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

The events in the Caucasus have only confirmed how absolutely right the concept of a new European security treaty is today. It would give us every possibility of building an integrated and solid system of comprehensive security. This system should be equal for all states – without isolating anyone and without zones with different levels of security. It should consolidate the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole on the basis of uniform rules of the game.[79]

Harking back to Gorbachev’s ‘common European home’, he emphasised the concept of ‘indivisibility of security’ that was a cornerstone of the 1990 Charter of Paris.

At the same time, Medvedev was also articulating a starkly divergent foreign-policy priority. Moscow, he said, had demarcated its neighbourhood as ‘a traditional sphere of Russian interests’.[80] ‘For Russia, as for other countries, there are regions in which it has privileged interests.’[81] The geo-idea was clear: Russia has a natural right to pre-eminence in its proximate environs. The problem is that if Russia has a sphere, the countries in it have to be insecure (or spoken for) in order for Russia to be secure, which would suggest that security is divisible after all. Medvedev’s use of the phrase, particularly after the war with Georgia, set off sirens in the region and the West. US Vice President Joe Biden felt the need to rebut it in his speech that launched the US–Russia reset: ‘We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence.’[82]

After Western partners demanded specifics regarding Medvedev’s proposal, Russia published a draft treaty in November 2009.[83] The document, while grounded in widely accepted principles like respect for territorial integrity and political independence, and the renunciation of the use of force, was deeply flawed. It was a legally binding treaty, the most weighty of all international agreements, which tend to come after a build-up of less formal arrangements that help generate support among domestic constituencies needed for ratification. It tackled core disagreements by creating new bureaucracies and crisis-response mechanisms. It also included provisions that would have obliged all states and existing organisations (including the EU and NATO) to ensure that their decisions ‘do not affect significantly the security of any Party or Parties to the Treaty’. Given the state of relations among countries in the region, the draft was dead on arrival.

The text was also a distraction from the opening that Medvedev’s initiative could have been: to begin much-needed dialogue on the regional order. Western governments focused on the objectionable elements in the text and declined the call for high-level talks. In a speech in Paris in early 2010, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, delivered the official US response: ‘common goals are best pursued in the context of existing institutions, such as the OSCE and the NATO–Russia Council, rather than by negotiating new treaties, as Russia has suggested’.[84] To put it in plain language, the regional order did not need any rethinking. The West was unwilling even to begin a conversation on the subject. The only dialogue to take place was at the working level in the OSCE – named the ‘Corfu Process’ for the Greek island where it began – that led nowhere.

Warning signs cropped up repeatedly. When meeting Russian counterparts in late 2009, a senior US official ‘emphasized that Russia’s efforts to assert a regional sphere of influence posed a threat to the reset in bilateral relations’.[85] In the same period, the US opposed any dealings between NATO and the CSTO, out of the conviction that ‘validation of the CSTO could further strengthen Moscow’s influence over our Central Asian [partners]’.[86] In June 2010, a German–Russian initiative to move forward on resolving the Transnistria frozen conflict while creating a new consultation mechanism between Russia and the EU on regional security not only failed to deliver on both counts, but also generated accusations that Berlin had offered Moscow a veto over EU decision-making.[87]