Putin's actions will invigorate NATO
Tom Maertens
Published in The Mankato Free Press, March 29, 2014
Tom Maertens worked on Soviet and then Russian affairs for a dozen years, inside the State Department, at the U.S. Consulate General in Leningrad, and as minister-counselor for Science, Environment and Technology at U.S. Embassy Moscow.
In recent decades, the world has watched as Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, Armenia seized part of Azerbaijan, Indonesia grabbed East Timor, Morocco took over resource-rich Western Sahara, North Vietnam absorbed the South and China claimed Tibet. Nobody expects any of those territories to be returned.
Don’t expect Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine either.
Crimea was captured from the Ottomans and annexed to Russia in 1783, along with parts of Ukraine. To celebrate that triumph, Grigory Potemkin arranged a visit to Crimea by Catherine the Great in 1787 for which he (allegedly) constructed the famous false-front “Potemkin Villages” to impress the Empress.
Krushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Since both were part of the USSR, it was viewed as mostly symbolic. Ukraine itself (together with Belarus) was long seen as a Russian buffer zone against attacks from the west — in the past, from Sweden, France, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany — twice. Indeed, in the German invasion of 1941, that buffer allowed Stalin to trade space for time. The result was that the Nazi attack outran its supply lines and stalled in sight of Moscow.
After the breakup of the USSR, Russia signed a long-term lease with Ukraine for continued access to Sevastopol, a warm water port on the Black Sea.
That historical background helps explain why Putin took the risks of unilaterally annexing Crimea. He first fomented insurrection and then invaded on the pretext that Russian speakers there — 60 percent of the population — were threatened.
The U.S. has responded with economic and visa sanctions. To be effective, the Europeans must also sign on, but they get roughly 30 percent of their energy from Russia, which makes sanctions a hard sell.
The reality is that Putin holds almost all the cards, including energy and geography. Moreover, most countries in the world really don’t care if the flag flying over Crimea is Russian or Ukrainian. Obama has ruled out military action on grounds that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
From Russia’s point of view, NATO’s decision to take in many of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies, and even former Soviet Republics, has been a major point of contention. Gorbachev believed that he had assurances from Bush 41 that NATO would not expand eastward if he allowed Warsaw Pact countries to go their separate ways.
Clinton, and especially Bush 43, changed the script after Yeltsin left office and actively expanded the alliance. As the New York Times recently reported, it was Bush 43 in the spring of 2008, who put Ukraine and Georgia on the road to NATO membership, “which divided the alliance and infuriated Mr. Putin.” Expanding NATO eastward looks to Russia much like a foreign intervention in Mexico would look to the U.S., a violation of their version of the Monroe Doctrine.
Equally offensive to Russia was the West’s interference in the former Yugoslavia. NATO bombed Milosevic’s Serbia for 78 days, forcing it to grant independence to Kosovo. Events there demonstrated not only Moscow’s impotence but embarrassed its long-time ally, Serbia, which Russia had entered WWI to defend.
Russia and the West had guaranteed Ukraine’s existing borders in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Ukraine giving up 1,700 former Soviet nuclear weapons stored on its territory. Russia committed to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,” a hollow promise.
Russia’s pattern of external aggression, first in Georgia and now Crimea, looks like Putin trying to turn back the clock. He has termed the breakup of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” That raises the prospect that Putin’s walkover in Crimea might tempt him to grab the rest of Ukraine in hopes of reconstituting the Russian empire. Given the enormous disparity in military capabilities, Russia could easily overwhelm Ukraine.
This Russian threat will invigorate a moribund NATO, an alliance without a mission since the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Baltic states — Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania — some of the newest members, and Poland, have sought additional security reassurances against Russian encroachment. Latvia, for example, has a population that is 35 percent ethnic Russian.
To complicate matters, the U.S. still has important interests with Russia, such as securing its loose nukes, for which we have been investing as much as $1 billion per year since the mid-1990s.
Whatever Russia does next, it is predictable that the Crimean takeover will drive Ukraine further toward the West, increase Russia’s isolation, and dispel any lingering illusions about Vladimir Putin.
