Today’s standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine can be traced back to 2004, a little more than a decade after the end of the Cold War. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin was just embarking on his second term, and he began nurturing a cult of personality, voicing grievances about perceived threats on Russia’s security perimeter, and positioning himself as the defender of Russia’s great power status.
By some accounts, Putin’s sense that Russia is under threat goes back to historic invasions of Russia: Batu Khan’s in the 13th century, Karl the XII’s in the 18th, Napoleon’s in the 19th and, finally, Hitler’s in the 20th. His historical gripes also extend to the Soviet Union’s first leader, the Bolshevik revolutionary Lenin, who Putin says weakened Russian territorial integrity by “creating” Ukraine—a contested revisionist claim. But whatever the precise length of this timeline of perceived injustice and threat, it has been abundantly clear since the mid-2000s that Putin is dissatisfied with the status quo of Russia’s position in the world.
Despite these early warning signs, over the past decade, the Western response to Putin’s rhetorical and territorial provocations has been tepid. Instead of deterring Russia, the U.S. and Europe pursued a three-pronged strategy. First, security-wise, they worked to force Russian revanchism east by expanding NATO, thereby preserving a united Germany and deterring possible military confrontations west of Poland in the north and Croatia in the south. Second, politically, they expected democratization to grease the wheels of NATO expansion, enticing former Soviet allies, satellites and republics without the U.S. or Europe needing to openly or “aggressively” push NATO farther east. Finally, economically, the West signaled its friendly intentions to Russia through economic appeasement, expecting that commerce, finance and socialization would encourage Western values among Russians.
But clearly, Putin was unpersuaded by these economic inducements. Seeing the balance of power tilting away from him and the balance of threat increasing both militarily and politically, he pushed even harder against the norms and limits the West believed would restrain him. As a result, after the war in Ukraine, the rift now emerging between Russia and the West is likely to become a permanent feature: a new Iron Curtain dividing the geopolitical and geoeconomic landscape for as long as Putin’s regime, or a similarly revanchist one, remains in power.
East and West
As early as September 1993, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent a letter to then-U.S. President Bill Clinton opposing NATO expansion to Eastern European states, advocating instead for a pan-European security settlement. At NATO’s 1994 Budapest Summit, he reiterated his resistance to NATO enlargement and the unipolar order, “Why are you sowing the seeds of mistrust?” he asked. “Europe is in danger of plunging into a cold peace. History demonstrates that it is a dangerous illusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital.”
Days later, Russia invaded the former Soviet republic Chechnya to prevent separatists from leaving the Russian motherland. Since then, whether it is reacting to other breakaway movements in former Soviet republics or discouraging them from allying with the West, the Kremlin’s response has been a militarized one, intended to brutally reaffirm a continued salience of the Soviet map.
During his 2005 state of the nation address, Putin lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, calling it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and a “genuine tragedy” for the Russian people. “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory,” he noted, interweaving his own nostalgia with regrets about lost lands. This statement, like others he’s made since, implied that the geopolitical rebalancing Russia sought would require the recuperation of territory.
That speech came in the wake of the anti-regime “color revolutions” that had swept across the former Soviet Republics, such as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Putin believed that these democratic uprisings were the product of Western meddling, and became “obsessed” with the idea that millions of Russians had been “trapped outside Mother Russia,” as Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, recently remarked to The New York Times.
By 2007, Putin was openly repeating former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s criticisms of the unipolar order led by the United States and the security threat he felt it posed to Russia. At the Munich Security Conference that year, he identified three key complaints. First, he resented NATO’s expansion into the Baltics. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had joined the alliance in 2004, and Putin said this could be considered an offensive move against Russia. Second, he decried U.S. election monitoring and regime-change efforts in the former Soviet republics, which the Kremlin considers to be within its “sphere of influence.” To Putin, U.S. democracy promotion was a “Trojan horse” that would destabilize Russia and further rebalance power toward the United States. Third, Putin protested a proposal to build an anti-missile shield over the United States, with bases in Eastern Europe, saying it would create a disequilibrium in the balance of threat and fear that had preserved nuclear stability during the Cold War.
Those fears seemed justified in January 2008, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko requested a NATO membership action plan, a program of advice and support that would pave the way for the country to join the alliance. William J. Burns, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, warned that this development would not go down well with Moscow, writing in a report to Rice that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite” and “a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Later that same year, at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin issued explicit warnings to the West. He made it clear to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary general, that he viewed expansion up to Russia’s border as a “direct threat.” He also told then-U.S. President George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a country.”
