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

It is rare that NATO summits involve substantive negotiations over important issues. Working-level officials in allied governments usually hash out all the agreements weeks beforehand, making the summits largely ceremonial occasions at which the leaders provide their blessing to the already-agreed texts. Bucharest was different; there was no consensus on MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. The debate at the foreign-minister level demonstrated changes to the intra-Alliance dynamic from a particular source – admission of the ten new members from East Central Europe in 1999 and 2004. When the German foreign minister voiced reservations about MAP, he was shouted down by his Polish colleague, who said that ‘[MAP] is a matter of national security for us. And now you come and tell us you are more worried for Moscow than for your allies.’[34] In the end, heads of state and government negotiated an ad hoc compromise: no MAP, but the summit communiqué declared that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become’ members of NATO at some unspecified future point.[35] Never before had NATO promised membership to aspirant states. The beleaguered leaders were making a necessary compromise to avoid a diplomatic meltdown. But once the parley was over it became clear that the decision was the worst of all worlds: while providing no increased security to Ukraine and Georgia, the Bucharest Declaration reinforced the view in Moscow that NATO was determined to incorporate them at any cost.

Bucharest also marked the breakdown of NATO’s dual-track approach to enlargement and relations with Russia: pursuing new members while also fashioning a more wide-ranging partnership with Moscow, as enshrined in the 1997 Founding Act. The evening following the release of the declaration, Putin arrived in the Romanian capital for a scheduled NATO–Russia summit. His public comments made clear Russia’s bottom line: ‘the appearance of a powerful military bloc’ on its borders was ‘a direct threat’ to its security. ‘The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice.’[36] The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, was soon to pass a resolution urging the abrogation of the 1997 Russia–Ukraine treaty, which had reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity, if Kyiv received a MAP.

In remarks to the NATO leaders behind closed doors, Putin made clear that Russia still did not consider its neighbours to be real countries entitled to their own policies. Georgia, he said, was foolhardy to think that NATO membership would resolve its separatist conflicts. He also called Ukraine an artificial creation of capricious Soviet leaders.[37] (Putin’s characterisation, of course, was by the same token true of post-Soviet Russia, which had never existed in its current borders before 1991.)

Such statements increasingly made it taboo for Western governments to hold any discussions with Moscow about post-Soviet Eurasia. Partly this came out of the Bush administration’s (and its supporters’) peculiar reading of mid-twentieth-century diplomacy. In his maiden speech in Europe in June 2001, Bush said, ‘We will not trade away the fate of free European peoples. No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.’[38] He was equating the Yalta accord, signed by the Big Three at the end of the Second World War, with Munich in 1938, the archetype of a sell-out of helpless countries to odious regimes. It should be noted that this characterisation is tendentious if not ahistorical; the Red Army had occupied most of East Central Europe when the Yalta agreement was signed.[39] Whatever the historical accuracy, Yalta now signified the granting of carte blanche to Stalin to impose tyrannical regimes fashioned in the Soviet image on the states of East Central Europe – a Western sin that must never be repeated. The invocation of the Yalta analogy implied that cooperation with Moscow would necessitate imposing decisions on Russia’s neighbours against their will, depriving them of democracy, independence and so on. When the East Central European states that had experienced the trauma of Yalta joined Euro-Atlantic institutions, this idea gained broader currency. But it was Putin’s words, and Russian policy broadly speaking, that crystallised that view into conventional wisdom.