The war in Ukraine

The Editorial Board of Cold War History has watched the war unfold in Ukraine as a tragedy and a geopolitical catastrophe. It has also noted that much contemporary commentary has drawn connections between the Cold War and the wider consequences of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’. In particular, the Board has been interested in the questions raised in the public domain about whether the world is now entering a second Cold War, or a new global Cold War. That is a chilling prospect for those who have studied the conflict which defined the second half of the twentieth century. At its meetings after February 2022, the Editorial Board decided that the journal should draw on the research of scholars to explain the historical forces at work in the event of our age. This roundtable is the result.

The articles here seek to enrich our understanding of the international history which led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and to contemplate its historical significance. They provide expert historical opinion on issues which the president of Russia and the Kremlin’s Security Council have called upon as justification for their military action. Of those, the question of the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the supposed deception of perfidious promises made by the West in the dawn of the post-Cold War era receive particular attention. In their articles, Kristina Spohr and Vladislav Zubok analyse the origins of the claim of deception and the use that Putin has made of it in a narrative which speaks of a wider contest with the post-1989 liberal order. James Ellison explores the British-Russian part in this history to explain why the UK has been a particular target for Putin’s hostility, and Hope Harrison raises Cold War historical analogies and Germany’s past and present to think about historic change. In his article, Jussi Hanhimäki examines the transatlantic alliance and puts its recent revival into historical context to suggest why earlier doubts about its future were misplaced. Piers Ludlow also focuses on the unifying effect of Russia’s invasion by detailing the historical significance of the European Union’s response to the war in Ukraine. Europe is the subject as well of Angela Romano’s article, but from the perspective of the Central and Eastern European experience of the Cold War, which leads her to consider why these countries see current events as the revival of an earlier threat. Michael Cox also draws on Cold War history to understand why the relationship between Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China is the latest incarnation of an alliance which now shares a world view that challenges the Western liberal order. The people of Ukraine are suffering from the return of war to international rivalry. As this roundtable suggests, it is a conflict which has its origins in 1989 and the course of events since.

The convenor and editor of the roundtable is James Ellison, Reader in International History at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. He has published two books on the history of British foreign policy during the Cold War and has recently concentrated on the post-Cold War era, the Anglo-American relationship and the wars in Kosovo and Iraq.

The other participants in this roundtable are:

Michael Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Relations and one of the Founding Directors of LSE IDEAS. He is the author and editor of many books, including, most recently, Agonies of Empire: US Power from Clinton to Biden (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022). He is now writing a book on China-Russia relations.

Jussi M. Hanhimäki is Professor of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is a specialist on the history of US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, international organisations and the Cold War. His latest book is Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Hope M. Harrison is Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is a historian of modern Europe, the Cold War, Germany, Russia and memory. Her most recent book is After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

N. Piers Ludlow is Professor of International History at the LSE. He is an expert on the history of Western Europe since 1945 and particularly on the history of European integration. He has published widely and his most recent book is Roy Jenkins and the European Commission Presidency, 1976–80: At the Heart of Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Angela Romano is Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests include the Cold War, processes of regional cooperation and integration and international economic relations. Her most recent book, co-edited with Federico Romero, is European Socialist Regimes’ Fateful Engagement with the West: National Strategy in the Long 1970s (London: Routledge, 2021).

Kristina Spohr is Professor of International History at the LSE. A specialist in German foreign affairs since 1945 and the post-Cold War era, she has co-edited four volumes on the global exit from the Cold War, European security and questions of world order. Her latest book is Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (London: WilliamCollins, 2019).

Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at the LSE. He has published widely on the history of the Cold War, the political history of the Soviet Union and the intellectual history of Russia in the twentieth century. His most recent book is Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

Michael Cox: ‘Clausewitz, Putin, Xi and the origins of the war in Ukraine’Introduction

The great strategist Carl von Clausewitz not only wrote brilliantly on war, but has also bequeathed to later generations possibly more quotes than any other writer on military affairs. We all know his famous aphorism that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’. We may even recall his definition of war as being an attempt by one side to impose its will on the other by force of arms. But how many of us remember what he said about simplicity: that ‘everything in war is very simple’ until of course it becomes ‘difficult’. It is a pity that Putin did not read these words of warning before invading Ukraine. If he had done so, he may have learned one thing from the famous Prussian: that launching a war might look easy, but waging and then winning it is a very different proposition altogether.¹

Of course, in Putin’s case, winning in Ukraine has been made all the more difficult as a result of two major miscalculations, one being his complete underestimation of Ukraine and its president, and the other his assumption that a divided United States and a fragmented Europe dependent on Russian gas would either be unwilling or unable to come to the rescue of a country which, for all the talk of it joining NATO, still remained outside its security structures, much to the consternation of Ukrainians themselves.² Indeed, possibly the best indicator of Putin’s failure was that when the war began the Western alliance was still recovering from Afghanistan, was uncertain about its future mission and was understandably concerned that a homeward-bound United States was no longer committed to European defence. A few months later the situation had been transformed beyond recognition. The United States, for instance, was now more committed to Europe than ever, all NATO members had promised to up their spending on defence, in Germany the mood had shifted from one of guilty understanding of Russia to hostility, and whereas the organisation ‘only’ had 30 members in February (with little chance ironically of Ukraine becoming one of them any time soon), by May it looked as if it might be acquiring two more in the shape of Sweden and Finland.³

But what role have other actors played in this ongoing tragedy? Putin as we know views the war almost entirely through the lens of the United States, or this ‘empire of lies’ as he prefers to call it, whose principal goal he insists is nothing less than ‘world domination’, something which can only be achieved, he argues, by first destroying Russia and then presumably getting rid of him.⁴ But there has been another, very different kind of player involved in this ‘great game’: namely the People’s Republic of China (PRC), once the USSR’s bitterest enemy, now locked into a very special relationship whose terms were outlined in great detail in a 5000-word communiqué published only three weeks before Putin launched his invasion. Historians will no doubt continue to debate the link between the war and the communiqué. There is every chance, too, they will be discussing how much President Xi Jinping actually knew about the planned attack on Ukraine. A group of Chinese historians later insisted that Xi had in fact been misled by Putin.⁵ Even so, having already agreed with Russia that there were now ‘no limits’ and no ‘forbidden zone of cooperation’ to their relationship, and aware no doubt that 120,000 Russian troops were amassed on Ukraine’s borders, it would have taken a very out-of-touch Chinese leader – which Xi most certainly was not – to conclude that there would not be some kind of military action in the not-too-distant future.⁶

But how could this have come about? After all, as more than one pundit has pointed out, the two countries were not exactly ‘natural’ partners.⁷ On the contrary, they have had a long and difficult history going right back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, large areas of what is now Russia were formally part of imperial China. There are significant cultural differences too. Their two economies are also quite distinct. Russia additionally tends to be more abrasive internationally than China.⁸ Finally, whereas one of the two countries is ruled by a party inspired by Marxism-Leninism and Marx (whose new statue it erected in his home town of Trier in 2018), the other is led by someone whose heroes include Peter the Great, to whom Putin once compared himself in his ‘quest to take back Russian lands’, and Alexander III, known to be his ‘favourite tsar’, and who once quipped that ‘Russia has only two allies: the army and the navy’.⁹

Yet in spite of all these very real differences, China and Russia still managed to establish an increasingly close relationship. And whatever label writers might like to attach to it – an axis of convenience, an alignment, an alliance, a partnership or even a ‘grand coalition’ – the fact remains that what one leading American predicted would never amount to a challenge for the West has gone on to become a very great challenge, even in times of war.¹⁰ In fact, not only has it survived the war in Ukraine, it has become a critical part of the war’s narrative, with Russia leaning upon China for diplomatic support and China rehashing the official Moscow narrative that Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was made necessary by NATO expansion and US refusal to recognise Russia’s legitimate security concerns. Even when the war had begun to go badly for Russia, a senior Chinese official reassured his friends in Moscow that he fully understood why Russia had been forced to take action in the first place.¹¹ Later, when Xi met Putin, he made it abundantly clear that there would be no abandonment of Russia, whose ‘core interests’ China shared.¹² Putin then sent a message to Xi following the 20^th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CCP), saying he looked forward to further developing the ‘comprehensive partnership and strategic alliance’ between their two countries.¹³ A few days later the Chinese foreign minister then conferred with his Russian counterpart, and amongst other things not only declared that China would do everything it could ‘to further reinforce the status of Russia as a major power’, but would thwart ‘any attempt to stop China and Russia marching forward’ together. Such moves, he declaimed, were ‘doomed to fail’.¹⁴

All of which leads us to ask the question: why? The answer, as we shall now go on to show, has to be sought not in the present, where most commentators tend to begin and sometimes end their discussion, but rather in an exploration of the past, and in particular the last years of the Cold War and the very long road Moscow and Beijing then travelled together to arrive at the destination they have arrived at today.

China and Russia: an evolving relationship

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed at least five major turning points in the history of the Sino-Russian relationship. The first came in 1950, when the two communist powers signed a treaty of friendship intended to last 30 years. The next came in the 1960s, when Mao declared that China’s old ally-in-arms was now led by revisionist traitors, who, amongst many other ideological sins, had had the temerity to reject Stalin while working hand in glove with the imperialists.¹⁵ A few years later China then met with the same imperialists in the shape of Richard Nixon, followed in 1979 with the establishment of full diplomatic relations and increased military cooperation between the two countries. Then, in the 1980s, the ‘seemingly changeless’ cold war between China and the USSR gradually began to come to an end.¹⁶ Driven by President Deng Xiaoping’s desire to drag China’s economy into the modern world and the recognition on both sides that it was pointless looking to exploit a ‘revolutionary global movement’ which no longer existed, the two countries, slowly but surely, began to move closer together.¹⁷

Significantly though, the most serious change in the relationship only occurred in the last years of the Cold War, when relations took a decisive turn for the better, which got better still when Gorbachev decided to visit Beijing in 1989, the first such visit by a Soviet leader in 30 years. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, and more worryingly still for the Chinese, not only did his trip coincide with the ongoing drama unfolding in Tiananmen Square – in part inspired by all his talk of reform – Gorbachev himself was about to do something which deeply concerned China, namely decamp from Eastern Europe and East Germany, causing a major crisis in the wider communist camp of which China still saw itself a part. Putin as we know later became highly critical of his reforming predecessor. But as Arne Westad has shown, the Chinese were perhaps even more shocked by a leader of a great communist superpower who not only let Eastern Europe go, but who also went on to accept ‘the banning of the party and then the dissolution of the Soviet state’ itself ‘almost without a shot being fired in anger’.¹⁸

That said, China was still faced with the task of working out how to manage the relationship with Russia going forward. The obvious answer, which was already in train anyway, was improving ties in the hope that these would provide both countries – one rising economically and the other collapsing – with some degree of security in a challenging new environment defined by globalisation, and in which democracy in one form or another appeared to be becoming the international norm. Thus followed a series of ‘joint statements’, a series of agreements on borders and military cooperation, a promise not to target each other with nuclear weapons, various discussions on improving economic relations, and quite a few summits (seven in total), all of which concluded in July 2001 with the two putting their names to what they regarded as a landmark treaty. Old-time foes had now become ‘good neighbours’ and ‘friends’.¹⁹

Dilemmas of unipolarity

Though these early moves did not in of themselves mean that anything like a new ‘axis of authoritarianism’ had come into being, the significance of what transpired should not be underestimated. Admittedly, none of what had happened added up to a formal alliance. The Treaty of 2001 was nowhere near as important as that signed by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong back in 1950. Nonetheless, it did point to a new configuration bringing together two countries who still felt like outsiders in a world shaped and dominated by the United States. Beijing may have also been hoping to secure a partner in what some, though not all, strategists in China were already starting to see as part of the ongoing struggle against US hegemony. Anti-Americanism was hardly a new phenomenon in China. Indeed, following the crisis occasioned by Tiananmen, the CCP had put a great deal of time and effort into linking pride in the Chinese nation with hostility to the United States. Hence building a bridge to another outsider country which, by the turn of the century, was beginning to move away from its earlier pro-Western phase, made a great deal of sense.²⁰

Moreover, even though the two countries claimed that nothing they were doing was directed against any ‘third party’, implicitly of course it was. As both made clear in 1997 (and Putin made it clearer still 10 years later in a famous speech delivered in Munich), while the two insisted they were not hostile to the United States – China after all needed US support to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) – they were determined to move the world away from a unipolar system, which did not suit their interests, towards a ‘multipolar’ order, which did. As Russian leader Boris Yeltsin declared at one of his long meetings with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, there were some (unnamed) powers who were pushing for a world with one centre. This, however, was simply unacceptable to either Russia or China, who from now on would be working together to create a ‘new world order … with several focal points’ and not just one.²¹

In and of itself this may not have led to conflict with the United States and the West. Nothing was set in stone. However, as soon became clear, unipolarity was not just some theoretical construct, but created conditions on the ground which allowed the United States to act with a degree of impunity without much fear of the consequences. How else, according to policymakers in both Russia and China, could one explain the many unilateral decisions taken by the United States, from the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, through NATO’s continuing war against Russia’s ally Serbia, and, finally – and most importantly according to Putin, writing on the eve of his war against Ukraine – to Bush’s war against Iraq in 2003? These were not accidents of history in their view, but rather expressions of an underlying power imbalance in the wider international system. Some in the West may have insisted that unipolarity engendered stability. Others that it did not really matter. This, however, was not the view in either Beijing or Moscow.²²

Russia and China may of course had been hoping that they could still work with the United States on key issues. They did, after all, share Washington’s views on the danger posed by international terrorism and nuclear proliferation. China and Russia also saw their future within pre-existing international institutions like the United Nations (UN). And from a purely economic point of view, Russia and China clearly needed the markets and the investment which only the West could provide. Yet the logic of economics would never be enough to overcome the logic of power politics, and slowly but surely what had begun as an attempt by all sides at finding a way of working together, in the end came to nothing.

History, however, never moves at the same speed for all actors, and as it turned out, relations between Russia and the West deteriorated even quicker than they did between China and the West. Putin’s brutal war in Chechnya, his use of the fight against terror to clamp down on democracy, his own vast wealth accumulated by means of controlling the apparatus of state and the imprisoning of key opponents (including one of the richest men in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky), taken together certainly did nothing to reassure Europe or the United States that this was someone with whom one could easily do business (though many in the West still hoped it would be possible).²³ Nor was the West much assured either with his oft-repeated assertions that his main goal now was to make his country ‘great again’, especially one now firmly under the control of an ex-KGB man and an inner circle whose ruthlessness at home was only matched by their willingness to see any move to bring about change in either Russia or in its so-called ‘near abroad’ (most especially Ukraine) as the work of foreign agents.²⁴

Nor did the relationship show any sign of improvement in the years thereafter. If anything, worse was yet to come when at the Bucharest Summit in 2008 Bush called upon NATO to open its doors to both Ukraine and Georgia (a move which Putin claimed at the time ‘complicated’ his ‘position’).²⁵ Relations cooled further when Russian forces invaded Georgian territory a few months later in what one writer called the first European war of the twenty-first century.²⁶ And they became cooler still when, three years later, the Arab world was convulsed by a series of upheavals, which not only caused consternation in both Beijing and Moscow – people power was not something they wished to encourage – but a great deal of anger when the West, in their view, turned what had initially been an R2P (Responsibility to Protect) operation designed to save lives into a policy of regime change. As they pointed out in a joint declaration signed in June 2011, they had been looking for a ‘political solution’ to the Libya crisis. The West, on the other hand, was using military means and taking sides in ways that went far beyond what was originally agreed at the UN.²⁷

But if the crisis in Libya provoked disagreement, the war in Syria caused something close to a near breakdown in relations, especially when Russia decided to throw its military weight behind the brutal regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Diplomatically, things became even more fraught when both Moscow and Beijing together deployed their veto power at the UN to prevent any sanctions being imposed on Assad’s government.²⁸ Russia’s decision may have been perfectly understandable given the long-standing relationship it had had with the Ba’ath regime ever since the Cold War. China’s reasoning was probably different, but as one observer noted, its decision was probably less driven by any interest it might have had in Syria, and more with demonstrating that it would, from now on, be adopting a more assertive, more proactive, foreign policy, and, significantly, doing so alongside Russia.²⁹

Enter Xi

The desire to be more proactive internationally and to do it alongside Russia clearly made a great deal of foreign policy sense to the incoming Chinese leader. Indeed, within a week of becoming president, Xi was already making his first overseas trip, and the first country he chose to visit was none other than Russia. He even told a small group of invited journalists that the ‘fact’ he was visiting Russia shortly after assuming the presidency was itself ‘testimony’ to the great importance that China placed on its relationship with its ‘friendly neighbour’.³⁰ Moreover, by making Russia what he himself called ‘a priority’, he was also sending out a message to the United States, which was by now taking what he felt was a dangerously intrusive interest in the affairs of the Asia-Pacific, that China was no longer prepared to sit back and watch Washington dictate the field in international affairs.³¹

Putin was clearly delighted by the visit and what Xi was saying, and responded in kind, even announcing that not only did he look forward to increased economic cooperation (by 2013 trade between the two countries had risen eightfold over a 10-year period), but to China and Russia working closely together to produce what he termed ‘a more just world order’.³² In a joint declaration issued by Putin and Xi after their talks, they also made it clear who they believed was standing in the way of creating such an order. Indeed, without even mentioning the United States, the two governments concluded that together they would ‘oppose’ any country (or even ‘bloc of countries’) which ‘unilaterally and without limit’ harmed ‘strategic stability and international security’.³³

But perhaps the real test of the relationship came just a year later, when Russia intervened to change the status quo in Ukraine by force. China may have been less than enthusiastic about this particular move, and even made it clear in its official statements that it continued to support the ‘independence, sovereignty and integrity’ of Ukraine. Yet in spite of its various declarations, there was little doubt in the end whom it would be backing. As critics at the time pointed out, what Russia was now doing in Ukraine – encouraging secession, using force to settle disputes and intervening in the internal affairs of another state (with which China had a significant relationship) – contradicted every single principle upon which Chinese statecraft had hitherto been based.

