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

This incident epitomised the ruinous character of the hardening regional contestation. Both Russia and the West adopted inflexible zero-sum stances regarding a dispute on regional security and were prepared to cling to them rather than negotiate a compromise solution. In the end, Russia’s attempt to force NATO member states to ratify A/CFE had failed, and the West had made no progress on the frozen conflicts. Everyone lost the transparency and accountability of the original CFE, and Moldova missed a chance to rid itself of an unwanted Russian military presence.

No more Yaltas

The demise of the conventional arms-control regime fed an upsurge in tensions between Russia and the West in 2007–08. Putin’s speech at the Munich security conference in February 2007, in which he pilloried various aspects of US foreign policy, set the tone. The tensions deepened in February 2008 when Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia and was recognised by the US and most of its European allies. Russia was bitterly opposed, and warned that diplomatic acknowledgement of Kosovo’s independence would have ramifications for the unrecognised entities in post-Soviet Eurasia. In the interim, another dispute had broken out regarding the prospect of a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia.

Introduced in 1999, MAP was an obscure bureaucratic step for aspirants to NATO membership, setting down the conditions required to join. A MAP did not imply automatic membership of NATO, as the final decision on a candidate nation’s accession was to be a political one, requiring a unanimous vote among the allies. In the heat of the tensions of 2008, though, both Russian and Western officials treated MAP as tantamount to NATO membership and adopted equally inflexible positions. In February 2008, a Russian deputy foreign minister warned the US ambassador in Moscow that ‘Russia would not consider a MAP offer as a “technical” step. It would be a strategic challenge with serious strategic consequences…. [It] would affect not only Russia–Ukraine and Russia–Georgia relations but also Russia’s partnership with the US.’[30] Such statements fed the pro-MAP drive in Washington. As then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice recalls, ‘For the West, given the pressures that Moscow had been placing on Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government had a good claim for the MAP as a counterweight to Russia.’[31] MAP had become the primary gauge of the larger contestation in the region.

The denouement would come at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in April 2008. In the months leading up to that meeting, the MAP question had become highly contentious within NATO; allies were divided between opponents, led by Germany and France, and ardent supporters, including East Central European states and the US. For supporters, the issue had become a litmus test for willingness to take on Russia’s influence in Georgia, Ukraine and post-Soviet Eurasia more broadly. As Asmus writes, advocates of MAP were ‘not necessarily interested in the details of whether Georgia had or had not successfully completed all of its reforms’. Instead, ‘they believed it was necessary to embrace and reassure Georgia at this critical moment when so much seemed to hang in the balance, and to send a message to Moscow to back off.’[32]

The Bush administration pressed the case for MAP publicly during the president’s visit to Ukraine, en route to Bucharest. At a joint press conference with Yushchenko, Bush said, ‘Your nation has made a bold decision [to request a MAP], and the United States strongly supports your request. In Bucharest this week, I will continue to make America’s position clear: We support MAP for Ukraine and Georgia.’ He added that he had recently said the same to Putin in a phone conversation, telling him, ‘you shouldn’t fear that, Mr President. I mean, after all, NATO is [an] organization that’s peaceful, or NATO is an organization that helps democracies flourish. Democracies are good things to have on your border.’[33] Putin and his advisers did not view this development in similarly rosy geo-ideational terms.