In response to Russia’s warnings, NATO deferred immediate plans to offer such roadmaps to Ukraine and Georgia. But Bush remained keen on NATO expansion, and as a result, the Bucharest Summit declaration included a promise to eventually incorporate both countries into the alliance. It even set a timeline, asking NATO’s foreign ministers to make a “first assessment of progress at their December 2008 meeting.” According to then-Danish Foreign Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Putin left the summit in a rage, fuming against the West for disregarding his line in the sand.
From Russia’s perspective, the prospect that Ukraine and perhaps Georgia could join NATO fueled domestic fears of the country’s “encirclement” by hostile states. If the bids were successful, Russia would have a rival military alliance positioned on its Western frontier, creating a hostile corridor extending from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Belarus, sitting between Lithuania and Ukraine, would remain as Russia’s only buffer in a fundamentally altered geopolitical landscape.
And strategically speaking, access to the Black Sea is crucial to the Kremlin, since it provides the most expedient passage to the Mediterranean Sea. Russia is one of six countries bordering the Black Sea, along with Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Georgia. If the latter two became alliance members, Russia would be left as the only non-NATO country in the set. But for a similar reason, Ukraine and Georgia have a significant incentive to join the alliance, since as it stands, they would have to fend off any amphibious attacks from their Russian neighbor without any guaranteed assistance from others on the Black Sea.
Just a few months after the Bucharest Summit, Russia extracted a heavy price for NATO’s open-door policy toward Ukraine and Georgia. In August 2008, before the membership action plan process had started, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia. The provocation could be keyed a success: The West mounted no challenge. The European Union proposed a cease-fire on Russian terms, and the U.S. offered to “reset” relations with Moscow.
Seeing little resistance to his revisionist designs, Putin took on the other potential NATO member, Ukraine, six years later. In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which, it’s worth noting, juts into the Black Sea. Simultaneously, he incited Russia-friendly separatists to seize territory in the country’s eastern Donbas region, before backing them up with a full-scale Russian invasion. At this point, the U.S. and its allies condemned and sanctioned Russia for its incursion and annexation of Crimea.
A rally supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in Moscow’s Red Square, March 18, 2014 (AP photo by Pavel Golovkin).
A few years later, Rasmussen, who had served as secretary general of NATO and was then a special adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, urged incoming U.S. President Donald Trump to establish military bases on NATO’s eastern front, with the rationale that “Putin only respects a firm hand.” By 2017, the alliance had deployed rotational battlegroups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
Putin was quick to warn his rivals that he saw the bases near Russia’s border as well as the EU and NATO’s continued courtship of post-Soviet states as a “direct threat” that would provoke a response. But Ukraine and Georgia continued to pursue NATO membership, and this year, Putin’s worst nightmare—NATO “coming with its missiles to our doorstep”—has finally become a reality.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, NATO responded by increasing its forward presence in Eastern Europe, stationing more battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Moreover, since the invasion, Finland and Sweden have accelerated their own discussions about joining the alliance, despite their long tradition of “neutrality.” If Putin’s former adviser, Sergey Karaganov, is right that the Russian president’s “real war is against Western expansion,” the current war is an abject failure.
NATO went East to maximize the power and security of the West. Russia, feeling insecure, resisted that eastward movement, using conquest to assert its sphere of influence. But its unwillingness to accept the structure and principles underpinning the world order that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only encouraged former Soviet republics and satellite states to go West.
Today’s new security context marks a watershed moment in NATO’s strategy toward Russia. If there was any ambiguity in NATO’s Eastern ambitions, there is none now. In addition to Finland and Sweden’s potential memberships, further deployments and reassurances to countries on the alliance’s eastern rim are inevitable. Russia may soon face a two-front standoff in its northwest and southwest, reminiscent of Germany’s Western-Eastern predicament during World War I.
The sea change in Russo-European relations cannot be overstated. In the words of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, “Russia is not the neighbor we thought it was.” Had the West been attentive to Russia’s red flags, it might have effectively deterred its belligerence, by for example offering Ukraine NATO membership with full security guarantees. With the West’s awakening, NATO’s strategic concept is in for a major overhaul, regardless of whether Russia pulls out of Ukraine before the alliance’s Madrid Summit in June. Its last strategic concept, issued in November 2010, viewed Russia as a “strategic partner” and appealed to a shared “respect of democratic principles and the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states in the Euro-Atlantic area.” This language is likely to be replaced by calls for security-seeking deterrence and open strategic competition.
The Legacy of Appeasement
If Putin’s strategy has backfired, the West, too, is now seeing the consequences of its soft efforts to reorient Russia around the ideals of political and economic freedom. In the words of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the hope was for Russia to “build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts,” instead of falling back onto “its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military.” European allies therefore encouraged stronger ties with Russia wherever they saw the opportunity.