This, however, made very little difference to policymakers in China, nor to those in the official Chinese press who made it clear on which side Beijing would be standing. Indeed, in one fairly typical newspaper article published at the time, readers were informed that there were (unspecified) ‘reasons’ why the situation in Ukraine ‘is what it is today’. Then, having hinted that the situation was more complex than many outside Russia were suggesting, it went on to attack what it termed the ‘West’s biased mediation’ in the crisis. This, it opined, only ‘made things worse’. Putin meanwhile was almost given a clean bill of health. After all, all he was doing, we were told, was protecting Russian interests and those of Russian-speakers living in Ukraine. The West, it concluded, should thus stop wagging its finger at the Russian leader and ‘respect Russia’s unique role in mapping out the future of Ukraine’.³⁴

Putin in turn lost little time in reinforcing his position with those now prepared to turn a blind eye to Russian actions. At the sixth BRICS Summit (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) held in Brazil in July he not only got the other four states there – including China – to say nothing about what Russia had done in Ukraine. He also persuaded them to oppose any Western sanctions then being directed against Russia.³⁵ Meanwhile, even though China did not formally recognise Russia’s incorporation of Crimea – impossible to do so given its own views on secession and sovereignty – it nonetheless used the opportunity presented by the crisis both to pressure Russia to sell its gas at below-market rates while strengthening the economic ties it was already developing with Russia. As one Russian analyst at the time observed, the new ‘rapprochement … accelerated projects’ that had been under discussion for decades, resulting in agreements on a natural-gas pipeline and cross-border infrastructure, among many other deals. As a result, China now began to import larger and larger quantities of Russian oil and gas, while Russia became one of the five largest recipients of Chinese outbound direct investment in relation to the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative.³⁶

Deepening relationship

Even so, a number of analysts were still not convinced that a serious strategic partnership was in the making. We were even informed by at least one writer (there were many more) that the West should not be too concerned about what was happening because ‘underlying tensions’ between the two countries were bound to keep them apart.³⁷ Two Russian writers even asked whether this ‘strengthening of relations’ constituted a ‘durable strategy’ or was a mere ‘temporary rapprochement’ between two countries with very different interests.³⁸ Beijing and Moscow soon provided an answer, and, as if to prove their intent, signed another strategic agreement right in the midst of the crisis.³⁹ By 2015 they were even talking of creating a ‘Greater Eurasian Partnership’ by bringing their two spheres of economic interest (the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union), much closer together.⁴⁰ Russia then moved (in 2016) to provide official backing to China in its ongoing struggle with the Hague Court and the West’s regional allies over the South China Sea dispute.⁴¹ A couple of months later, following ‘a string of high-level meetings’ in both Beijing and Moscow, it also announced measures similar to those already in place in China to bring the internet under tighter control.⁴² Significantly, too, in light of what happened later, Russia (and 36 other nations) wrote to the UN in 2019 supporting China’s policies in its western region of Xinjiang.⁴³

Nor did the rapidly improving relationship conclude there. In 2015, for example, Russia finally agreed to sell China 24 Sukhoi-35 (Su-35) combat aircraft and four S-400 SAM systems.⁴⁴ Sino-Russian military ties also became much closer, especially in the area of joint military exercises, ‘the most important’ part of Russian-Chinese military cooperation, according to Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu.⁴⁵ Indeed, by early 2021, one senior Chinese official was even moved to declare that there now appeared to be ‘no limit’ to Chinese-Russian ‘military cooperation’.⁴⁶ What followed only appeared to confirm this, when in October Chinese and Russian warships conducted joint naval drills in the western Pacific for the first time, followed only a month later with both militaries sending bomber flights into Japanese and South Korean air-defence zones. The message could not have been clearer: this was a partnership that needed to be taken extremely seriously.⁴⁷ As one well-informed Western analyst pointed out at the time, it was by now clear that the relationship was ‘the strongest, closest and best’ the two countries ‘have had since at least the mid-1950s … possibly ever’.⁴⁸

And so to war

Meantime, as relations between Beijing and Moscow moved in one particular direction, those with the West moved in another. Earlier during his presidency Barack Obama had tried to ‘reset’ relations with Russia and ‘tilt’ the United States more towards Asia in an effort he claimed would take advantage of the economic opportunities presented there. But, as we now know, the reset soon collapsed, while the United States’ so-called rebalancing act was read in Beijing as just a cover for a new and more effective means of containing its rise.⁴⁹ Moreover, when Obama was then followed by Donald Trump, who had already declared that the United States was being economically ‘raped’ by China, it had become abundantly clear to policymakers and foreign-policy experts in China that they were now engaged in a long-term competition with Washington from which there would be no easy escape.⁵⁰ Trump alone was not the cause of this. But reflecting as he clearly did a decisive shift in US attitudes towards China as expressed most clearly in a raft of official reports detailing the threat China now posed to US national security, Beijing drew the logical conclusion that to offset the challenge posed by an increasingly hostile United States, it needed all the friends it could gather around it.⁵¹

But what in the end may have driven the final nail in the coffin of China’s relationship with the West was not what Beijing saw as the hard core ‘China threat’ lobby in Washington, but Europe’s increasing concerns about the direction in which China was now travelling. Hitherto neither the European Union (EU), nor even NATO, had seen China in the same way as it viewed Russia. No doubt the lure of its huge market influenced this judgement. But there was also a feeling that even if China were no longer a simple ‘stakeholder’ it did have an ongoing interest in a stable global economy and indeed in globalisation itself. Soon, however, the rhetoric coming out of Brussels started to change. The EU may have continued to see China as a country with which it could continue, and possibly needed, to do business; even so, by 2020 and 2021 it was already starting to view the PRC as a ‘systemic rival’, pursuing human-rights policies as well as economic ones, inimical to its core interests. When China then decided to adopt sanctions on members of the European Parliament, including the chair of its Delegation for Relations with China, relations inevitably deteriorated even more rapidly.⁵²

NATO found itself in a not-dissimilar position. As late as 2020 it too was still refusing to see China as a threat or an enemy. However, by the time of its summit in 2021, it was already arguing that China’s policies overall now presented a serious challenge to the ‘rules based order’. NATO in fact left little room for misunderstanding, and, in a lengthy communiqué of its own, talked in increasingly tough-minded terms of Beijing rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, being opaque when it came to its own military modernisation and significantly working ever closer with Russia in the Euro-Atlantic region.⁵³Even more worrying from the point of view of China was NATO’s growing inclination to see security in increasingly globalist terms in general, but with a discernible tilt of its own towards what it now called the ‘Indo Pacific’ region. Admittedly, it was only after the Ukraine War had begun in early 2022 that NATO began to think seriously about ‘practical and political cooperation’ with a number of key allies such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. But even before the invasion began, it was clear enough in which direction the Alliance was already moving.⁵⁴

The impact of all this back in Beijing was entirely predictable. Facing as it felt it now did a ‘collective West’ and not just the United States alone, Beijing concluded that it now had few, if any, incentives not to move ever closer to Russia, which interestingly now began to make its support for China in its own region more explicit. Meanwhile, as the two began to coalesce around issues such as Taiwan, China began to step up its attacks on the West more generally. Indeed, having been careful hitherto not to attack NATO openly, it started to do so – and nowhere more unambiguously than in the communiqué of 4 February 2022, where it talked, probably for the first time (and very much like Russia), of the organisation being some relic of the Cold War whose continued existence not only threatened the security of its close friend Russia, but which also provided no long-term basis for European security overall. By the middle of 2022 it was even talking of NATO as itself being a ‘systemic challenge’ to global security and stability, as well as a ‘tool for the United States to maintain its hegemony’ in order ‘to instigate a “new cold war”’.⁵⁵

Conclusion: any way back?

As we have tried to show in this historical survey of the Sino-Russian relationship, the partnership was a long time in the making, beginning just as the Cold War was winding down, through the transitional 1990s, and then on to the crisis in Ukraine in 2014 when China and Russia made what turned out to be a decisive turn towards one another. The groundwork for taking the relationship to a higher level had already been laid in the years preceding. But as we have seen, from 2014 onwards it went from strength to strength, in part driven by overlapping interests, in part by their own ideas about the kind of international system they wished to inhabit, and in part by what they perceived by the liberal, democratic West’s underlying refusal to accept their right to be either illiberal or undemocratic.

But something else was also uniting them: a shared view about the direction in which they thought the world was now moving. Both of course were well aware of how much power the United States and its allies could still muster. Even so, underlying their partnership was a belief – false or otherwise – that the West in general and the United States in particular were in decline, and that ‘history’ was at last moving in their direction. Long-term changes in the structure of the world economy combined with the financial crisis of 2008, followed in short order by the rise of populism, the West’s failure as they saw it to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally NATO’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan in late 2021, only proved to them at least what Putin and Xi had been saying for years: that the West was failing and that the future belonged to the East.⁵⁶

This in turn leads us to reflect finally not just on how durable the Russia-China relationship is likely to be – that question has already been answered by the way in which Putin and Xi have responded to any suggestion that theirs is a ‘bad marriage’ likely to hit the rocks some time soon – but what the relationship means for the world at large.⁵⁷ The answer quite simply is an enormous amount of uncertainty at best and a great deal of conflict at worst, which, as we have seen in the case of Ukraine, can very easily lead to war. Ukraine may of course be a one-off. On the other hand, it might well be a harbinger of things to come. But even if we do not witness another Ukraine (a conflict which still has a long way to run) the fact that two significant nations with a deep history of resentment against the West are now locked into a partnership whose purpose is to overthrow one kind of order and replace it with another, points to very dangerous times ahead. A certain writer on world affairs confidently suggested back in 1989 that history was coming to an end. Little did Francis Fukuyama know that within a few short years, it would be starting all over again.

James Ellison: ‘The British factor and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine’Introduction

Western states have since the end of the Cold War been fully aware of the sensitivity that Russians have felt about their ‘near abroad’. They have also known that there has been a pervasive belief in the Russian Federation that it was deceived early on by empty promises made by Western leaders about the future of NATO. It was no surprise, therefore, that Vladimir Putin referred to both concerns in his presidential address of 21 February 2022, which justified the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine that would follow.⁵⁸ While his reference to Ukrainian neo-Nazis can be scorned as fabrication, his other remarks about Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and about Western deceit are less easy to dismiss. We now know much about these issues. Historians have written at length about Putin’s claim that Ukraine is ‘an inalienable part’ of Russia.⁵⁹ They have also considered the basis of his accusation of Western perfidy about NATO’s expansion eastwards.⁶⁰ This supposed deception and its consequences and British-Russian relations are the subjects of this article.

In his speech, Putin said:

In 1990, when German unification was discussed, the United States promised the Soviet leadership that NATO jurisdiction or military presence will not expand one inch to the east and that the unification of Germany will not lead to the spread of NATO’s military organisation to the east. This is a quote.

Putin referred specifically to a meeting held in Moscow on 9 February 1990 when the US secretary of state, James Baker, told the last of the Soviet presidents, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would ‘not shift one inch eastward’.⁶¹ The subsequent enlargement of NATO to former Soviet Bloc states in Central and Eastern Europe is thus seen as evidence of Western duplicity. Evocations of Stalin’s indictments of Western encirclement in 1949 are hard to ignore and while the responses of Boris Yeltsin and Putin to NATO’s eastward expansion do not have the same ideological motives, their rejection of Western encroachment certainly does. However, just as NATO was not the cause of the Cold War, it is not the cause of the war in Ukraine, either. Putin’s emphasis on its post-Cold War enlargement is propagandistic, but also relates more to what he sees as an existential threat from the West to Russian interests, which he seeks to deter.

In 1949, Stalin’s fury about NATO was directed principally at the United States, its ideological Cold War adversary, but it was also pointed towards its NATO allies. Among them, for historical reasons as well as the role played by British politicians and officials in NATO’s creation, the United Kingdom was a high-profile target. As will become clear here, it regained that position in the mid-2000s since when Putin has reserved a special place for the UK in his sights. This outcome is much to do with his view of the West and particularly what he called in 2007 the ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force by the United States’.⁶² The primacy that British governments gave after 1989 to the United States and the Atlantic alliance, as guarantors of security, and especially after 2001, are the context for Putin’s decision. Both involve the NATO enlargement story. To date, in contrast to what we have learned about US and Russian histories, Britain’s role in the course of Russian-Western relations in the decades after the end of the Cold War has not yet received serious historical attention.⁶³

The issue under analysis in this article is the British factor in the complex geopolitical history which has seen the deterioration of relations with Putin’s Russia to the point of Ukrainian tragedy and global peril. Focus is placed here on high politics, with awareness that the edifice beneath requires treatment at much greater length. The article asks what British governments after 1989 sought to achieve for British interests and those of the West in Russia, how the search for cooperation and not confrontation with a democratic Russian Federation failed, and why it has taken so long for British governments to respond to the decision taken by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin in the mid-2000s to target the UK as an enemy state. The Russian president’s reach into Britain has extended to the use of chemical weapons on British soil by Russian agents to kill former Russian intelligence officers, cyber-attacks, economic entanglement, espionage and attempts to disrupt democratic processes. The cause of these threats has much to do with Putin’s paranoid view of the Western world and his belief that it has pursued a form of neo-Cold War containment which challenges Russian nationalism. In the choices that British governments have taken since 1989, and more markedly after 2001, there is reason to believe that he is not entirely mad.

New world, 1989–96

The West’s response to the transformations of 1989 and 1991 was largely governed by the policies of the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Those were to encourage Russia towards democracy through economic support and to allay Russian security concerns by not drawing a new line across Europe to replace the Iron Curtain.⁶⁴ Western European allies of the United States broadly shared its objectives. All wished to contribute to the stabilisation of Russian-Western relations, yet they would have to come to terms with their precarity once the US government decided in the mid-1990s that NATO enlargement had to be realised. The UK, one of the closest allies of the United States among European powers, would find this situation particularly difficult. Under the Conservative government of John Major, the UK would seek to contribute independently and multilaterally to the new post-Cold War European security architecture. Its aims were to retain the US security guarantee to Europe and to build bonds with the Russian Federation. Over time, the Major government would find that the price of US involvement in Europe’s defence was NATO enlargement and that the cost would be felt in its efforts to bring Russia out of the cold.

On 6 July 1990, NATO leaders met in London to announce a declaration of cooperation with the Soviet Union and its former satellite states. The ‘Cold War belongs to history’, the NATO secretary general, Manfred Wörner said: ‘Our Alliance is moving from confrontation to cooperation.’⁶⁵ This approach complied with British interests. Anglo-Soviet relations during the Cold War had been characterised by deterrence, surveillance, subversion and spy scandals. Their greatest literary chronicler perhaps epitomised at least part of their essence when he wrote that ‘[S]urvival … is an infinite capacity for suspicion’.⁶⁶ By 1991, in the hope of a Cold War peace dividend, the UK government sought to put suspicion in the past. Uncertain of the UK’s place in a world in transition, and without Margaret Thatcher and her personal involvement in Russian-Western relations, or her rapport with US and Soviet leaders, the government of John Major emphasised the role of multilateral diplomacy after the creation of the Russian Federation. In January 1992, its foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, forecast Britain’s objectives. In ‘the former Soviet Union’, Hurd wrote, ‘our power is limited’.⁶⁷ That fact made sustained engagement with US governments, and preservation of the US military commitment to Europe, premier aims for British security.

