Parties to a long conflict may think of themselves as oil and water that do not mix, but on a territory that keeps changing hands, they do. Ceded for a decade or a century, a region becomes culturally transformed, and when it returns to the country that had lost it, it does so with a new face and character. Several cultures had overlapped on the territory of modern Ukraine, resulting in peculiar, region-specific cultural molds.
It is this state without a nation, unused to independence and self-governance, that has now become subject to the “Monroe doctrines” of regional powers, NATO and European Union eastward expansion, and attempts at regime change.
Monroe Doctrines
Russia responded to the collapse of the USSR with an incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine: all of the former Soviet republics were defined as the “near abroad,” and part of Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence. All had once shared a continuous human and economic space, and Russia, as the former imperial core, had a particularly big stake in keeping the legacy. Every attempt by a foreign power, whether the United States, China, Iran, Germany, or Turkey, to step into Russia’s backyard was deemed poaching, a provocation, brinkmanship. When in 1995 NATO announced plans to expand eastward, Russians reacted as Americans did when Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba.[6]
The “near abroad” concept has been deservedly criticized as neo-imperialist, yet immorality does not necessarily invalidate realpolitik. Many failing empires of the past had cushioned their disintegration precisely by creating a “near abroad.” The British Commonwealth is a good example. Second, contemporary great powers, such as the United States and China, maintain and guard their periphery zealously and determinedly (the United States in the Caribbean, China in Southeast Asia), so it makes little sense to hold Moscow to a higher standard. Finally, in the end of the Cold War, both American and Western European leaders had led Russians to believe that they would have preferred the Soviet Union to stay undivided (minus the Baltic countries, whose right to secede no one in the West doubted). Pretty much like the Entente in 1919, they now suspected that the disintegration would lead to geopolitical chaos. As a veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, former ambassador Jack F. Matlock, puts it, “The Soviet Union collapsed as a state despite the end of the Cold War, not because of it.” In 1991, in a speech in Kiev, President George H. W. Bush advised the non-Russian Soviet republics to keep a democratic federation with Moscow. Aggressive U.S. involvement in nation-building in the post-Soviet space would not start until Bill Clinton’s presidency.[7]
Just like the Monroe Doctrine, the “near abroad” was a response to new ideological and geopolitical challenges. For the United States in 1823, those challenges came from the reactionary politics of European powers after the downfall of Napoleon, and the formation of the Holy Alliance. For Russia in the 1990s, the ideological challenge was the worldwide triumph of Western universalism, with NATO a new Holy Alliance.[8]
What worried the United States in the 1820s was the possible return of old foes to the Americas, and this is why President James Monroe proclaimed that the American continents were not “to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” He warned that the United States “should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and security.” A similar rationale stood behind the “near abroad”: after seventy years of forced absence, Western powers were returning to Eurasian heartlands.[9]
No newly independent nation in the near abroad is more intertwined with Russia than Ukraine. A Russian ambassador to the United States said that Russia’s relations with Ukraine were “identical to those between New York and New Jersey.” A deputy foreign minister warned: “Remember, anything between us and the Ukrainians is a family affair, and any disagreement we have is a family feud.” The most prominent American realist, Henry Kissinger, concurs: “The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. …Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.”[10]
Russia does not have a right or a duty to remain Ukraine’s custodian, and its military and economic superiority are not going to last forever. Nor should Russia’s pretentions go unquestioned or unchallenged. The point is that for Russians, Ukraine is part of their continuous national space, not unlike what Canada is for the United States, but even closer.
Eastward Expansion: NATO and the European Union
If we looked for a single factor that pushed Moscow into annexing Crimea and then invading Donbass, NATO’s eastward expansion, especially into the former Soviet republics in the Baltics in 2004, would be it.[11]
When NATO was born in 1949, its mission (as famously put by its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay) was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” While keeping the Russians “out” was not necessarily a bad idea, the question remains whether the eastward expansion of the alliance has served the purpose or, alternatively, made things worse.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the global system of alliances froze in suspense. Even the unification of Germany did not look guaranteed. The prime minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, quipped: “We love the Germans so much that the more Germanies there are the better.” U.S. secretary of state James A. Baker asked, “Would the Soviets permit a unified German state to remain in NATO, the military alliance that protected the West against Soviet aggression?” Not only the Soviet Union but also France and Britain were doubtful “about the implications for Europe and the world of reconstituting the state responsible for two of the bloodiest wars of the century.”[12]
Yet East and West Germany were allowed to merge, with the reunified Germany a NATO country. That was the first expansion of NATO in the post–Cold War world. The administration of George H. W. Bush allegedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would stop on the reunified Germany’s eastern border. According to several accounts in February 1990, Baker told Gorbachev: “If we maintain a presence in Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later, Baker insisted that he had been misunderstood and that NATO expansion east of Germany simply did not come up in the negotiations. The former U.S. ambassador to the USSR Jack F. Matlock, though not a big fan of NATO enlargement, emphasizes that all there had been was “a general understanding” Bush and Gorbachev reached that “the USSR would not use force in Eastern Europe and the U.S. would not ‘take advantage’ of changes there. This was not a treaty binding on future governments.” This is not to say that the “understanding” was not sincere; it was—but only as long as the two leaders stayed in power. “I am sure,” Matlock continues, “that if Bush had been reelected and Gorbachev had remained as president of the USSR there would have been no NATO expansion during their terms in office.”[13]
6
Andrew C. Kuchins and Igor A. Zevelev, “Russian Foreign Policy: Continuity in Change,”
7
Jack F. Matlock,
8
Elihu Root, “The Real Monroe Doctrine,”
10
Strobe Talbott,
11
Richard Sakwa,
12
Giulio Andreotti quoted in Pavel Palazchenko,
13
Bill Bradley, “A Diplomatic Mystery,”