This was particularly the case when it came to energy trade. By the beginning of the 1980s, gas reserves in the North Sea had been depleted, and Europe had to look for alternative suppliers to meet its energy needs. Later, climate change also hastened a diversification of fuels to reduce reliance on coal.
Russia had both the capacity and willingness to meet Europe’s energy needs. During the Cold War, Russian gas imports had not been an option, but by the early 2000s, engaging Russia economically actually made good geopolitical sense. If Europe and Russia were to become economically entangled, the thinking went, the costs of undoing the relationship would be high on both sides, and could serve to promote peaceful, even friendly, relations on the continent. That’s not to mention that Russia is the third largest energy producer in the world, behind China and the United States. It has significant oil reserves, the world’s largest natural gas reserves and is the third largest exporter of petroleum and other liquid fuels.
It made sense, then, for Europe to increase its economic ties with Russia, even if doing so has remained controversial both on the continent and in relations with the U.S., which has long opposed dependence on Russia. But that strategy has meant that, in the weeks since Russia’s invasion, as the U.S. issued a complete ban on Russian energy imports, Europe was slow to follow suit.
Despite coordinating an array of financial and import restrictions with the United States to contain Russian aggression and expansion, Europe’s high dependence on Russian energy has restricted its sanction options. According to Eurostat, Europe now receives most of its energy from Russia, including some 40 percent of its natural gas and 25 percent of its oil. Russia, too, is overly dependent on Europe, which is the single largest destination for its exports, including for energy.
Within the European Union, negotiations over a comprehensive energy boycott are sowing divisions, with some countries stalling and others pushing to forge ahead. While oil sanctions are more likely, EU-wide gas sanctions may simply not be possible. Some are calling for select members to implement unilateral import restrictions, as Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have done. The strategy is potentially promising. A comprehensive EU gas embargo would be economically costly for highly dependent countries, and could even weaken Europe’s strategic resilience if the Ukraine conflict escalates to include NATO countries. But EU members that are not excessively dependent on Russia can afford to turn off their gas valves individually, with the aim of collectively damaging Russia.
A New Iron Curtain
However well-intentioned the authors of the liberal peace were, interdependence can be exploited when commerce is relied upon to preserve stability, as was acknowledged by one of its key proponents, Paul Krugman. Despite its economic interdependence with Europe, Russia’s security threat has now escalated beyond its sphere of influence, intimidating prospective NATO members in Scandinavia. Democratic states are unlikely to restore relations with Russia if it means shaking hands with an aggressive, authoritarian regime that now poses a direct security risk to them.
Even if Russia were to reverse course, the Putin regime can no longer credibly commit to peaceful relations with the West. With the current regime in power, a reset is highly unlikely, and somewhat out of foreign governments’ control. Even if governments decide to re-engage with Russia, other economic or morally motivated actors may not want to. As of April 7, 600 companies had scaled back or suspended business in Russia. Some entities in the sports and entertainment industries have even banned participation by Russian citizens altogether or canceled events in Russia. In the art world, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams have cancelled their summer arts events in London; oligarch buyers of Fabergé eggs, Kandinsky paintings and the like are too sanctioned to participate, collapsing the market. These measures are not the result of some extraterritorial U.S. sanctions policy. They are a product of self-policing behavior among independent economic actors that neither require enforcement nor can be mandated away without interfering with free markets.
Tough times lie ahead for Russia. Its gross domestic product contracted 2 percent in this quarter and is projected to fall nearly 10 percent in the next. In an attempt to protect the domestic currency, the Kremlin is maintaining sky-high 20 percent interest rates and capital controls, as well as import restrictions. Sanctions on high-tech exports have terminated production of surface-to-air missiles at Russian plants. The public, too, has been affected, facing limitations on foreign currency withdrawals and worsening food shortages.
A rocky road also lies ahead politically outside of Russia. Inflationary pressures are affecting gas and food prices all over the word, and these impulses are starting to have outsized political consequences. For example, in France, the far-right party of presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has recently seen a rapid increase in popularity amid rising food prices.
The basic premise of sanctions is to remove them once the sanctioned party complies with the stated demands. But that wager depends on other economic actors following suit and reentering the sanctioned market when it reopens. The longer the war in Ukraine continues, with its profound human, social and economic casualties, the less likely the corporate, sports and arts worlds are to return to business-as usual-in Russia. A deep transformation may be underway. Today’s sanctions may not only quash Russia’s war effort, but could bring a final end to its great power status, politically, economically and culturally.
Carla Norrlöf is a professor at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. She can be found on Twitter at @CarlaNorrlof.