While the British collaborated with allies in multilateral settings to create the post-Cold War security architecture, they also sought to contribute to the West’s overall objective by taking a diplomatic lead with the Russians. Their purpose was to improve Anglo-Russian relations, strengthen Yeltsin’s position in Moscow, and ameliorate the Kremlin’s apprehension about NATO’s developing role in European security. In London on 30 January 1992, Major signed a 15-point Joint Declaration with Yeltsin which spoke of the passing of the Cold War.⁶⁸ The next day in New York, the prime minister chaired the first meeting in the Security Council’s history presided over by heads of state and government. Its function was to affirm the Russian Federation’s place in the international community.⁶⁹

Britain’s diplomatic embrace of Russia continued in November 1992 during a two-day visit to London by its president. It was a historic occasion in that it involved the signature of the first Anglo-Russian treaty of friendship since 1766.⁷⁰ In case it was not already clear, Major declared once again that ‘[w]e are consigning the Cold War to history’.⁷¹ The need to restate that fact, and to maintain the forward march of diplomacy with the Russians, became more important after NATO’s next summit in January 1994. It was at this point that NATO leaders took a step towards the Organisation’s enlargement. They declared that it was open to the membership of Central and East European states and committed to a new ‘Partnership for Peace’ (PfP) which allowed potential members to work alongside the alliance.⁷² In his press conference remarks, Major stressed that there ‘must be no new dividing line in Europe; no recreation of opposing blocs’.⁷³ It would become increasingly difficult for Britain to sustain these reassurances as the Clinton administration led NATO to its enlargement later over the next few years.

The British government continued to work towards the West’s attempt to sustain Yeltsin’s presidency in a reforming Russian Federation. In October 1994, it employed the soft power of a royal state visit to Russia, as Queen Elizabeth II became the first and only reigning monarch ever to visit Moscow.⁷⁴ The UK also maximised these new ties with Russia in a multilateral setting. On 5 December 1994, the United Kingdom and the United States, together with the Russian Federation and Ukraine, moved one inch further towards the realisation of post-Cold War European security. They signed a memorandum in Budapest which committed Ukraine, an independent nation since 1991 and, until this moment, the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons state, to transfer its nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantling. In return, the Russian Federation, the UK and the United States pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to refrain from the threat or use of military force against it. Twenty years later, it would be this agreement that would be abrogated by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Much would have to change in those two decades for Yeltsin’s successor to rip up the agreement of 1994. However, the signs of fundamental Russian discontent were already present. Yeltsin and the Kremlin had become unsettled by developments in Europe in the mid-1990s as the war in Bosnia strained Russian-Western relations. The Balkans were considered by Russian leaders to be within their nation’s sphere of influence and Serbia, seen as the aggressor by the West, was a traditional ally. The complex nature of United States-led international diplomacy and military action in the pacification of the war included sustained Russian resentment about Western intervention. Clinton managed to prevent a break with Yeltsin by 1995, but the war and the parallel debates in NATO about enlargement set the ground for future dispute.⁷⁵

The Major government observed these events with concern. Douglas Hurd’s view in November 1994 was that the ‘Americans congratulate themselves on their policy towards Russia but tend to behave as though the Russians do not have their own interests and their own domestic constituency’. The British wanted ‘to integrate the Russians into the international system’ but the Americans were ‘more ambivalent’. This reading of events was particularly problematic now that the issue of NATO enlargement was live. Hurd reminded the prime minister that Central and Eastern Europe were ‘acutely neuralgic for the Russians’ and that NATO and EU enlargement ‘must be seen in this context’.⁷⁶ The defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, told Major in January 1995 that the ‘debate about NATO enlargement to the east is nervous and inconclusive’. There was no clear idea about how to engage Russia in European security, ‘how countries like the Baltic States can be kept out of the Russian embrace’ or ‘how Ukraine can maintain its independence in the longer term’. Rifkind believed that the UK held ‘a pivotal position to influence these issues’, as it was close to the United States and European powers and had good bilateral relations with the Russians.⁷⁷ It may have been true that UK diplomacy since 1991 had put the Major government in this position, but its ability to influence events would be curtailed once the Clinton administration had decided to enlarge NATO, and when predictions about Russian neuralgia proved accurate. What curtailed it more was defeat in the 1997 General Election to Tony Blair’s New Labour Party.⁷⁸

New hope, 1997–2003

It is a measure of how badly Russian-Western relations deteriorated during the second presidency of Vladimir Putin that a month before Russians elected him to the Kremlin in March 2000, Bill Clinton saw him as the new hope. He told Tony Blair that Putin had ‘enormous potential’ and was ‘very smart and thoughtful’. In fact, Clinton predicted that ‘we can do a lot of good with him’.⁷⁹ In his final year in the White House, the US president was eager to reach agreements with the Russian leader to complete the work he had been doing with Yeltsin. His concern was that a Republican administration led by George W. Bush might ‘reverse’ what he planned to achieve in arms-control negotiations.⁸⁰ The 1990s had seen growing Republican criticism of Clinton’s foreign policies and calls for a harder line and increased military spending.⁸¹

Uncertainty about how a Republican Party influenced by Reaganite nationalists and neo-conservatives would approach Putin’s Russia gave Blair an opportunity. While John Major and his government had sought to work towards the overall objectives of the Clinton administration’s policy towards Russia, NATO enlargement and European security, Blair would intervene with more energy and personal involvement. He shared Clinton’s optimistic view of Putin. Unburdened by experience and motivated by conviction and self-confidence, he would seek to emulate Thatcher by doing business with a Russian leader to shape events and wield personal influence in the White House. For a brief period, Blair had some success. This was because he had a willing counterpart in Vladimir Putin, a fact that raises the question of what went wrong.

Blair and his government took charge of Anglo-Russian relations at the stage when the Clinton administration attempted a nigh-on impossible balancing act: to enlarge NATO to Central and Eastern European states while avoiding rupture with Yeltsin’s Russia. Clinton’s diplomatic solution was to keep talking with Yeltsin and the Russians (he met him 18 times over eight years), and not to force the issue until the Russian president had been re-elected in July 1996. Russia’s involvement in NATO’s PfP had begun a process which was extended in May 1997 by the NATO-Russia Founding Act, an agreement which attempted to formalise mechanisms and areas for consultation and cooperation.⁸² It came into being as Blair was elected. He very quickly had to realise that however much Clinton and his administration sought to ameliorate Yeltsin and the Kremlin, the Russians remained distrustful of NATO’s progress towards Eastern enlargement. Blair also had to deal with theirncreaseng sensitivity about NATO’s role in the war in Kosovo. He had been forceful in encouraging the Clinton administration to consider the use of ground troops to stop Serbian aggression against the Kosovars. NATO’s consequent involvement in the Kosovo war was the first in its 50-year history and was justified on humanitarian grounds and, crucially, without UN Security Council authorisation. On 26 March 1999, two days after NATO bombs landed on Serbia, the Russian Federation tabled a UN Security Council Resolution which called for cessation of NATO’s ‘unilateral use of force’ as ‘a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter’.⁸³ The Resolution was defeated but Russian opposition was not.⁸⁴

Yeltsin and the Kremlin’s criticism of NATO’s actions in Kosovo marked a fundamental divergence in Russian-Western relations, a fact that has ‘barely been appreciated in the West’, according to a former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.⁸⁵ The coincidence of NATO’s bombing campaign with its first enlargement since 1990 can only have compounded Russian discontent. On 12 March, three former Soviet states – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – joined the Organization. This eastward expansion and NATO’s military actions in Kosovo exposed different Russian and Western conceptions of spheres of influence, international law and national sovereignty. In Russian estimates, NATO had over-extended its power. These matters would become the arguments that Vladimir Putin would use to justify his increasingly aggressive policies and actions. Yet on his accession to the presidency, they were not impediments to his intention to develop good relations with the West in the pursuit of stabilising Russia and building its economy.

In his memoirs, Blair wrote that he ‘never forgot the initial warmth’ of his relationship with Putin, a bond based on them being ‘the same age’ and, ‘it seemed’, sharing ‘the same outlook’. By this, he meant an admiration for the United States, the intent to develop strong ties with its government, and the ambition for further democratic and economic reform in Russia.⁸⁶ How far Putin placed trust in his Western opposite number remains an interesting question, but he certainly sought to develop an early bond with Blair. The British prime minister was a leading figure among European heads of government and the US presidency was in a phase of transition as Putin became president himself. He sought Blair’s public approval and an opportunity to begin conversations with a senior Western politician who was close to US leaders. Two weeks before the Russian presidential elections in March 2000, Putin therefore used ‘back channels’ to invite Blair to St Petersburg. The connection that began there would remain ostensibly good natured and productive until 2003.⁸⁷

The prime minister’s diplomacy with the new Russian president had the backing of British parliamentarians. In those early days, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee fully supported the Foreign and Commonwealth Office policy ‘to encourage Russia to adopt Western norms’ and to put ‘suspicion firmly in the past’.⁸⁸ Personal relations between Blair and Putin were assisted by the prime minister’s decision not to condemn Russia’s violent suppression of secessionists in the long war in Chechnya.⁸⁹ Blair was criticised for his remarks and for the welcome he gave to the new Russian president, meeting him five times in 2000, but he was willing to shoulder it.

In April 2000, Putin made the UK his first destination as president, where Blair greeted him warmly, and the Russian leader replied in kind. The presence of British business leaders at the meetings and the prospect of UK investment in the Russian economy had much to do with their success. Putin also stated clearly that it had been useful to speak with a Western leader about multilateral issues. At their press conference, there was a mood of optimism on both sides. Putin said ‘that today we have turned a page in Russian-British relations, and made our bilateral policies more transparent, more predictable and more effective. Of course, there is a road towards isolation but I firmly believe that this choice is unacceptable’. Economic issues were prominent and Chechnya and the START II Treaty were the main foreign policy issues. While NATO would no doubt have been a subject of discussion in private meetings, it was notable by its absence in the press conference.⁹⁰ NATO was also not named by Blair or Putin in the press conference of their subsequent meeting in Moscow in November 2000. It was clearly discussed by the two leaders because Putin referred to the question of European security. His remarks were guarded but nevertheless receptive. Putin explained that ‘Mr Blair gave a fairly detailed account of his philosophy on the problem, which, if we understood him correctly, is that every move and step in this area in united Europe aims to preserve stability in the continent and the world’. Putin noted that such ‘an approach to this very sensitive issue suits us very well, and we share the underlying principles of European development’. He added that Russia’s ‘only reservation is that all moves in this area should be absolutely transparent’.⁹¹ After the meeting, Blair told Clinton that Putin had been ‘very anxious to impress me’.⁹²

In these early meetings with Putin, Blair had adopted a self-appointed role as the West’s leading interlocutor with him prior to the election of a new US president.⁹³ Putin was happy to play along, recognising the influence he might achieve through the British prime minister. Their association became significant when the world changed on 11 September 2001. Blair’s vigorous response to that event and his diplomacy with President George W. Bush and his administration, and other world leaders, is well understood.⁹⁴ Putin also took the decision to support the United States and its allies against the advice of the political and security figures in the Kremlin who believed that Russia should remain neutral and not break its policy by giving the United States military support.⁹⁵ Putin’s personal position, and his personal relationship with Blair, enabled the prime minister to engage the Russian president in the campaign to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had given the terrorists safe harbour.

These issues dominated Putin’s visit to London on 21 December 2001. Blair paid tribute to Russia for its part in the international coalition which had overpowered the Taliban in Afghanistan and to Putin for his cooperation in UN diplomacy. He also specifically mentioned intelligence collaboration, which since 9/11 had ‘been unprecedentedly close’. The order in which Blair made his remarks then becomes interesting. After discussing the emerging War on Terror, he moved directly to Russia’s relations with NATO. The Organization was looking ahead after its 1999 enlargement to a further possible expansion to include the Baltic States. As its predecessor had done, the Blair government understood that this prospect was, as the UK ambassador to Moscow Sir Roderic Lyne put it, ‘pretty neuralgic for the Russians’.⁹⁶ It suggests some quid pro quo in response to Russia’s support after 9/11 that Blair announced a new NATO-Russia Council at the meetings with Putin. He went as far as saying that he had found it ‘extraordinary and encouraging’ that Russia and NATO had ‘embraced the idea of this new relationship in a way again that would have been frankly unthinkable a few years ago’. Blair believed that ‘Russia today that is changing its relations with the United States, with us, with NATO, with the European Union and becoming an ever stronger player on the world stage’. Given the sensitivity of this issue in Russia, the optimism with which Putin spoke of Blair’s proposals was notable. The ‘formula proposed by the Prime Minister suits Russia quite well’, he said, adding that he thought it was ‘one of the few possible ways of changing the quality of relations between Russia and NATO and, even more importantly, it is one of the few real ways of changing the situation in the world in terms of a single security system in Europe’.⁹⁷

In his achievements with Putin at this stage in world events, and in Putin’s interest in collaboration with him, Blair had attained unusual influence.⁹⁸ Given the tensions in Russian-Western relations over Kosovo and NATO enlargement in 1999, the advances were marked. They were enabled by his diplomacy and Putin’s judgement of what was in Russia’s interests. The US War on Terror had obvious advantages for his nation’s fight against terrorists within its own borders. More generally, however, Putin saw opportunity to strengthen Russia’s position economically and in international affairs, principally through relations with the Bush administration, but also with Blair’s government as an ally and significant player in its own right in those early post-9/11 days. The problems began to emerge as Putin realised that the Bush administration’s cooperation with Russia had limits and that the priority for Blair and the UK was to support the Americans at all costs.⁹⁹ One of those costs was the British-Russian relationship.

Ostensibly, matters began to decline over 2002–3 – as part of the overall deterioration of Russian-US relations – due to the question of Iraq. The Russians had a different view than the Americans and the British of Saddam Hussein’s regime and did not share the West’s belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The Russian deputy foreign minister, an expert on the Near East, told the British ambassador that a military intervention would be ‘a huge mistake’. The ambassador later noted that ‘he was right and we were wrong’.¹⁰⁰ In his retrospective account, Blair could not go that far. However, he did write that he ‘realised how deep’ Putin felt ‘that Russia had just been ignored by the US’ and was determined ‘that they should see it eventually as a mistake’. Remarkably for Blair, he added that the ‘difficulty was that I half agreed with him about [US] unilateralism’.¹⁰¹ If he did, it made no difference. From mid-2003, Putin decided that the UK was a Russian target.

