Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Clinton had indulged Yeltsin on [the point of eligibility], while making it clear that this was not a realistic prospect any time soon. Internally, I often told my staff that we had the 10, 25, and 50-year plans. The first was for Central and Eastern Europe, the second for Ukraine, and the third for Russia.

Christopher’s ‘no one ahead of others’ had morphed into ‘everyone ahead of Russia’. By now even whispers of a hypothetical Russian membership bid fuelled antagonism. Asmus reports American trepidation that Moscow ‘might try… to create mischief by actually applying for membership’. When Kozyrev’s hard-nosed successor as foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, mooted an application in 1996, the response from Talbott was terse: ‘Russia would have to get into the same queue and meet the same criteria as other candidates.’ Primakov suspected the Americans of trying to trick the Russians into a premature statement of intent, which could then be used to refute any objections to other applications.[38]

At work under the surface was the bare-knuckled calculus of security. NATO spokespersons trumpeted that their policy was not anti-Russian. That may have been true, but the leaders of the aspirants to membership seldom concealed the fact that they considered it more than anything else a hedge against revanchism by Russia, a point echoed by a number of Western strategists. Even if the policy was not expressly anti-Russian, Russia was for all practical purposes disqualified from partaking and had no guarantees whatsoever against future encroachment on its interests. Where the diplomacy of the late 1980s had rested on an amorphous dream of assimilation into Western and global systems, ‘the 1990s were marked by the steady atrophy of serious efforts to integrate Russia’.[39]

Yeltsin and his government for some time continued their late Soviet predecessors’ touting of the CSCE/OSCE as an alternative to a widened NATO. In May 1994 they proposed to outfit it with ‘a leadership organ of restricted composition’, a compact executive board modelled on the UN Security Council whose members – one of them Russia – would have veto rights. This was in a sense the Russian edition of prefab institutional design, applying an antecedent model to current problems. But no sympathy for its version of OSCE reform was forthcoming from the West, from aspirants to NATO or from the smaller countries that felt they would lose from a potent executive.[40]

The best Moscow could manage by way of damage limitation and a consolation prize was the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation, an agreement signed in Paris in May 1997. As Primakov stated in his memoirs, the Russian aim was ‘not to drop our negative position on NATO expansion’ and at the same time to work out ways to ‘minimise the consequences that were most threatening to our security and most inconsistent with our interests’. In conversations in the wings, Primakov warned that admission of any ex-Soviet republic hereafter was ‘unacceptable’ and would traverse a ‘red line’ for Russia.[41] The Founding Act stated that NATO and Russia ‘do not consider each other as adversaries’ and ‘share the goal of overcoming the vestiges of earlier confrontation and competition and of strengthening mutual trust and cooperation’.[42]

Any goodwill emanating from the Founding Act was dispelled by a bitter controversy over the 1999 NATO air war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslav government, which had forcibly repressed a revolt by the Kosovar Albanian minority. It was the first major intervention in the history of the Alliance and the first to implement revisions of NATO’s strategic concept that allowed for military actions other than territorial defence. Incensed over the bombing campaign, Moscow broke off liaison with NATO and made the risky decision to send airborne troops into Pristina, Kosovo, ahead of the allied forces. Although cooler heads eventually prevailed and Russia contributed to the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, official suspicion hit new heights and Russian popular opinion was agitated. The episode underscored the growing gap between Russia and NATO over the Alliance’s post-Cold War modus operandi, particularly its enlargement and ‘out-of-area’ actions like Kosovo. Talk of Russia’s potential membership had almost ceased.