Russian President Vladimir Putin has a sad. The U.S. and its allies are ignoring the autocrat’s legitimate security concerns, he claims. Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014, and Putin placed a 100,000-strong invasion force on his border with un-annexed Ukraine in recent months. Putin claims that NATO allies would be the aggressors if they allow Ukraine to join the western alliance (Washington Post):
In remarks to reporters at a Moscow news conference with the visiting leader of NATO ally Hungary, Putin said the Kremlin is still studying the U.S. and NATO’s response to the Russian security demands received last week. But he said it was clear that the West has ignored Russian demands that NATO not expand to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, refrain from deploying offensive weapons near Russia and roll back its deployments to Eastern Europe.
“While the Biden administration insists it will not allow Moscow to quash Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO, it has no immediate plans to help bring the former Soviet republic into the alliance,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago. Putin wants a veto on NATO membership.
The White House is not budging:
“When the fox is screaming from the top of the henhouse that he’s scared of the chickens, which is essentially what they’re doing, that fear isn’t reported as a statement of fact,” Psaki said Tuesday, as Western officials continued diplomatic efforts to defuse a potential further Russian invasion of Ukraine. “We know who the fox is in this case.”
Joining the back-and-forth, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov retorted Wednesday that Russia was a bear, not a fox, and “too big and heavy to climb on a henhouse.”
Yes. Seriously.
Putin said the Western allies’ refusal to meet Russia’s demands violates their obligations on the integrity of security for all nations. He warned that a Ukrainian accession to NATO could lead to a situation where Ukraine launches military action to reclaim control over Russian-annexed Crimea or areas controlled by Russia-backed separatists in the country’s east.
“Imagine that Ukraine becomes a NATO member and launches those military operations,” Putin said. “Should we fight NATO then? Has anyone thought about it?”
NATO has generals and strategists whose full-time job it is to think about it.
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper
Putin’s excellent gambit to fracture NATO and to recreate the Russian federation from its ashes has not gone well since Crimea, writes Fred Kaplan at Slate. Instead, he has reenergized a NATO alliance recovering its footing after an attack on its western front between 2017 and 2021 instigated by a former U.S. president and Putin puppet:
Putin had reason to believe things would go otherwise. He saw President Biden touting the Quad—the shiny new alliance of the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia, which would unify the Asian and Pacific allies and fend off a rising China—and may have figured that NATO had receded in importance. He also watched Biden bug out of Afghanistan, and while he may have sympathized with the move (his beloved Soviet Union was among those entombed in that graveyard of empires), he no doubt noticed the withdrawal’s rushed incompetence and the concern, if not panic, that it roused among U.S. allies. Meanwhile, the UK was out on its post-Brexit own; Angela Merkel had retired as Germany’s chancellor, leaving NATO’s largest, richest country in momentary flux; and French President Emmanuel Macron was seeking to take her place as the continent’s leader with a vision of Europe’s “strategic autonomy” from Washington.
Who knows whether all this was passing through Putin’s mind, but objectively it must have seemed a good time to make a move—especially since the pesky Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was drifting ever further to the west, renewing his request for NATO membership, and U.S. officials were indulging him, saying they’d invite him in the club someday. Meanwhile, the U.S. was supplying Ukraine’s soldiers with weapons and sending American soldiers as trainers, along with corps of special forces and CIA agents, who were up to who knows what mischief.
Putin may have thought the threat of cutting off Russian gas supplies in winter might give some NATO members pause, Kaplan writes. If they didn’t accede to an agreement never to admit Ukraine, a combination of weather, economics, and political uncertainty to his west might gain him Ukraine without a shot fired. Just like Crimea. Things have not gone his way this time.
Donald Trump lost the White House and faces indictment. The Trump administrations’ incompetents have been replaced with skilled negotiators: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, both experienced foreign policy hands. Biden himself spent years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eight as vice president.
Instead of NATO floundering, Kaplan explains:
… Washington has put 8,500 more troops on high alert for deployment to Poland and Estonia, to shore up the eastern flanks of NATO. Poland and Britain have announced a “trilateral security pact” with Ukraine, and, though no one knows quite what it means, the two countries are in the meantime redoubling their recent arms shipments to Kyiv. Sweden and Finland, Russia’s thoroughly western neighbors, which have stayed militarily neutral for all these decades, are now mulling the prospect of joining NATO.
Now Putin has to figure out whether spilling blood is worth having the west’s banks freeze the accounts of Russian oligarchs he’s made loyal because he’s made them rich. Perhaps NATO resolve would collapse if he invaded. If he does not, how can he withdraw and save face.
“Nobody knows what Putin prefers,” Kaplan writes. Maybe not even Putin. “If he’s looking for an exit ramp off this highway to catastrophe, the question is how to get him to take it while giving him a way to save face. Simply backing him into a corner would probably push him to double down.”
There are signs diplomacy still has a chance. Unless some military miscalculation sets off the powder.
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