New confrontation, 2003–22

In June 2003, the Russian president made the first state visit to the UK by a leader of his country for 125 years. This was a set-piece occasion to extend and deepen the personal relationship that Blair had established with Putin, and to enrich relations between their two nations. It achieved its diplomatic and political objectives. Blair thanked the president for his friendship and partnership and described his leadership as offering ‘tremendous hope for Russia but also for the wider world’.¹⁰² Putin replied with words of mutual respect, noting that the meetings had ‘emphasized once again the strategic character of our partnership’. Success was much to do with the economic deals that were agreed. British Petroleum and Shell would invest £17 billion in the Russian fuel and energy sectors and there were also discussions about trade (which had grown by 15% in the previous year). Perhaps most remarkable of all were Putin’s restrained remarks about the Iraq war. He stated that ‘we can and will work together’.¹⁰³

Given the connection that Blair and Putin had developed from 2000 onwards, and the apparent success of the June 2003 state visit, it remains a paradox that from mid-2003, British-Russian relations soured dramatically. Within three years, the Russians would use hostile methods against the UK, which suggested a return to Cold War subterfuge. The British ambassador to Moscow at the time, Roderic Lyne, described mid-2003 as ‘a very sharp nosedive’ in the bilateral relationship.¹⁰⁴ His explanation rests first on the domestic political setting in Moscow. Oil revenues and increased foreign currency reserves removed Russia’s debt as an economic problem and ‘eased fatally’ the need to continue with economic reform. Hardliners took over in the Kremlin to fix the 2003 elections to the Duma and to see off an opponent to Putin in the 2004 presidential election.¹⁰⁵ Lyne also suggests that the Kremlin reacted badly to the British state’s refusal to extradite two individuals to Russia, the Chechen Ahmed Zakayev and the Russian Boris Berezovsky. The ‘Russian Government then threatened retaliation’, he said, which was ‘old Soviet-style behaviour led by the successor organisation to the KGB, the FSB’.¹⁰⁶

Blair’s memoirs offer further explanations for the downturn in relations. They concentrate on Putin’s response to how the United States dealt with him and to a greater, fundamental divergence over international affairs. ‘Vladimir thought that the Americans treated him and Russia with insufficient respect’, Blair wrote, ‘and as time wore on he decided to pitch Russia to the international community as the country willing to stand up to America’. He found opportunity to do so over Iraq. During a visit that Blair made to Moscow in April 2003 – prior to Putin’s state visit two months later – the Russian president ‘launched a vitriolic attack … really using the British as surrogates for the US’. Putin was ‘convinced that the US was set on a unilateralist course’. ‘Time and again’, Blair wrote, ‘he would say … the Americans think that they can do whatever they like to whomever they like’.¹⁰⁷

The transformations in Moscow and Putin’s criticism of evolving US foreign policy and military intervention in Iraq, and of the UK by association, offer a credible interpretation of the hardening in Russian views and actions after mid-2003. It also complies with what can be seen as the first formal statement of a new Russian foreign-policy posture in Putin’s April 2005 annual address to the Federal Assembly. It was in this speech that Putin told the Russian people that above all, ‘we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century’. His reference to ‘the rights of Russians abroad’ as ‘an issue of major importance, one that cannot be the subject of political and diplomatic bargaining’ was a harbinger of future ambitions to defend ethnic Russians outside of the Federation. Also, his consequent statement was an attack on US actions in its War on Terror: ‘Countries that do not respect and cannot guarantee human rights themselves do not have the right to demand that others respect these same rights.’¹⁰⁸

Two years later in Munich, Putin would go further and describe ‘an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations’ by the United States which had ‘overstepped its national borders in every way’. The Russian leader also now referred to NATO’s expansion as ‘a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust’, and pointedly to the lost assurances made by ‘western partners’ in 1990.¹⁰⁹ In his memoirs, Blair recognised that Putin saw the Americans ‘as circling Russia with Western-supporting “democracies” who were going to be hostile to Russian interests’.¹¹⁰ It is no coincidence that the hardening of Putin’s views corresponded with the colour revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2002 to 2005, or that in 2004 the accession of former Soviet Bloc states to the EU marked its largest expansion and also NATO’s fifth enlargement.¹¹¹

This background explains why the UK became the target for hostile state activity by Russia after 2003. The Blair government’s support for the Bush administration, the Iraq war and the ‘Freedom Agenda’, can only have aligned the UK with the United States in Putin’s mind. The UK was suddenly ‘in the firing line’, according to Sir Tony Brenton, the British ambassador to Moscow from 2004 to 2008.¹¹² In January 2006, antagonism became public, with Russian accusations of MI6 activity in Moscow, followed in November by the poisoning of the exiled former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Litvinenko, by two Russian agents in a London hotel.¹¹³ In 2007, the Russian state then forced the closure of British Council offices in Russia on the spurious grounds of tax evasion. Reuters reported that British-Russian relations ‘hit their lowest level since the Cold War’.¹¹⁴ The Litvinenko affair would continue to contaminate them over the long term as the British instituted an inquiry which 10 difficult years later concluded that Litvinenko’s death was the result of an FSB operation probably approved personally by Putin.¹¹⁵

The poor state of affairs between Britain and Russia was by the end of the decade a matter of public debate, not least because of the focus placed on them in high-profile Parliamentary select committee reports. In November 2007, the Foreign Affairs Committee warned the British state of Russia’s hostility towards Britain and also its entanglements in British society.¹¹⁶ In June 2009, the Defence Committee’s report detailed the circumstances of a ‘new confrontation’ between Russia and the West.¹¹⁷ During this period of rising antagonism, Britain’s official foreign and defence policies towards Russia did not apparently depart from principles established in the 1990s. In October 2010, the Strategic Defence and Security Review of David Cameron’s coalition government made no reference to the Russian threat.¹¹⁸ In the same year, Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, had noted on its website that the ‘number of Russian intelligence officers in London is at the same level as in Soviet times’.¹¹⁹ Nonetheless, the Cameron government persisted. In November 2010, at the NATO-Russia Council meeting in Lisbon, Cameron continued to support the ongoing attempt by the administration of Barack Obama to reset relations with Russia.¹²⁰ That process was made more difficult by Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, the latest indication of its intensifying foreign policy. In his statement to Parliament on the NATO summit, Cameron referred to his and Obama’s attempt to encourage Russia to respect the ceasefire in Georgia. He then maintained a diplomatic façade, telling MPs that he judged ‘it right we do not let this and other bilateral concerns prevent us from working [with Russia] where it is in our interests to do so’.¹²¹ In 2012, when he made the first visit by a British prime minister to Moscow in five years, Cameron would realise the difficulty of that approach. Britain’s ambassador, Dame Anne Pringle, recounted that by this stage, trust had fundamentally broken down.¹²²

At the moment of greatest jeopardy, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the divisions became irreparable, and the British began to depart from any pretence. In July, they joined with the Americans and Canadians to form a Joint Commission for Defence Reform and Security Cooperation with Ukraine.¹²³ On 4 September, Cameron and Obama wrote a joint article in The Times which stated that ‘Russia has ripped up the rulebook with its illegal, self-declared annexation of Crimea and its troops on Ukrainian soil threatening and undermining a sovereign nation state’.¹²⁴ Their article set the tone for the first NATO summit to meet in Britain since 1990 held that same day. As NATO leaders discussed Russia’s actions in Ukraine, two paths were emerging in the Anglo-American approach and that of France and Germany. On the day of the NATO gathering, the French and German representatives met with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts as ‘the Normandy Four’ to negotiate peace via the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) in the Minsk Protocol.¹²⁵ While this process continued, British ministers announced to Parliament the financial and military support given by the UK government to the government of Ukraine over 2014–15, culminating in March 2016 with the signing of a 15-year Memorandum of Understanding on closer British-Ukrainian defence cooperation.¹²⁶ The UK’s 2015 national security policy review also now surpassed its 2010 predecessor by describing Russian behaviour as ‘aggressive, authoritarian and nationalist’.¹²⁷ Thereafter, in November 2017, Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, became the first British prime minister since 1989 to describe Russia as an adversary.¹²⁸ What followed was the event which seemed more than any other to deepen the freeze between London and Moscow. In March 2018, Russian agents used a chemical weapon in Salisbury in a failed attempt to assassinate a former KGB intelligence agent. The British government’s response was finally to confront Putin’s Russia and muster international support.¹²⁹ Shortly afterwards, the UK chief of the general staff spoke publicly of the need to meet the full-spectrum threat from Russia.¹³⁰

Despite the apparent resolve within the British government to defend its nation’s interests from Russian hostility and to work with the United States and the government of Ukraine, it was still called upon by three premier foreign-policy forums to adopt a yet firmer policy. In May 2018, the Foreign Affairs Committee published a report on the intricate financial relationship between Putin’s regime, the City of London and the British economy. It claimed that Putin and his allies continued to do ‘“business as usual” by hiding and laundering their corrupt assets in London’.¹³¹ The incongruity of deepening economic British-Russian economic ties which ‘cater to Russia’s elites’ was then the basis of an October 2018 report by Chatham House. In the shadow of the Salisbury poisonings, it found the UK government’s policy unmatched to the Russian threat.¹³²

Most powerful of this set of influential reports was that of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. Such was the sensitivity surrounding the ‘Russia Report’ and its judgements on how far Russia had penetrated British democracy and politics that its publication was stalled by the prime minister, Boris Johnson.¹³³ In July 2020 it detailed Russian influence in British society as the ‘new normal’. British governments were criticised for not prioritising the multifarious Russian threat which included ‘malicious cyber activity’ and widespread disinformation campaigns, not least in British referendums. The report also raised the issue of the costs of the UK’s long-standing welcome to Russian oligarchs and their influence upon the British state, including through donations to leading political parties. Moreover, the report outlined the post-Cold War reduction in the capability of British intelligence agencies to register the Russian danger. While MI5 had focused on state-related threats to the UK throughout the Cold War, only 20% of its activity was directed to them in 2000, and 3% in 2008/9, rising to 14.5% in 2013/14. In the Cold War, GCHQ devoted 70% of its resources to monitoring the Soviet Bloc. Six years into Putin’s presidency, the figure was 4%. MI6 capability had also declined by 2007 before being revived. Among the many judgements of the ‘Russia Report’, it was its findings that the UK government had purposefully not sought to investigate Russian state interference in the 2016 EU referendum, and that there was credible proof of such interference in the 2014 Scottish referendum, which pointed to the complex interaction of Russian power and British politics.¹³⁴ That situation remained even as late as December 2021 when a Chatham House report claimed that the UK continued to ‘enable post-Soviet elites to launder their money and reputations’ in London and that Russia’s financial influence extended to sizeable donations to the Conservative Party.¹³⁵ The idea that Conservative governments had been slow to meet the Russian threat because of their Party’s exposure to its money was ever present as evidence of Moscow’s influence was exposed.¹³⁶

It was in March 2021 that the Johnson government published the UK’s latest national security strategy since 2015, the Integrated Review. Broad-ranging in its vision of Britain’s place in the world after leaving the EU, it went further in naming the Russian threat than any previous strategy paper. It stated that ‘Russia remains the most acute threat to our security’ in the Euro-Atlantic area and until relations with its government improved, the UK would ‘actively deter and defend against the full spectrum of threats emanating from Russia’. It would cooperate with NATO allies and support Eastern European states, including Ukraine, to defend themselves.¹³⁷ Yet for all its focus on Russia, the Integrated Review was, largely for political purposes, centred on the post-EU Indo-Pacific tilt of the Johnson government with the challenge presented by China on its horizon. How the UK would manage to sustain its new foreign-policy ambitions while also meeting the threat of Russia was a question which was open as the Integrated Review was published.¹³⁸ As Russian forces crossed the borders of Ukraine in February 2022, it became critical.

Conclusion

Vladimir Putin has made the Ukrainian people casualties of his challenge to the liberal order which was intended to be the peace dividend of the Cold War’s end. The tragedy continues to unfold, and its measure will take some time, but its causation is emerging in the growing understanding of the course of relations between Russia and the West since 1991. As this article has suggested, there is a significant British factor in that history. It is seen now in the way that the UK has responded to the war in Ukraine with energy, resolve and resources. It can only ever act as a medium-sized European power, but from what we are able to perceive, it has used its diplomatic, financial, military and intelligence capabilities to play a sizeable part in NATO and the international alliance to help the Ukrainians survive. It is also the case that a confrontation between the UK and Russia has been long in the making, and British governments have known that it was one which had to be met multilaterally. Ultimately, for complex reasons explored here, the post-Cold War attempts by British governments to create a pivotal role for the UK in the formation of a European security architecture which was acceptable to Russia has not succeeded. That ambition may have been unattainable given the size of the problem and the fact that its shape was ultimately determined in Moscow and Washington.

For a brief period, while Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin were willing collaborators, the pivotal role seemed to have had success. The problem was that while the Cold War had ended, and while UK governments wished to put conflict with Russia into the past, and reap the rewards, the traditional UK alliance priorities of the Cold War endured. In fact, after 9/11, they became renewed with force. While the British had been a mediating power on the most sensitive of issues between Russia and the West – NATO enlargement – and while they seemed to understand the need to listen to the Russians, the UK’s fundamental priorities remained. Those were the continuation of the US security guarantee to Europe and NATO. After Blair had so fully associated himself, his government and the UK with the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 and then its War on Terror, the pivotal role became impossible. The clash in world views that Putin identified in these events, and especially in the divergence between Russia, the UK and the United States over the Iraq war, set British-Russian relations on a downward course. As Putin decided to address the problem of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ in defence of his nation’s alternative world view and raised the spectre of Western deception over NATO expansion, Britain found itself in the firing line.

The deterioration in the UK’s relations with Russia, and the escalation of Russian hostility, occurred as the UK went through historic change, culminating to date in the 2016 EU referendum and its subsequent fragmentary effect on British politics. These events corresponded with uncertainty in Britain’s traditional premier alliance with the United States, as Donald Trump was anything but a status quo president. Relations with leading EU states which continue to influence European economic stability and military security were also disrupted by Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. The UK found itself unmoored in an unstable world worsened by the emergency of the pandemic. As the threat from Russia has escalated, UK governments have needed to develop a multilateral response; until Putin’s ‘special military operation’, that has been as complex as it has been problematic. These factors, combined with the dislocation in British democracy and the apparent reluctance of prime ministers to grasp the problem of Russian financial connections in the UK, explain why it has taken so long for a government to confront the Russian threat to the British state, and to its international interests, that has grown since 2003. They also explain why the British seek Putin’s defeat.

Jussi M. Hanhimäki: ‘Transatlantic relations and the Ukraine War’

‘America is back’, Joe Biden vowed, repeatedly, at the start of his presidential term in 2021. Back with all the multilateral institutions that Donald Trump had ignored, withdrawn from, insulted, or all of the above. America was back with the Paris Agreements to combat climate change. Back with the World Health Organization. The United States was no longer branding NATO as obsolete or turning a blind eye to violations of human rights. The United States was back, in short, in its customary role as the leader of the West, as the country that leads the transatlantic partnership as it had for some seven decades prior to Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the November 2016 US presidential elections.

A year later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, all eyes were on the 46^th president, whose administration had been warning about Russia’s intentions. Biden and the rest of the administration could not have been clearer. This was an egregious breach of international law, a moral outrage and something that the United States, alongside its NATO partners, would do everything in their power to oppose. In the days and weeks after 24 February 2022, a near total transatlantic unanimity emerged. Ukraine would be supported with military and economic aid. Russia would be ostracised economically and diplomatically. As US president, Biden assumed a leadership role of a coalition of countries that a few short years earlier had been deeply critical of the Trump administration’s approach to international affairs. As Biden emphasised on 24 February: ‘The United States is not doing this alone. For months, we’ve been building a coalition of partners representing well more than half of the global economy’.¹³⁹ The key members of this coalition were the traditional European allies and partners of the United States. ‘The West’ had come back together. It all amounted to ‘the return of containment’, as Ivo Daalder put it in Foreign Affairs.¹⁴⁰

The notion that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unified the divided West may seem obvious. Yet, it is also somewhat misleading. The transatlantic relationship had not been on the brink of utter collapse prior to 24 February 2022. The United States had never truly ‘left’ following the election of one president, only to return when he was replaced. As outrageous as some of Trump’s rhetoric was, as detrimental as the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic appeared to have been for the transatlantic relationship, the wreckage was limited. NATO did not show signs of coming apart at the seams in 2017–21; in fact, it witnessed another enlargement when North Macedonia joined in 2020. The transatlantic economic relationship was challenged more by the onset of COVID-19 than by the collapse of such ambitious efforts as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Populist politicians from Trump to Victor Orban in Hungary did not upend the transatlantic political space, but rather exemplified its interconnectedness.¹⁴¹

The point of this essay is not to argue that nothing changed in the transatlantic relationship following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rather, the point is that what happened was part of a recurring pattern. Transatlantic relations have always been on a rollercoaster ride. There have been disagreements over the years over numerous issues ranging from burden-sharing and out-of-area issues in the context of NATO, to economic subsidies and other unfair trade practices. Transatlantic unity has always been a relative concept, and one littered with disagreements. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created strong incentives for co-operation, but is unlikely to change this historical pattern.

In this article I will take a very brief look at two aspects of the transatlantic relationship. First, by placing today’s NATO unity into its historical context, I maintain that the alliance was never on the brink of collapse or close to becoming irrelevant. Past disputes about burden-sharing and disagreements about out-of-area engagements never seriously threatened the alliance’s core purpose: providing a system of collective security for the Euro-Atlantic area. The narrative, dominant in Russia and popular in ‘the West’ as well, about the provocative nature of NATO enlargement never hindered this quest. Second, by examining the economic links across the transatlantic community, the article emphasises the deep but often overlooked economic integration of North America and Europe. Neither of these trajectories – the continued integration of the transatlantic security and economic spaces – is exceptional in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine War. ‘The West’ may have new incentives to cooperate. But it was never divided in the first place.

In the context of the transatlantic security space, much changed on 24 February 2022. Conventional war returned to the European continent with bombs raining on civilians and refugees running away in the millions. Russia was effectively declared a pariah state with its president branded a war criminal by his US counterpart. Ukraine’s president became the symbol of heroic resistance by a democracy against an autocratic foe. Germany announced a massive increase in defence spending not seen since the Second World War. Neutral countries like Finland and Sweden decided to do the unthinkable and join NATO. The list goes on and on.