Published in The Mankato Free Press, March 29, 2014
Tom Maertens worked on Soviet and then Russian affairs for a dozen years, inside the State Department, at the U.S. Consulate General in Leningrad, and as minister-counselor for Science, Environment and Technology at U.S. Embassy Moscow.
In recent decades, the world has watched as Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, Armenia seized part of Azerbaijan, Indonesia grabbed East Timor, Morocco took over resource-rich Western Sahara, North Vietnam absorbed the South and China claimed Tibet. Nobody expects any of those territories to be returned.
Don’t expect Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine either.
Crimea was captured from the Ottomans and annexed to Russia in 1783, along with parts of Ukraine. To celebrate that triumph, Grigory Potemkin arranged a visit to Crimea by Catherine the Great in 1787 for which he (allegedly) constructed the famous false-front “Potemkin Villages” to impress the Empress.
Krushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Since both were part of the USSR, it was viewed as mostly symbolic. Ukraine itself (together with Belarus) was long seen as a Russian buffer zone against attacks from the west — in the past, from Sweden, France, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany — twice. Indeed, in the German invasion of 1941, that buffer allowed Stalin to trade space for time. The result was that the Nazi attack outran its supply lines and stalled in sight of Moscow.
After the breakup of the USSR, Russia signed a long-term lease with Ukraine for continued access to Sevastopol, a warm water port on the Black Sea.
That historical background helps explain why Putin took the risks of unilaterally annexing Crimea. He first fomented insurrection and then invaded on the pretext that Russian speakers there — 60 percent of the population — were threatened.
The U.S. has responded with economic and visa sanctions. To be effective, the Europeans must also sign on, but they get roughly 30 percent of their energy from Russia, which makes sanctions a hard sell.
The reality is that Putin holds almost all the cards, including energy and geography. Moreover, most countries in the world really don’t care if the flag flying over Crimea is Russian or Ukrainian. Obama has ruled out military action on grounds that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
From Russia’s point of view, NATO’s decision to take in many of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies, and even former Soviet Republics, has been a major point of contention. Gorbachev believed that he had assurances from Bush 41 that NATO would not expand eastward if he allowed Warsaw Pact countries to go their separate ways.
Clinton, and especially Bush 43, changed the script after Yeltsin left office and actively expanded the alliance. As the New York Times recently reported, it was Bush 43 in the spring of 2008, who put Ukraine and Georgia on the road to NATO membership, “which divided the alliance and infuriated Mr. Putin.” Expanding NATO eastward looks to Russia much like a foreign intervention in Mexico would look to the U.S., a violation of their version of the Monroe Doctrine.
Equally offensive to Russia was the West’s interference in the former Yugoslavia. NATO bombed Milosevic’s Serbia for 78 days, forcing it to grant independence to Kosovo. Events there demonstrated not only Moscow’s impotence but embarrassed its long-time ally, Serbia, which Russia had entered WWI to defend.
Russia and the West had guaranteed Ukraine’s existing borders in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Ukraine giving up 1,700 former Soviet nuclear weapons stored on its territory. Russia committed to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,” a hollow promise.
Russia’s pattern of external aggression, first in Georgia and now Crimea, looks like Putin trying to turn back the clock. He has termed the breakup of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” That raises the prospect that Putin’s walkover in Crimea might tempt him to grab the rest of Ukraine in hopes of reconstituting the Russian empire. Given the enormous disparity in military capabilities, Russia could easily overwhelm Ukraine.
This Russian threat will invigorate a moribund NATO, an alliance without a mission since the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Baltic states — Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania — some of the newest members, and Poland, have sought additional security reassurances against Russian encroachment. Latvia, for example, has a population that is 35 percent ethnic Russian.
To complicate matters, the U.S. still has important interests with Russia, such as securing its loose nukes, for which we have been investing as much as $1 billion per year since the mid-1990s.
Whatever Russia does next, it is predictable that the Crimean takeover will drive Ukraine further toward the West, increase Russia’s isolation, and dispel any lingering illusions about Vladimir Putin.
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1 Comments:
In your brief history you omit mention of the role played by Nazi sympathizers in Belarus and Ukraine and how that impacts the range of strong feelings/animosity in that part of the world and especially parts of the Ukraine
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