United States. The current military build-up is Putin’s attempt to force American policymakers to address his concerns about Ukraine’s westward drift.
Among the American political class, the standard response to Russian complaints is that NATO expansion should not provoke any fear in Russia because it is a defensive alliance. As long as Russia behaves itself and refrains from attacking its neighbors, NATO will never have to act against Russia. So, the fact that American weapons systems creep closer and closer to Russia’s borders should be of no concern to Russians.
This argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of geopolitics. There is no international authority that can punish states that fail to abide by their promises. Multilateral organizations like the United Nations cannot constrain the behavior of powerful nations, as the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea demonstrate. Since neither action was authorized by the UN Security Council, both were in violation of international law. But who can enforce that law? Given the realities of the international system, why do American leaders expect that Russians should simply trust that the United States will never use NATO in an offensive capacity?
To illustrate the point, consider this hypothetical situation. Imagine that over the next several decades, China continues to increase its military power and begins forming military partnerships with countries far from its borders. On top of that, Chinese leaders start fomenting revolutions abroad. At some point, a revolutionary movement in Canada gains momentum, and with support from the Chinese government, overthrows Canada’s democratically elected government. Suppose then that after they sign an agreement with the new leadership and install missiles on the Canadian border aimed at Washington, China’s leaders claim that this military alliance is “purely defensive.”
How would Americans expect their leaders to react to such a situation? Would they trust the Chinese and hope that their government refrained from any kind of action? Or would they demand an assertive military response?
Even this analogy does not fully capture the depth of Russian concern over the trajectory of Ukraine. Though their relationship has always been complex, Russia and Ukraine have been bound together by over five centuries of historical, political, and cultural links. For most of this period, the lands of present-day Russia and Ukraine were part of the same political entity, within either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Two of the Soviet Union’s premiers, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, were themselves Ukrainians. The argument that Russians should just shrug their shoulders at the thought of Ukraine abandoning its long-standing ties to Russia and forming a closer military partnership with the United States is unrealistic.
There is no doubt that Putin is an authoritarian leader who has committed serious human rights abuses. But to relentlessly focus on his personal traits as the explanation for the current crisis over Ukraine is a convenient evasion. Until Americans recognize that the Ukraine crisis has less to do with Putin as a man than it does with the decisions of our own leaders over the past three decades, we will be unable to address the deeper issues that have poisoned relations with Russia.