The so-called ‘West’, in other words, suddenly woke up from its decades’ long stupor. Or, rather, NATO countries suddenly realised that geopolitics mattered and collective security concerns – matters of war and peace – remained much as they had been before the collapse of the USSR. As Robert Kaplan put it: ‘During the Cold War, Western Europe and the United States faced off against Russia in the guise of the Soviet Union. Now Europe and the United States face off against Russia again’.¹⁴² No more complacency about the threat that authoritarianism posed to the international liberal order. Donald Trump’s apparent infatuation with Putin and the denigration of NATO seemed like misguided ‘narcissism of small differences’ at best, and downright treasonous at worst. A newfound unity replaced the divisions that had plagued NATO for decades. In essence, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 focused minds in ways that Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea had not.

The Ukraine War had an immediate impact across Europe. Among the many significant shifts was Germany’s sudden decision to increase dramatically its military expenditures. In a ‘Foreign Policy U-Turn’, Germany decided to ramp up its defence spending, start assisting Ukraine militarily, and move to decrease rapidly its reliance on Russian energy. In an equally dramatic shift, longstanding Nordic neutrals Finland and Sweden announced, and soon followed up upon, their decision to seek NATO membership. As Finnish president Sauli Niinistö put it in an interview in June 2022: ‘24th of February changed a lot. That Russia really was ready to attack, totally, a neighboring country, it changed a lot of people’s minds’.¹⁴³ Indeed, if one of Putin’s goals in invading Ukraine had been to put a stop to NATO enlargement, the outcome was exactly the opposite. As Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute for International Affairs, put it: ‘The paradigm has changed. Everything has changed. Nobody is questioning where we stand any more … . It is not only war in Europe, it is war against Europe’.¹⁴⁴

And yet. While the Ukraine War clearly sharpened minds and refined or caused an overhaul of existing policies, it did not totally transform the transatlantic security space. For one, during the Trump presidency the alliance was never in such grave danger of dissolution as many observers claimed. To be sure, prior to 2022, the alliance was in the midst of a severe identity crisis, prompted by internal squabbles and changing external circumstances. Questions about fair burden-sharing and defence spending had been accentuated by disparaging comments from leaders like Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron. The former had repeatedly called the alliance obsolete; in 2019, the latter referred to NATO’s ‘brain death’. Meanwhile, the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea seemed to have gone virtually unpunished and, consequently, an emboldened Vladimir Putin was pursuing his quest to expand Moscow’s influence in its near abroad. While it was not helped by the attitude of the 45^th president of the United States after 2016, NATO appeared toothless in the face of repeated Russian transgressions – ranging from interference in elections to selected assassinations of opposition leaders – that prompted vocal protest and outrage, but little concrete action. Meanwhile, out-of-area interventionism had yielded few positive results, instead exacerbating tensions among alliance members. In September 2021, the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan, showcasing the apparent folly (and hubris) of a two decades’ long effort to reshape the nation. A year earlier two long-standing NATO countries – Greece and Turkey – had been at the brink of war over natural-gas deposits discovered near Cyprus, the island nation where both Athens and Ankara already had conflicted long-standing interests. Alliance solidarity had given way to all sorts of internal bickering that threatened to erode the collective security pact that had been the institutional embodiment of the post-Second World War transatlantic partnership.

There was, though, another narrative that was equally, if not more, important than the one of internal squabbling and out-of-area failure. The first point to note is about NATO’s expansion. In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, NATO had enlarged its membership exponentially: in 2020 North Macedonia became the 30^th member state of an alliance with 12 original signatories. Instead of its Cold War function as a passive deterrent against potential Soviet aggression, the alliance had become a more active player, venturing beyond its immediate neighbourhood. Its significance as a security actor had been enhanced, not least because of the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Three decades into the post-Cold War era, NATO was bigger and more engaged than ever before, with military capacities that dwarfed those of any of its real or potential adversaries. Yet, the success story was hampered by widespread pessimism about the alliance’s future. In the early 2020s NATO appeared deeply divided, with its purpose and prospects being questioned by leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Three decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, NATO retained its function as the major security actor across the transatlantic space and beyond.

The second point of note is the simple fact that internal differences and disagreements over out-of-area engagements have been part and parcel of NATO’s long history. In the Cold War era NATO was constantly plagued by internal disagreements among European alliance members and between Europeans and the United States. The Suez Crisis, France’s exit from NATO’s unified military command, differences over détente and nuclear-missile deployment had produced a series of crises that, at the time, had often been seen as precursor of the inevitable dissolution of the alliance. Since the 1960s – as it still does today – the United States had complained about inadequate European defence spending. All of this continued into the post-Cold War era. The existence of the Soviet Union never totally united the alliance. After 1991, it is remarkable how united NATO remained in the absence of its initial raison d’être, particularly as its membership roster increased dramatically, introducing a host of new security concerns and geopolitical calculations. The very longevity of NATO speaks volumes about the alliance’s adaptability.¹⁴⁵

NATO’s long history should also offer a cautionary tale to those celebrating the unity of purpose vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Such unity will never be absolute. This has been apparent most obviously in the evident reluctance of Hungary and Turkey to rush into ratifying Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO (they remain the only two NATO member states that did not do so in 2022). Many in Europe – most prominently France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, in early December– have voiced concerns that the old continent will be far more affected by the war than the North American NATO partners. Indeed, a European push to find some kind of a diplomatic off-ramp from the war is likely to grow stronger as the war enters its second year.¹⁴⁶

The Ukraine War has hardly transformed NATO into an alliance with total unanimity of purpose. While a lot has changed, NATO remains, as it always has been, an alliance of nations with a number of different security concerns. For understandable reasons, Russia’s invasion has focused most of the attention on Ukraine and its contested role as either an outpost of the West or part of Russia’s ‘near neighbourhood’. While this is unlikely to lead to a serious internal conflict within the transatlantic security space, tactical differences about the need for a diplomatic solution – and on what terms – will certainly emerge as the war continues.

While NATO has been at least temporarily united as a consequence of Russia’s invasion, economic concerns have become rife on both sides of the Atlantic. Rising inflation, pushed up by increased energy costs as Europe tries to wean itself from dependence on Russian oil and gas, are undoubtedly connected to the series of economic measures taken by the United States and its European partners after 24 February. Add to this China’s continued troubles with COVID-19 and a series of disruptions in global supply chains, and you have a recipe for a recession across the transatlantic economic space. The United Kingdom, not helped by the already difficult legacies of Brexit and the pandemic, is facing a particularly hard 2023.¹⁴⁷

Recession may indeed be unavoidable. Its effects are probably made worse by the impact of the Ukraine War and rising energy costs. But there is, again, another narrative worth noticing. In 2022, the transatlantic economic space has moved towards ever closer economic integration. By November 2022 there were clear signs that the combined effect of the Ukraine War and growing transatlantic concerns about China’s economic woes were driving a transatlantic ‘trade and investment renaissance’, as the Wall Street Journal put it. For the first time in over a decade, for example, US imports from Europe overtook those from China.¹⁴⁸

There are two points worthy of note here. First, the surge in transatlantic trade and investment, while noticeable, hardly represents a massive turning point in the long-term evolution of transatlantic economic relations. Indeed, despite the rapid growth of China and much-hyped rise of the rest, the transatlantic economic space had never lost its role as the wealthiest, most deeply integrated intercontinental marketplace in the world. That North America and Europe were growing closer in economic terms was, at some level, no news at all. For Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in particular, stability and reliability are, after all, key considerations before moving capital across borders.¹⁴⁹

Second, notwithstanding the growth in trade and investment, the transatlantic marketplace remains as open to sporadic disagreements as ever. Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s economic slump may have caused statistical shifts in trade and investment that underline the closeness of the transatlantic economic partnership. Indeed, amidst this newfound unity and increased transatlantic trade and investment, disagreements and tensions remain. A clear reminder of this came when French president Emmanuel Macron visited Washington in November 2022. He attacked the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – which includes a US$ 370 billion support package for US industries to support US industries – as US protectionism. ‘The choices made are choices that will fragment the West’, Macron warned.¹⁵⁰

Much as in the case of NATO, the impact of the Ukraine War on the transatlantic economic space must be seen in the context of the broader history of European-American economic relations. No matter what metric one uses, the overall evolution of the relationship has been one of success and growth. But this evolution has always been punctuated by disagreement and tension over unfair subsidies and trading practices. Ultimately, however, it is important to underline that despite globalisation, notwithstanding China’s rise, irrespective of the financial crisis that shook the world in 2007–9 (and the Eurozone crisis that closely followed), and even considering the politics of economic nationalism that have become so prevalent since then, the transatlantic economic space remains by far the largest and most closely integrated intercontinental marketplace on earth. The war in Ukraine will do little to change this basic fact.

Ultimately, the Ukraine War has done more to confirm than transform the prevalent trends in the post-Cold War evolution of transatlantic relations. NATO’s enlargement and its gradually evolving strategic doctrines emphasising adjustment to the ever-changing international environment have been given a jolt. But the general direction was there all along. The transatlantic economy was drawing closer – for better or worse – since the end of the Cold War and is now headed towards further integration and cooperation. In simple terms, the Ukraine War has confirmed a simple fact: the West did not die with the end of the Cold War; it did not disintegrate because of the overtly muscular reaction of the United States to the attacks on 9/11, nor because of the political success of various nationalist and populist movements in the 2010s. The rise of China and the great recession of 2007–9 did not undermine the central role of the transatlantic economic space in the global economy. In 2022, a de facto transatlantic community not only exists but continues to thrive. This process has been accelerated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But it is not new. What is happening now is not a great transformation, but a great acceleration.

Last, a point of caution is in order: internal bickering and disagreement are just around the corner. Much like the post-9/11 unity – when for a few days ‘we were all Americans’ – did not last, neither will this. Whispers of disagreement are already appearing and will likely grow louder as the winter sets in and politicians, particularly in Europe, feel the impact that higher energy costs will have on their voters’ support of the Ukrainian cause. It will be, undoubtedly, a winter of discontent. Pressure will grow on policymakers to offer diplomatic solutions. It is possible that a form of uneasy truce will be agreed between Russia and Ukraine. But whatever happens in that war is unlikely to change the course of transatlantic relations. In late 2022, transatlantic relations appear on a strong footing. Alliance solidarity has been affirmed, and multilateral cooperation confirmed. But do not expect this state of affairs to last for very long. A crisis over subsidies and tariffs, military engagements or defence expenditures is always looming around the corner. A leading politician – a French president, no less – has already made comments that appear to undermine the foundation of transatlantic cooperation. Some analysts are, or soon will be, pontificating upon the cataclysmic nature of the disagreement, with others calling for quick action to avoid irredeemable damage.

This is, of course, the normal state of transatlantic relations: the coexistence of community and conflict. It is largely an outgrowth of the success of the relationship, and its increasingly complex and multi-layered nature that opens up infinite possibilities for both cooperation and rivalry. It is also the inevitable consequence of many democracies – with an infinitely varied set of security interests, economic concerns and domestic political configurations – searching for common ground in an unpredictable and constantly shifting global context. The recurrence of crises, rather than undermining the transatlantic relationship, has time and again illustrated its resilience. In 2023 there is no substantial reason to assume that this pattern will suddenly be broken. But, paradoxical as it may seem, the disagreements themselves will remain one of the greatest strengths of the close but contentious relationship between the United States and Europe. For better or worse, the war in Ukraine is likely to further confirm this fact.

Hope M. Harrison: ‘Russia, the United States, Germany and the war in Ukraine: a new Cold War, but with a dangerous twist’

The shadow of the Cold War, as well as the way it ended, hang over current Russian-Western tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine. While there are similarities between the Cold War and the current state of relations between Russia and the West, there are also important differences. This article will address both from US, Russian and German perspectives. It will also discuss the ways the Cold War experience continues to reverberate in US, Russian and German outlooks and policies regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The Cold War and the current era share a systemic, ideological component to the conflict between Russia and the West. The fact that both President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin came of age during the Cold War and have many memories of that period has made it easier for them to fall back into an attitude of mutual suspicion and sense of threat posed by the other.¹⁵¹ Just as Harry Truman and other US presidents in the Cold War spoke of it as a conflict between democracy and tyranny, so Biden has called the war in Ukraine a ‘great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’.¹⁵² For his part, Putin finds the West decadent, devoid of morals and trying to impose itself on Ukraine, Russia and the rest of the world. He derides Western arrogance and is critical of ‘liberal’ fans of ‘so-called gender freedoms’.¹⁵³ Putin believes ‘the so-called collective West’ has ‘sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values’ and ‘low cultural standards’.¹⁵⁴ He favours what in the early nineteenth century under Russian Tsar Nicholas I was termed ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’. Conservative nations and political parties around the world join him in criticising ‘liberal extremists’.

It is not just that Putin is critical of Western values and ideas; he feels threatened when they penetrate what he considers Russia’s sphere of influence, as did Soviet leaders before him. During the Cold War, the Soviets intervened militarily in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 when protesters in those countries took to the streets to criticise the communist system and Soviet influence, protesters who were clearly inspired by liberal Western ideas about democracy. Given that Hungary and Czechoslovakia bordered the Soviet Union, including Soviet Ukraine, in both cases the Kremlin leaders were deeply concerned that the protests and ideas were ‘contagious’, spreading across the border into their own country. As Ukrainian party leader Pyotr Shelest reported in May 1968 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) regarding the Prague Spring, ‘certain individuals are using the situation in Czechoslovakia to express openly hostile, anti-Soviet sentiments’. He reported in detail on the critical attitude of some Soviet Ukrainian citizens living on the border who could easily access Czechoslovak radio, TV and newspapers. One biology teacher noted that the Czechs had ‘a genuine democracy unlike what we have. We, too, need that kind of democracy’. More threateningly, another critic declared: ‘Soon will come the time when they’ll hang those stupid Russians’. Yet another asserted: ‘Everything is done by coercion in our country. The CPSU long ago lost its authority among the people’.¹⁵⁵ This thinking hit too close to home for the Soviet leaders.

This ‘contagion’ spread not only to Soviet Ukraine but to Byelorussia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and even to the Russian Soviet Federation itself.¹⁵⁶ The Kremlin rulers under Leonid Brezhnev asserted in what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine that they had the duty and right to ‘defend’ socialism anywhere from threats.¹⁵⁷ Led by Moscow and joined by troops from Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia, brutally ending the Prague Spring.

Visiting the Czech capital in 2006, Putin declared that Russia carried ‘no legal, but moral’ responsibility for the invasion. Yet the year after annexing Crimea, the central message about the Prague Spring changed, essentially reverting back to the Brezhnev Doctrine. In 2015, state-backed Rossiya 1 TV broadcast a documentary, Warsaw Pact: Declassified Pages, claiming that the intervention was necessary since NATO troops were ‘ready to enter Czechoslovakia’ and the Prague Spring had been inspired by radical groups linked to the West. The intervention was thus required to ‘protect’ the Czechoslovaks.¹⁵⁸ This kind of argument is part of Putin’s rhetoric now about the need to protect Russians (and Russia’s Ukrainian supporters) from Western influence by launching a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.¹⁵⁹

The most significant difference between the Cold War and the current era concerns the question of spheres of influence and the status of Ukraine specifically. While the United States and the West criticised the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, they did not actively engage in countering it, in stark contrast to active Western backing of Ukraine in 2022. During the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union generally agreed on separate spheres of influence and were careful not to breach these. When Moscow tried to enter the US sphere by deploying nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the United States pushed back and the Soviets withdrew. The Cubans themselves did not have a say. In the case of contemporary Ukraine, there is violent disagreement between Russia and the West over Ukraine’s place in spheres of influence and, most importantly, the Ukrainians themselves are insisting on their right to determine their own fate.

The most analogous Cold War crisis to Russia’s war on Ukraine is the Soviet invasion of and subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan. Moscow’s intervention in 1979 gave rise to a global coalition backed by the United States, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and others to support the mujahadeen, the Afghan resistance to the Red Army. Confronted by the large amounts of weapons, money and even foreign fighters that flowed into Afghanistan to help defeat the Soviets, under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership the Soviets ultimately withdrew in 1989.¹⁶⁰ That took 10 years, however, and in 2022 we are in what is (sadly) likely to be just the first year of the war in Ukraine. Still, it is hard to imagine Putin ever fully withdrawing from Ukraine as Gorbachev did from Afghanistan. Ukraine is far more important to Russia than Afghanistan ever was to the Soviet Union, and Putin has tied his own reputation and his sense of Russia’s historic destiny to Ukraine.¹⁶¹ But this could all change. Especially if Putin were no longer the leader.

