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ABSTRACT
Stopping NATO enlargement has become a clear foreign policy priority for Russia. Given the diminished likelihood of Ukrainian and Georgian membership, Russia’s anti-NATO agenda may appear as an unqualified success. However, the net impact of Russia’s anti-NATO foreign policy agenda is quite mixed. Ukraine's and Georgia's stakes for accession have increased and key European NATO members' hesitancy to provoke Russia unnecessarily is clear, but Russia's actions have not prevented progress toward accession in other candidate countries, while the appeal of membership actually has increased in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Russia’s fierce opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia has become explicit; Prime Minister Medvedev in August 2018, for example, warned that any attempt to grant Georgia NATO membership would spark a horrible conflict (Isachenkov Citation2018).
2. For example, Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed Germany’s hesitancy in her August 2018 visit to Georgia (France24.com August 24, 2018).
3. Kimberly Marten interestingly notes that so-called independent foreign policy experts who expressed early anti-NATO positions were encouraged to do so by an organization called the Working Group on Russia’s Policy toward NATO, led by Sergei Karaganov, from the presidential administration, and should not necessarily be seen as evidence for early widespread opposition to NATO enlargement (Marten Citation2020, 417).
4. The polls vary in their results but typically showed majority to strong majority support. See Interfax-Ukraine (Citation2015); Williams (Citation2014); Pew Research Center (Citation2015).
5. As was noted in a Moscow Times article a year after the annexation of Crimea, for Ukraine, overcoming enough of its internal problems to join NATO may be “Mission Impossible” Bodner (Citation2015).
6. Ukraine even turned to crowd-funding for its military (Grytsenko and Harding Citation2014).
7. A National Democratic Institute 2017 poll reports 68 percent of Georgian respondents approve of NATO membership (Bierle Citation2018).
8. In some respects, this assertion was more recently mirrored by the EU’s similar assertion during the Ukrainian crisis that all European countries that met certain conditions were welcome to apply.
9. Greece expelled four Russian diplomats, accusing Russia of meddling before the vote on the name change (Erlanger and Gladstone Citation2019).
10. In addition to Sweden and Finland, EOP was made available also to Jordan, Australia, and Georgia (Dahl Citation2017, 81).
11. Prominent leaders in Finland and Sweden advocated closer relations with NATO after the war in Ukraine, as seen in publications from the Swedish Ministry of Defense in 2016 and a 2016 book coauthored by Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari (Dahl Citation2017, 84).