Another case of Moscow’s policy during the Cold War shows just how much has changed since then. Faced with the popular anticommunist Solidarity trade union movement in Poland in 1980–1, the Soviets decided not to intervene and to let the Poles themselves crush the opposition, which they did by arresting Solidarity activists and instituting martial law. The Kremlin rulers felt they had too much to lose if they sent in their own troops, and they feared the Poles would mount a strong military defence. KGB chief and future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov argued in 1981 that the West had prepared ‘a variety of political and economic sanctions’ in case the Soviets invaded Poland that would ‘make things very difficult for us’. The Soviets did not want to risk losing essential Western economic aid that helped them, the Poles, Hungarians, East Germans and others buy much-needed goods and obtain loans from the West. Andropov even went so far as so declare: ‘Even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity, that’s the way it will be’. Instead, he insisted: ‘We must be concerned above all with our own country’.¹⁶² While Soviet behaviour then was constrained by worries about the vulnerability of the homeland, a sense of a stake in the broader international (including economic) system, and the fear of a strong local military defence, these concerns did not deter Putin from invading Ukraine.

A major difference between the Cold War and the current global order is the extent to which the Kremlin leader believes he has a stake in the international system. Putin feels excluded from the West and the European security system, as he has pointed out on many occasions.¹⁶³ During the Cold War, although Soviet rulers relied on an ‘enemy image’ of the West to help maintain their grip on power at home and thus needed tensions with the West, they also relied on meetings and agreements with the West to bolster their superpower standing at home and abroad, to gain access to Western technology and aid, and to keep the East-West conflict limited.¹⁶⁴ Khrushchev’s two-week trip to the United States in 1959 and Brezhnev’s meetings with West German chancellor Willy Brandt and US president Richard Nixon in the early 1970s were cherished markers for the Soviet leaders of their global status. In addition, Brezhnev’s summits with his US and West German counterparts resulted in an expansion of aid and trade and an arms-control agreement with the United States.¹⁶⁵ This all gave the Soviets a strong stake in the international system.

Particularly since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and the West responded with sanctions, he has found common cause with others beyond the West. In a world in which the United States is a declining power and riven by polarisation at home while China expands its political, economic and military power, Putin has drawn closer to China. Whereas during the Cold War, China ultimately tilted towards Washington against Moscow, it is now doing the opposite, albeit without shutting the door to the West.

China and others in the Global South refuse to support Western policies and values, including regarding Ukraine. They also feel there is not just one global system or way of ruling and are much less focused on Europe than the Europeans and Americans are. For the Global South, it is the impact of the war on food and fuel supplies that they are concerned about far more than the war itself, which they perceive as a regional war in the North.¹⁶⁶ While all are confronted with wheat and energy shortages and higher prices due to the war, the have-nots especially in the Global South bear more of the burden. Just as many countries during the Cold War sought to opt out between choosing between East and West and formed the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),¹⁶⁷ so it is the case that the majority of the world’s nations have not joined the Western sanctions regime against Russia, leading some observers to wonder whether a new NAM may be in the offing.¹⁶⁸

During the Cold War and since, smaller powers have influenced the dynamics of international relations. Under bipolarity, smaller states eager for superpower backing became adept at emphasising their vulnerability to the other superpower and their need for their ally’s aid, as both East and West Germany did with their patrons, for example. Divided Germany was on the front line of the Cold War and German statesmen on both sides drew on the strategic and symbolic nature of their locations to appeal to Moscow and Washington, whose leaders feared falling dominoes if they lost their part of Germany or Berlin. East German ruler Walter Ulbricht used his country’s vulnerable location as ‘the western most country of the socialist camp’, up against the borders of NATO, to gain increased Soviet aid and backing.¹⁶⁹ West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer did the same in appealing to the United States.¹⁷⁰

Similarly, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy regularly points to Ukraine’s place on the front line between Russia and the West. In his speech to the US Congress in March 2022, he declared that the Ukrainians are ‘fighting for the values of Europe and the world’, namely, democracy, human rights and freedom.¹⁷¹ Losing the war in Ukraine would thus send a message worldwide that those values could not prevail. Addressing the German Bundestag the same month, Zelenskyy urged German lawmakers not to allow Ukraine to be trapped ‘behind the wall again’, a wall in Europe between freedom and slavery. He even quoted President Ronald Reagan’s exhortation to Gorbachev in June 1987: ‘Tear down this wall!’¹⁷²

Germany, the Cold War and the war in Ukraine

The Cold War experience (as well as the Second World War) of the nation divided between the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) has profoundly influenced the German approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine. There are political, economic, military and cultural reasons for this. In addition, the war has exposed lingering East-West Cold War divisions more than 30 years after unification and the supposed end of the Cold War.

The German governing coalition under chancellor Olaf Scholz is led by the Social Democrats (SPD), whose policy towards Russia was set during the late 1960s. When SPD chancellor Willy Brandt came to power in 1969, he changed West German policy from focusing on a hardline containment of the communist East to one favouring engagement, including with the Soviet Union. Having been the mayor of West Berlin when the communists erected the Berlin Wall in 1961, Brandt felt he must do all he could to build bridges between East and West, an aim Chancellor Scholz reaffirmed in December 2022 by warning that ‘we must … avoid the temptation to once again divide the world into blocs’.¹⁷³

Brandt’s Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) aimed to make life better for East Germans, persuade the East German regime to allow more movement back and forth across the Berlin Wall, and ultimately to bring about change or ideally the downfall of the communist regime. The West German leader and his closest colleague, Egon Bahr, believed they could achieve ‘change [in the East] through rapprochement’: Wandel durch Annäherung.¹⁷⁴ Trade with the East was a key part of this strategy, although it would ultimately lead to the significant energy dependence on Moscow exposed so dramatically in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Brandt and Bahr believed that if they could deeply enmesh the East Germans, Soviets and other communist countries in Europe in trade relations, the communists would not want to put these ties at risk with hardline policies at home or abroad. In this way, West German leaders believed they would be able to lure communists into reforms, into becoming more Western, and ultimately ideally into throwing off communism. While Brandt’s primary interest was in improving relations with East Germany to reduce the brutal impact of the division on so many Germans who were cut off from family and friends on the other side of the Berlin Wall, he understood that the path to East Berlin went through Moscow. He had to have Soviet backing for his policy of reaching out to the GDR. Brandt was further inspired by a desire to atone for the destruction Nazi Germany wrought on the Soviet Union. An expansion of trade with Moscow was meant to serve both purposes.

Even before the West Germans and Soviets signed the ground-breaking Moscow Agreement of August 1970 renouncing the use of force and recognising the post-war borders, they signed a ‘gas for pipe’ agreement in February. The Treaty of Essen was a 20-year contract for Soviet gas in return for West German steel pipes for the pipelines. Contracts for more Soviet gas imports were signed in 1972 and 1974, and Soviet gas started flowing to the FRG in 1973. Ruhrgas was the West German importer, and the pipes were supplied by steel companies Mannesmann and Thyssen. German banks underwrote the agreements involving loans to the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁵ In the following years and decades, West German political and economic leaders supported the expansion of these ties.

In 1981, Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt, joined by other West Europeans, backed a 25-year ‘gas for pipe’ agreement that was called ‘the deal of the century’ and was estimated to be worth US$10–US$15 billion, with contracts for West German firms amounting to around US$4.5 billion. Twenty-five percent of the Soviet gas, 10.5bcm per year, would go to the FRG. That meant doubling their gas dependency on the USSR from 15% to 30%.¹⁷⁶ President Ronald Reagan was concerned about this growing dependency and also feared that the hard currency and technological aid the Soviets received in the deal could be used for military purposes, especially in the wake of martial law in Poland in December 1981. He banned US companies from helping with the pipeline in 1981 and, then, in the summer of 1982 extended this embargo to West European companies involved, moves which the US government would repeat in 2020–1 to stop another German-Russian gas pipeline. Schmidt and others pushed back and Reagan lifted the sanctions in late 1982.¹⁷⁷

In the 40 years since then, German chancellors Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel all continued and expanded these energy contracts with the Soviet Union/Russia and shared the belief that, as Schmidt said to Carter in 1980: ‘Those engaging in trade with each other do not shoot at one another’.¹⁷⁸ German companies strongly backed the profitable deals; the Eastern Commission (Ost-Ausschuss) of German Trade became a powerful lobbying group, and Russian gas increasingly fuelled German industry.

Under SPD chancellor Schröder, Germany and Russia agreed on a new gas pipeline to go directly between their countries under the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 1 was constructed between 2005 and 2011 and went into operation in 2011. Subsequently, and in spite of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its waging of a shadow war in eastern Ukraine, CDU chancellor Merkel backed the creation of a second Nord Stream pipeline, constructed from 2018–21.¹⁷⁹ When the United States threatened in 2020 to sanction companies involved in this second pipeline due to concerns about providing Putin’s repressive regime with even more income from energy exports, Germans set up a shadowy Foundation for the Protection of the Climate and Environment, which actually served as a front to continue making deals with Russia to complete Nord Stream 2 safe from US sanctions. One of those involved, Matthias Warnig, the managing director of the company who built the first pipeline, was a former East German spy who ‘won a Stasi medal for services recruiting Western spies. Now, he was recruiting German supporters for a second Russian pipeline. (His communications director, Steffen Ebert, was a former Stasi informer whose code name was “Bull”)’.¹⁸⁰ The confluence of Cold War experiences and allegiances combined with the profit motive led to the completion of Nord Stream 2. By 2021, Germany relied on Russia for 55% of its gas, 34% of its oil and 40% of its coal.

Nord Stream 2 never opened as planned in 2021 due to US pressure on Germany not to become any more dependent on Russia for energy than it already was and due to concerns about a build-up of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders. Scholz’s new government took office in December 2021 and, unlike Schmidt in 1982, Scholz agreed not to open the pipeline, finding ‘technical grounds’ to delay it as Russian troops continued to mass on Ukraine’s border. Following Russia’s invasion and the implementation of an ever-wider set of sanctions on Russia by the United States, the EU and others, Russia first reduced and then turned off the gas to Germany in August and September 2022, respectively; by the end of the year, the EU had instituted embargoes on Russian coal and oil.

This history of West German and united German energy dependence on Russia is essential background for understanding the initial hesitancy of SPD Chancellor Olav Scholz (who was previously Merkel’s finance minister and thus deeply involved in Nord Stream) to embargo Russian oil and gas following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Moreover, Cold War beliefs about Germany being a bridge between Russia and the West were deeply ingrained in the minds of German political and economic leaders, especially in the SPD. As Scholz observed in December 2022, ‘our experience of being split in half during an ideological and geopolitical contest gives us a particular appreciation of the risks of a new cold war’.¹⁸¹ It was (and for some still is) very difficult for many Germans to pivot away completely from a policy that had guided relations with Russia since 1969.

This is even harder for people in eastern Germany. Indeed, more than 30 years after German unification, Russia’s war on Ukraine has revealed lingering aspects of Cold War divisions regarding the views of Moscow and NATO. Eastern Germans tend to be more suspicious of NATO and trusting of Moscow, less willing to continue sanctions and less supportive of significant aid to Ukraine. Moreover, eastern Germans who have faced challenges adjusting to a different system in united Germany empathise with the Russian sense of loss since 1989–91, as well as a perceived Western hubris.

In late January 2022, as more Russian troops gathered on the Ukrainian border and the United States warned of a Russian invasion, a public-opinion survey showed that eastern Germans generally blamed the United States for the tensions over Ukraine (43% vs. 17% holding this view in the west), while western Germans tended to blame Russians (52% vs. 32% holding this view in the east).¹⁸² A poll conducted in October showed that while both eastern (42%) and especially western Germans (65%) were sceptical of the idea that ‘NATO had provoked Russia for so long that Russia had to go to war’, more than twice as many eastern Germans (33%) than western Germans (16%) believed that in fact NATO had provoked Russia into going to war.¹⁸³

After the German government agreed in late April to supply the Ukrainians with heavy weapons such as anti-aircraft tanks, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and self-propelled howitzers, eastern and western Germans were split on whether this was the right decision or not. A June survey made that clear: 61% of western Germans supported the decision; 63% of east Germans did not.¹⁸⁴ Indeed, 34% of eastern Germans felt the German government was already doing too much to help Ukraine, while only 18% of west Germans shared that view.¹⁸⁵ In the early autumn, 52% of eastern Germans opposed increasing military aid to Ukraine, while only 27% of western Germans did.¹⁸⁶

Policy towards Russia is a particular dividing point between east and west, both with regard to views on importing oil and gas from Russia, and on maintaining broader sanctions against Russia. In an April survey about whether Germany should halt these imports, 64% in the west said yes while only 42% in the east did. As to what sorts of energy to turn to without Russian gas, eastern Germans favour German coal and western Germans favour solar and wind energy.¹⁸⁷ After Russia shut down deliveries of gas to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in early September, when asked whether Germany should open the completed but never opened Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to receive Russian gas, 65% of east Germans said yes, but only 35% of west Germans did.¹⁸⁸

In the former East German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, including in the capital of Schwerin and the town of Lubmin, where the Nord Stream pipelines come ashore, there were regular demonstrations in early winter 2022, with citizens calling to open or re-open those pipelines.¹⁸⁹ Since German unification in 1990, some eastern towns and industries have remained dependent on ties with Moscow. The town of Schwedt is a good example of this, since it is home to an oil refinery that has processed Russian crude oil for decades. People in this industrial town in the eastern state of Brandenburg ‘feel like it’s 1989 all over again’.¹⁹⁰ As they see it, their lives were thrown into upheaval with the fall of the East German regime and German unification, and now they are experiencing dramatic change again, including with the fear of unemployment due to the cessation of Russian oil deliveries to Schwedt.¹⁹¹ Not surprisingly, a survey in September found that on the question of willingness to make more economic sacrifices due to the impact in Germany of sanctions on Russia, only 19% in the east were willing in comparison to 45% in the west.¹⁹² When asked whether all sanctions against Russia should be lifted, 32% in the east agreed while only 14% in the west did.¹⁹³ In an October poll asking whether the sanctions were not enough, appropriate, or too much, the largest number of eastern Germans (35%) said they were too much, while the largest number of western Germans (38%) said they were not enough.¹⁹⁴

Lingering effects of the Cold War (and the Second World War) are also visible in the challenges Germany faces politically, culturally and logistically in supplying Ukraine with weapons and bringing Germany’s own armed forces up to an appropriate state of readiness. During the Cold War, there were strong limitations imposed by the Second World War Allies on German military forces. Both the FRG and GDR relied on their superpower allies for their security. Along the way, Germans on both sides of the Wall became increasingly critical of any use of military force. They knew that if a Third World War broke out, they would be at the centre of it, and thus strongly preferred the use of non-military instruments in foreign policy. West Germany prided itself on being a ‘civilian power’, not a military power, thus engaging in ‘checkbook diplomacy’, a practice which initially continued in united Germany after the end of the Cold War, albeit with some notable exceptions, such as the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.¹⁹⁵

Faced with the Russian war on Ukraine, the Germans are in the midst of shaking themselves out of this old mindset. This means, as Chancellor Scholz has put it, that:

The crucial role for Germany at this moment is to step up as one of the main providers of security in Europe by investing in our military, strengthening the European defence industry, beefing up our military presence on NATO’s eastern flank, and training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces.¹⁹⁶

Scholz is putting Germany’s money where his mouth is with an investment of US$100 billion in the Bundeswehr; he has also broken with the old policy of not sending weapons to war zones with substantial support for Ukraine.¹⁹⁷ Yet the memories of German aggression in the Second World War and the decades-long practice of a non-military-based foreign policy during the Cold War still have many in the leadership and among the broader populace uncomfortable with the militarisation of German foreign policy.¹⁹⁸ Indeed, while eastern and western Germans see many foreign-policy issues differently, a strong majority of both (67% in the east and 73% in the west) do not support Germany supplementing its leading economic role in Europe by assuming a military leadership role as well.¹⁹⁹ As Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Emily Haber, noted in December 2022: ‘Our national psychology is undergoing a profound transformation’.²⁰⁰

Another important Cold War influence on German policy (and that of most other countries) can be seen in its longstanding practice of equating the USSR with Russia and neglecting to think about the other former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine. The decades of Cold War efforts in the GDR and the FRG to atone for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union focused on Russia and the leaders in Moscow, and that approach continued in the 30 years since the collapse of the USSR. Yet, as Timothy Snyder pointed out to the Bundestag in 2017, a greater number of inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine than Soviet Russia were killed fighting the Nazis. Six and half million people living in Soviet Ukraine were killed in the war, including one and a half million Jews. Many Jews were murdered in the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, the Nazis’ initial method of killing Jews and others before concentration and extermination camps became the preferred method, since they did not involve individual soldiers having to pull the trigger and perhaps develop a conscience. One of the most notorious of such incidents occurred when German forces rounded up the Jews in Kyiv, brought them to a ravine outside the city in Babyn Yar and shot 33,771 Jewish men, women and children.²⁰¹ In 2022, Russian missiles caused damage to the memorial site at Babyn Yar.²⁰² Modifying and expanding the German approach to atoning for the horrors of the Second World War by considering Ukrainians separately from Russians will take more than a few months, as will tamping down the special obligation many, especially in the SPD, feel towards keeping the door open to relations with Russia.

Conclusion

While the United States and Russia, including their current leaders, are certainly influenced by a Cold War mindset in their approaches to Ukraine and to each other, the Cold War experience was in many ways more traumatic for the Germans than for the superpowers, since it resulted in the division of their country.²⁰³ Thus, while they have been outraged at Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale war on Ukraine, their deep desire not to be thrust into another Cold War has meant that their reactions have generally been slower and more painstaking than those of the United States and many other countries in the EU. Moreover, many Germans, particularly Social Democrats, believe that the end of the Cold War in Germany was brought about by the bridges Brandt’s Ostpolitik constructed to East Berlin and Moscow. This has made it much harder to pivot away from this policy quickly in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Gratitude towards the Soviets under Gorbachev for giving up the GDR and allowing it to join the FRG also accounts for a German desire to at least keep the door open to relations with Russia.

For the United States, memories of the Cold War are associated with victory and inspire confidence in the chances of prevailing in round two with Russia. Consequently, the United States is less reluctant than Germany to behave as though we are living through a second Cold War. For the Russians, memories of the Cold War are associated with loss and humiliation, fuelling a desire to overcome those or at least not repeat them.

Putin himself had a front-row seat in East Germany, as Soviet influence there collapsed in the late 1980s. Stationed with the KGB in Dresden, he witnessed first-hand the widespread popular demonstrations and criticism of the GDR regime. He was worried that the East Germans protesting on the streets and storming Stasi offices ‘were going to “come for us too”’.²⁰⁴ Indeed, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Putin’s KGB outpost (masquerading as a Soviet cultural centre) was surrounded by angry East Germans. He called for help from the local Soviet military base, but they refused to do anything without explicit orders from Moscow – and ‘Moscow was silent’. Feeling a combination of fear and anger, Putin went outside to talk to the protestors, using his fluency in German. He claimed he was a translator and persuaded them to leave, not least by supposedly asserting that ‘if they entered, they would be shot’.²⁰⁵

In spite of his blustery front, the 37-year old Putin later made clear later how worried he had been, not least because ‘talking to an aggressive crowd was against the [KGB’s] rules of operation’, and he could have been fired for his actions.²⁰⁶ On the other hand, he knew it was imperative to prevent the crowds from storming the building and finding the files on KGB informants. Putin’s traumatic personal experience of popular protests against the government has undoubtedly contributed to his wariness of popular protest, whether at home or in countries he considers to be in Russia’s sphere of influence, as well as his all-out efforts to suppress them. His war on Ukraine can be seen in this way as an outgrowth of his experience in Cold War East Germany: an attempt to stop groups who challenge his power and that of the system he represents. While he could not save the East German communist regime or the Soviet regime, he continues to dig in deeper to protect his own regime and not give in on Ukraine.

As this article has demonstrated, there are similarities and differences between the Cold War and the contemporary period, and memories of the Cold War exert an important influence on policymaking in Moscow, Berlin and Washington, to say nothing of Kyiv. What makes the war over Ukraine potentially more dangerous than the Cold War is that both Russia and the West feel it is part of their sphere of influence, and the Ukrainians themselves are adamant in fighting to stay independent and not be pulled back into Russia’s sphere. Berlin is providing strong backing to the Ukrainians; yet traumatic memories of the Cold War affect popular opinion and government policy in ways that complicate German policy regarding the war in Ukraine.

There is one final important comparison to consider between the Cold War and the current state of international relations surrounding the war in Ukraine. In 1948, Joseph Stalin blockaded Western access to West Berlin in an attempt to halt the process of creating a separate West German state that he feared would be hostile to the Soviet Union and would become part of a Western military alliance. Instead of achieving his aims, his aggressive actions helped turn his fears into reality: NATO was created in April 1949 and the Federal Republic of Germany was established a month later. Stalin ended the blockade, forced to admit defeat. Thus far, the use of Russian military force in Ukraine has augmented Ukrainian opposition to Russia and has solidified and even expanded the NATO alliance. Will Putin follow in Stalin’s footsteps and back down? We can only hope so.

N. Piers Ludlow: ‘The EU response to the Ukraine War’

The European Union has not always done war well. Indeed, both of the major conflicts that have occurred since the transformation of the European Communities into the European Union in the early 1990s – the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001, and then the war in Iraq from 2003 – became deeply chastening affairs for Europe’s multilateral decision-making, highlighting division and ineffectiveness much more clearly than strength or unity.²⁰⁷ Both earlier conflicts had, furthermore, underlined the gulf between US military strength and Europe’s comparative weakness. There is hence an element of surprise in the observation that so far at least, the collective European response to the war in Ukraine has been remarkably rapid, united and effective, and that in the process the EU has underlined a centrality to the international response to the Russian invasion that is very much on a par with that of the United States. This makes it worth not only asking what the EU and its member states have done in response to the war, but also why they have been able to be so much more effective than in earlier crises. Finally, the piece will briefly assess the likelihood of this unexpectedly forceful response continuing. Is it a false dawn, likely to be followed by a re-emergence of internal disunity and external weakness? Or is this war truly different from those that have occurred before?

The first aspect of the European response to note is its speed. Russia invaded Ukraine in the early morning of 24 February 2022. Within hours, multiple European leaders, including the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had issued strongly worded statements condemning Moscow’s action. And by 9.00pm that evening, the European Council itself had convened, with EU leaders gathering in Brussels to discuss their collective response and to hear an emotional video appeal from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.²⁰⁸ Within a month EU leaders would hold two further summits, the first at Versailles on 10–11 March, the second in Brussels once more on 24–25 March; the European Council would meet again in late May, June, twice in October and once more (so far) in November. Each leaders’ meeting, furthermore, was both prepared and followed up by multiple other parts of the EU institutional system. A detailed European-level discussion of what was happening in Ukraine and what the EU should do in response was thus underway from the moment the war began (and indeed somewhat before) and has continued pretty much without interruption until the time of writing.

The second point to make is that the response was remarkably unified. From the very outset the EU leaders were absolutely unanimous that what Russia had done was wholly unacceptable, that Ukraine needed to be helped to defend itself, and that Putin’s actions, if left unchecked, were a threat both to the values that are central to the EU’s existence and to its territorial integrity. This was not, in other words, ‘a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing’, as Neville Chamberlain had infamously described the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938, but instead a direct challenge to the security of all of Europe – and hence a clear and present danger to the EU itself. In such circumstances, the variety of views that had previously existed amongst senior European politicians about how best to deal with Russia gave way to a very clear consensus. The forceful official statements issued on 24 February and again after the Versailles summit two weeks later were not skilful verbal contrivances designed to hide deep underlying divisions.²⁰⁹ They were instead genuine expressions of sincere disapproval.

Third, condemnatory words were rapidly backed up with concrete actions of real significance. The policy response began with economic sanctions against Russia, the first tranche of which was issued the evening before the actual invasion, triggered instead by Moscow’s recognition of the breakaway republics in the Donbass. Six (and a half) further packages have followed to date, with more likely in the future.²¹⁰ Such economic measures, furthermore, have been designed to hit a trade relationship which had been intense and of real economic significance to Russia. In 2020, for instance, the EU was Russia’s largest trading partner, accounting for over a third of its exports (37.9%) and a third of its imports (36.5%).²¹¹ A drastic pruning of such intensive trade links is a much more powerful weapon than the scaling back of the significantly lower levels of trade that had flowed between the United States and Russia, or Russia and the UK. What has often been discussed in the press as a European vulnerability, namely its previously high level of economic interaction with Russia, is hence also a source of strength, in that sanctions are likely to do genuine medium-term damage to the Russian economy.²¹² They have already hurt the EU economy too and will continue to do so. Forsaking the EU’s fifth largest trading partner and its largest energy supplier will not be easy. But if economic pressures are to play any role in limiting Russia’s actions or even forcing a chance of tactics in Ukraine, the successive packages of EU sanctions have been the most important sources of Western leverage to date.

European actions have been similarly central in coping with the refugee crisis that the Russian invasion provoked. Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic and Italy have been the top four Western destinations for Ukrainians escaping the conflict so far, with multiple other EU member states also providing refuge for those forced from their homes.²¹³ On the basis of UNHCR figures, the 27 EU countries between them had welcomed just over 4,460,000 refugees by November 2022.²¹⁴ And while a significant portion of this response has been nationally organised, there has also been a vital EU dimension, not least the visa-free travel rights to the Schengen area that were granted to all Ukrainian citizens as a result of the 2017 Association agreement between the EU and Ukraine. In early April, the EU Council of Ministers also agreed the CARE regulation, permitting up to €17 billion from EU cohesion-policy funds and the Fund for European Aid for the most Deprived (FEAD) to be redirected to recently arrived Ukrainians.²¹⁵ European rules and European money have been integral to the welcome afforded to those fleeing the conflict.

EU member states, both individually and collectively, have also been crucial sources of financial assistance to the Ukrainian government. Many of the tables compiled by the excellent Ukraine Support Tracker produced by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy somewhat understate the collective EU role, by splitting up many of the categories into multilateral aid from the EU and then individual contributions from each of the member states separately.²¹⁶ What matters, however, when assessing the overall significance of such EU support is the aggregate amount. But one of the tables does combine the totals, revealing that the total financial assistance to Kiev provided by the EU governments and institutions amounts to €29.2 billion so far, second only to the €52.3 billion provided by the United States.²¹⁷ This EU share, furthermore, is only likely to rise, with a widespread assumption, both in Brussels and elsewhere, that a disproportionate share of the massive costs of rebuilding Ukraine once the war is over will be borne by the 27, collectively and individually. The sum of €350 billion was being mentioned at an off-the-record briefing in Brussels over the summer.

On top of this, the EU has also made commitments in response to Ukraine’s long-term aspirations to become a member state. Serious discussions about how to react to the Ukrainian desire to join the EU predate the war itself, with the Polish and Slovenian prime ministers writing to Charles Michel on 23 February asking that a plan be drawn up to integrate the country into the Union by 2030.²¹⁸ Other European leaders expressed immediate scepticism that so ambitious a timetable was remotely realistic, and also voiced misgivings about Ukraine being allowed to overtake a number of other countries, notably in the Western Balkans, who have had EU candidate status for much longer.²¹⁹ But at the 23–24 June European Council meeting, agreement was reached to accord the Ukrainians candidate status, a step also taken towards Moldova and, subject to certain conditions, Georgia.²²⁰ The 27 have thus committed themselves in the medium term to a very sizeable eastward expansion, with potentially huge knock-on effects both for the EU itself, but also for the geopolitics of Europe more broadly. This is all the more notable a step given the near deadlock which had seemed to prevail until very recently over any further geographical expansion of the EU.

The Ukrainian conflict has also injected new dynamism into two pre-existing European debates, underway at both member state and EU level. The first of these is the European discussion of defence, which has rumbled on for decades, but which has often in the past revealed more about gthe disinclination of European states to commit large amounts to their defence budgets, and their wariness of intensive cooperation, than it has about their desire for unity. The manner in which the return of war to European soil has encouraged Germany and others to pledge significantly greater sums to defence spending is potentially transformative, however. And this is all the more so if, as now seems likely, the new expenditure is accompanied by efforts to better coordinate procurement at a European level and avoid wasteful duplication of effort. There is no real need for that recurrent federalist fantasy and Eurosceptic bugbear, namely a European army. But more coordination of the various national efforts to rearm could ensure that European governments get much better returns on the extra spending that has been promised. Also breaking new ground in policy terms has been the agreement to deploy EU funds to purchase weapons for delivery to Ukraine under the European Peace Facility. The sum so far pledged amounts to €3.1 billion.²²¹

Equally transformed has been the European debate about energy policy. This had already become an important topic given the commitments that the EU had entered into over climate change and decarbonisation. But the urgency of change required has been hugely increased by the need to move rapidly away from dependence on Russian coal, oil and gas. The Commission’s 18 May REPowerEU Plan thus outlined a mixture of energy savings, diversification of supply and an acceleration of the move towards renewables, backed up by €225 billion of loans and grants of €20 billion.²²² And in response to Russian efforts to restrict gas supplies in particular, there was also Council agreement in late July on a scheme to cut most member states’ gas consumption by 15% in the coming winter.²²³ As with defence, therefore, a long-running discussion has been revivified by the outbreak of war and the accompanying realisation of Europe’s potential vulnerability to Russian energy blackmail.

Taken together, all of these developments amount to a surprisingly far-reaching and forceful response to the Ukrainian conflict. It is a response furthermore that not only is having and will continue to have an impact on the war itself – supporting the Ukrainian government, increasing Russia’s isolation and seeking to mitigate the spill-over effects of the war – but also has the potential to transform European politics more broadly. This almost goes without saying when it comes to the commitment to further enlargement that the EU has now made. But it is also the case that a Europe that takes defence spending and energy diversification more seriously, and has improved its record in coordinating both, would be a stronger player internationally. It is worth noting, moreover, that most of these moves have been well coordinated with and strongly supported by the United States. As was underlined by President Biden’s participation by video-link in one of the early European Council discussions of the Ukrainian crisis, the effective EU response has been part of a wider intensification of Western unity.²²⁴ There is hence no contradiction between a stronger NATO and a stronger EU; instead, the two processes are complementary.

So, what explains this perhaps unexpectedly strong response? And crucially can it last? The answer to the first of these questions lies partly in the nature of the EU institutional system, as it has emerged from the recent past, and partly in the nature of this particular crisis and of the European public’s response to it. As far as the institutions are concerned, the twin developments of note are the improvement of European foreign policy coordination mechanisms, and, more vital still, the ever-greater consolidation through crisis of European Council leadership. The EU’s capacity to coordinate the foreign policies of its member states has long been significantly greater than most outside observers acknowledged. As a result, the question of how to deal with the ever-growing threat posed by Putin’s Russia had already been the subject of repeated discussions, some of them at the very highest level. These had not, it is true, necessarily led to complete consensus. Indeed, there was more than enough dissonance for journalists, for whom disunity is invariably a more interesting story than unity, to talk up European disarray on the topic. But it did mean that when Russia invaded Ukraine the European discussion of how to respond did not have to start from scratch, but instead could build upon a variety of forceful policies drawn up earlier. Furthermore, the leaders whose agreement would be needed before any concrete steps could be taken have grown ever more accustomed during the EU’s last crisis-ridden decade to meeting each other very regularly and taking rapid collective decisions. In fact, European Council members had already gathered in Brussels on 17 February for a brief exchange of views on the situation in Ukraine before a long-planned EU-Africa summit, and were able to agree there and then to convene once more should the situation demand it. Getting everybody together in order to take the initial decisions was thus much easier and faster than it would once have been. And once they did meet, all were highly aware that they needed to be seen to respond effectively and vigorously. The distance travelled since 1979/80 when the fact that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in the midst of the Christmas holidays meant that no collective European response could even begin to be discussed until several weeks after the invasion had occurred is important to underline.²²⁵

A second explanation for why the EU was able to respond quickly and well was that this was a military crisis, but one that demanded a primarily economic and political response, rather than the actual use of force. One of the earliest points of consensus to emerge, in Washington as well as in European capitals, was that the Western response to the Russian invasion needed to be rapid and forceful, but could not involve direct military confrontation with the Russians. Instead, the principal mechanisms that the Western powers would employ would be financial and moral support for the Ukrainians, humanitarian assistance to refugees, economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus, and affirmations of Western unity in the face of Russian aggression. All of these were things that the EU was well placed to provide quickly. Indeed, when it came to moral support and an affirmation of Ukraine’s European vocation, only the EU could respond with the promise of candidate status. Had the demand from the outset been for the deployment of military force, by contrast, NATO would have been a much more relevant institutional vehicle for the collective Western response. There was a military dimension, of course, which was why NATO has also been very active, reinforcing defences in the Baltic states for instance and beginning to discuss the Swedish and Finnish membership requests. And over time the need to furnish Ukraine with advanced Western armaments has also become a major consideration. But even here, the capacity of the EU to finance the purchase of such weaponry has made it much more relevant than it might have been had the immediate imperative been the deployment of Western battalions to the front line. It has thus been the right sort of war so far in terms of the EU’s capacity to react.

Third, and most importantly, EU leaders have been able to take a forceful line secure in the knowledge that they enjoyed overwhelming support from European public opinion in doing so. Russian actions were so transparently aggressive, the news and images filtering out from Ukraine so distressing, and the challenge to Western values and to the idea of enduring peace in Europe so direct and obvious, that both public and political agreement that something needed to be done was almost instantaneous. Not to have acted, or to have done too little, too late, would hence have been much more politically hazardous than responding energetically. Furthermore, whereas there had been a fairly wide spectrum of views in Europe about how far to engage with Putin’s Russia prior to the invasion, with a good number of politicians and commentators advocating a softer approach, the range of acceptable viewpoints has narrowed dramatically since February. The behaviour of Marine Le Pen is instructive in this regard. In the past she had been quite happy to accept Russian financial support and to call for a much greater level of cooperation; in the latter stages of the French presidential election campaign, by contrast, she had to work energetically to distance herself from her previously pro-Russian stance, since to be seen as close to Putin had become a significant electoral liability.

This then links to the second question asked earlier, namely, is this consensus, at both public and political levels, in favour of a forceful response likely to endure? Or will public support for the Ukrainians melt away, and with it EU consensus on how to help their cause? There are certainly some causes for concern. In Viktor Orban, the EU does have a politician with strong pro-Putin inclinations within its own camp, and so much in control of the domestic debate within his own country that he can afford to ignore public opinion much more than his counterparts. He has already demonstrated his nuisance value by blocking the inclusion of the Russian Patriarch on the list of those targeted by EU sanctions, and by rejecting the planned 15% cuts in gas consumption. The summer months also reminded us that political accidents can chip away at the authority of several of those who have been at the forefront of the current EU response. Mario Draghi’s departure from the Italian leadership is one serious blow of this sort; Emmanuel Macron’s failure to win a majority in the National Assembly another. The European institutions also have their own home-grown problem with a very fractious relationship between von der Leyen and Michel. In a system that operates best when Commission and Council work closely together, this too could become a liability. There are also periodic reminders that the scars caused by the Euro crisis have not fully healed, with several southern European commentators questioning what right Germany had to ask for solidarity in the face of a Russian gas boycott when it had, in their eyes, shown little such solidarity at the height of the sovereign-debt crisis. And above all there is a question mark over how long the current European public support for a strong pro-Ukrainian line will endure once the economic and energy-supply effects of the war begin fully to hit home. It is one thing to talk bravely about taking cold showers and turning the heating off in the midst of a summer heatwave or an unusually mild autumn; it will be quite another to do the same during a January cold snap.

While complacency about all and any of these dangers would be unwise, there are, however, strong reasons for doubting that the solidity of the European front will quickly collapse. First of all, European public support for the current line on Ukraine remains overwhelmingly strong, despite the economic and energy implications of this line becoming increasingly clear. Opinion polls in Germany, for instance, suggest that 70% of the population agree with their government’s stance even if it means higher energy bills.²²⁶ Second, the EU system has always been reasonably good at accommodating individual dissenters, normally able to carve out some form of special dispensation without this being allowed to undermine the whole, but now has a powerful new tool for dissuading would-be rebels from breaking ranks in the form of the sizeable New Generation EU budgetary funds. The new Italian government led by Georgia Meloni, for instance, has very strong incentives not to impede the general European line on Ukraine, for fear of raising question marks over the rapid arrival of sorely needed EU money. The presence within its ranks of politicians who have questioned the hardline approach of the EU towards Ukraine is hence less threatening than it otherwise might have been. Third, those in favour of staying strong include not just the post-Wende government of the EU’s most powerful member state, Germany, but also those of multiple Central and Eastern European countries which are not only geographically close to the Russian threat, but also preserve strong memories of Cold War Soviet domination. There is, in other words, a potent coalition in favour of a strong anti-Russian line within the EU. And, finally, several of the changes that the Ukrainian war has accelerated represent steps that many within the EU wanted to take even before the outbreak of war. On both defence cooperation and the energy transition, for instance, the measures taken work with the grain of previous EU policy objectives rather than against. And they are thus correspondingly easier to press ahead with and harder to reverse. The real challenges ahead do not therefore strike me as a rapid dissolution of the current pro-Ukrainian line. Instead, it will be the management in budgetary terms of the colossal bill for long-term post-war reconstruction, and, still more challenging, the narrowing of the huge gap between how long most Ukrainians believe it will take to attain full EU membership, and the rather more sober assessments that currently prevail in Brussels.

Angela Romano: ‘The Cold War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the Central and Eastern European experience’

This short article will offer some tentative suggestions about how the history of the Cold War and its aftermath as experienced by Central and Eastern European states may inform our understanding of the current war in Ukraine. In doing so, this contribution has no pretensions to be either final in its suggestions nor exhaustive in considering the rich literature about Central and Eastern Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural Cold War experiences. In fact, given its nature, this piece is more likely to be found quite deficient in both. It will first address the definition and scope of ‘Eastern Europe’ and then delve into a discussion of the agency of Eastern European states during the Cold War vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In its concluding remarks, this article will briefly consider the developments of the post-Cold War period and draw some considerations about the war in Ukraine and the question of a ‘new Cold War’.

Eastern Europe/Central and Eastern Europe

The expression ‘Eastern Europe’ is in itself a quintessentially Cold War experience for the countries it comprises. To guarantee Soviet security, Joseph Stalin’s strategy was to control this space, which led to the division of Europe; Gorbachev’s more positive view that ‘Eastern Europe could best serve Soviet security as its bridge to Western Europe in a newly integrated continent made the peaceful ending of the Cold War possible’.²²⁷ Still, it confirmed the otherness of this region vis-à-vis both the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe.

‘Eastern Europe’ also represents the view from the Western camp, which lumped together the countries beyond the Iron Curtain allied to the Soviet Union. The connotation was evidently ideological and geopolitical as much as it was geographically inaccurate and oblivious of the historical experiences and cultural specificities of those countries as part of the Continent. In particular, in the Western Cold War image of and language about the continent, ‘Central Europe’ had disappeared. In the early 1980s, Central European authors such as the Czech(oslovak)s Václav Havel and Milan Kundera, the Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs and the sociologist György Konrád all ‘promoted the idea that their region was an organic part of a discursively constructed wider “Europe”, a space of diverse yet intertwined cultures, from which C(entral) E(astern) E(urope) had been temporarily and unreasonably detached’.²²⁸

Since the end of the Cold War, the more sensible ‘Central and Eastern European countries’ has been increasingly adopted. This expression is used when treating both the Cold War period and its aftermath. In the first case, the choice reflects historians’ acknowledgement of the variety of identities and national specificities that were present across the socialist regimes. In many cases, this is linked to analysing the legacies of these countries’ pre-Cold War historical experiences on the development of socialism; in some studies, it reflects an explicit attempt to understand their Cold War experience as a phase in longer national histories.²²⁹ In some works, this is openly done to either advance or qualify the narrative of ‘Europeanness’ of (some of) these countries, of their ‘return to Europe’, including the process of accession to the EU.²³⁰

The debate about the ‘return to Europe’ narrative is also part of a rich literature analysing the region’s processes of democratisation and nation-building. In this regard, it is particularly important to notice that the notion of Central and Eastern Europe actually includes two groupings with different experiences of being part of the Cold War ‘East’: former Republics of the Soviet Union (Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova) on the one hand, states of their own belonging to the Socialist Bloc and its regional organisations (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [CMEA] and the Warsaw Pact) on the other. In the current war in Ukraine the above-mentioned difference matters at the very core of the conflict: both in geopolitical and identity terms, the war is about solidly establishing Ukraine either as a European state in the east of the continent, or as an entity belonging to Russia.

In consideration of the above, I contend that the Cold War history of Central and Eastern European states may inform our understanding of the current war in Ukraine only to a limited extent. First, the Cold War years represent only a phase in the longer, complex and often tormented national history of each of these countries, which are still in the process of nation-building. As mentioned, the interpretation about of Ukraine’s historical experience and the battle of narratives around it are part and parcel of the current war and very much at its heart, and both sides look back to a past preceding the Soviet epoch.

Second, I maintain that the experience of being part of the Soviet Union adds layers of complexity that make the European former Soviet Republics a category of their own; therefore, the following paragraphs will only consider the Cold War ‘Central and Eastern European countries’, i.e. those states that during the Cold War existed per se and were allied to the Soviet Union.

Satellites/autonomous actors

The other implication of the expression ‘Eastern Europe’ is that for too long these countries’ Cold War histories have been narrated in terms of their being mere ‘satellites’ of the Soviet Union. One of the most fascinating established trends of the last 20 years in Cold War historiography is the move beyond the focus on the two superpowers and the dedication to studying the agency of the smaller states, be they members of the blocs or neutral and non-aligned, located in Europe or in the other continents. This rich and diverse corpus of studies is revealing more and more the extent to which small states formulated and were able to assert their own policies (domestic and foreign) vis-à-vis the superpowers, challenging their system of bipolar regulation of the world. Their capacity for autonomous action was variable according to the specific relationship they had with the superpower(s) and the latter’s own foreign-policy approach over time. The room for manoeuvre and assertiveness of a country also varied across periods of time and policy domains.

Within this flourishing historiography, several authors have convincingly questioned, challenged and qualified the long-held conventional narrative of the Socialist Bloc as a Soviet-led monolith and the image of Central and Eastern European countries as mere satellites of Moscow. Among the many studies of this kind, I draw here from those concerned with foreign policy, and single out three main domains which stand out as realms for Central and Eastern European countries’ visible pursuit of national interests: the internal security of the bloc; the external security as addressed in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); and economic relations with Western Europe and its European Economic Community (EEC).

The internal security of the bloc is usually seen as the most visible embodiment of the Soviet grip on its European allies, with the repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 immediately coming to mind. In both cases, intervention was motivated by the concern of preserving communism in power. Although the doctrine of limited sovereignty is associated with Brezhnev and the military intervention in Prague in 1968, the first conceptualisation of the collective right to intervene in a fellow socialist country where communist rule risked (or was) being overthrown occurred with regard to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Laurien Crump contends that the Soviet decision on 4 November to intervene militarily in Hungary was not triggered by Imre Nagy’s declaration of Hungarian neutrality and appeal to the United Nations on 1 November, but by his declaration on 30 October 1956 on establishing a multi-party system. In this view, Moscow was not alone; the intervention was the result of what Crump calls the ‘multilateralisation of Soviet Bloc Security’. Khrushchev’s bilateral and multilateral consultations with the other allies legitimised the invasion and revealed a shared ‘interest in sacrificing Hungary’s sovereignty to safeguard the communist monopoly on power’, with the strongest support for intervention coming from the still Stalinist Romanian and Czechoslovak leaderships.²³¹

As for the intervention in Prague in 1968, the leaders of East Germany, Poland and Bulgaria, worried by the possible contagion of their own countries, put early and considerable pressure on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who, with the Hungarian leader János Kádár, rather preferred a political solution mediated with the Czechoslovak leadership. Only when Kádár lost faith in Dubček’s ability to control the situation did Brezhnev agree to intervene militarily. To confirm that the preservation of communism was a shared rationale to endorse the limitation of sovereignty, Crump points out that no invasion was contemplated (by Moscow or the smaller allies) in response to Albania’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in September 1968, for the communist character of Tirana’s regime was beyond doubt. The same applied to Romania’s quite independent policy stances within the Warsaw Pact (e.g. Romania vehemently opposed the military intervention in Prague). Even more interestingly, the Warsaw Pact was never the instrument for invasion, as both interventions were agreed outside of it; in fact, it actually provided the framework for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania in 1958.²³²

As Csaba Békés argued, the Warsaw Pact Treaty ‘enshrined the sovereignty of the Warsaw Pact members, and thus upgraded them from Soviet satellites to sovereign states, at least in theory’.²³³ In practice, this was very visible on the occasion of the CSCE. The various studies focusing on the socialist countries’ role in the pan-European conference initiative, its preparation, negotiations and ensuing process provide evidence their pursuit of specific national goals.²³⁴ The Poles and the Romanians certainly stand out as the most self-conscious and assertive. For instance, the re-launch of the idea of a pan-European security conference was a Polish initiative taken with no consultations with either Moscow or the other allies and launched by Polish foreign minister Adam Rapacki in December 1964 before the UN General Assembly.²³⁵ The proposal prompted consultations within the Warsaw Pact between January 1965 and March 1969, which were characterised by tensions between the Poles and the Germans on the one hand, pushing for the international recognition of post-Second World War borders against possible West German ‘revanchism’, and the Romanians and Hungarians on the other, who emphasised the normalisation of relations with Western Europe in pursuit of political and economic gains. Western narratives usually put the Soviets on the side of border security; in fact, behind the scenes they supported the Romanian position, as they were also interested in improving economic relations with West Germany.²³⁶ The final compromise was found in bilateral consultations between Ceausescu and Gomulka, and the Budapest Appeal contained both stances. Later on the Polish CSCE policy changed, embracing proposals about pan-European cooperation and broadening the country’s political latitude.²³⁷ Indeed, since the early 1970s the new bold and confident Polish leadership acted on the assumption that their country had the right to play a central role in European affairs, and aimed to make it the second most influential socialist country after the Soviet Union.²³⁸

The Romanian CSCE policy was marked by a constant (and successful) push for including in CSCE documents the protection of sovereignty for all countries and in all relations in Europe. Research shows the fundamental importance that the conceptualisation of national sovereignty had in shaping the Romanian ruling elite’s economic and political strategy, and its determination to go against Soviet advice and common positions in the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) on all proposals that might impinge on national sovereignty.²³⁹ Consistently, Romania’s CSCE policy aimed at securing an independent status within the international arena, rejecting the bloc system and securing pan-European rules that would prevent coercive actions from the Soviet Union and the other allies. Romanian delegates sided with neutral and non-aligned countries in calling for European security to be debated by all states outside the blocs, in supporting the adoption of Confidence Building Measures and the proposal for the creation of a permanent body; the latter being unsuccessful, Romania supported the option of follow-up meetings that would guarantee continuity to the off-the-bloc pan-European security conference. The Romanian delegation even called for a collective system of security that would substitute the two bloc military alliances.²⁴⁰ The same rationale of national sovereignty and interests underpinned Romanian support for economic cooperation with the more advanced Western countries; the latter would not only foster economic development and the modernisation of the country, but also help its emancipation from the CMEA.²⁴¹

Indeed, the third strand of foreign policy that reveals the capacity of European socialist regimes to elaborate and pursue autonomous actions pertains to their economic relations with Western Europe. Starting in the mid-1960s, the socialist countries’ strategy for prosperity and stability became based on enhanced relations with the capitalist economies next door. Recent research on the 1970s has confirmed that all Central and European socialist regimes read European détente and the emergence of a pan-European space for cooperation as an opportunity to modernise their economy effectively and achieve better living standards for their people. This in turn was meant to consolidate the single-party domestic rule and make socialism stronger and more influential on a global scale, with the Polish leadership confidently and ambitiously envisioning Poland as the tenth global industrial power.²⁴² The same research has also exposed the limits of Soviet control over the allies’ pursuit of this Western strategy. On several occasions, the Soviets tried to persuade their European allies to change their foreign-trade policies; Brezhnev personally warned them off becoming too dependent on Western markets and loans, but to no avail. Both Honecker and Ceausescu blamed the Soviets back, arguing that their inadequate economic support had made increased exchanges with the West an unavoidable choice. The Polish leadership covered up statistics to show the Soviets that the country was not so dependent on the West as they claimed. In Hungary, Kádár and his older-generation comrades did not adopt the bolder moves suggested by experts and some ministerial officials for fear that Moscow might withdraw its energy supplies or even decide on political intervention; yet they gradually ditched the idea of socialist integration in favour of rapprochement to Western Europe.

Moreover, the European socialist regimes increasingly pursued national goals. Romania openly challenged bloc discipline when it presented itself internationally as a developing country, which allowed it to extract preferential treatment on trade and credit. Most of the other regimes also often tried to out-compete their socialist partners, albeit in less outspoken ways. This was particularly evident when dealing with the EEC, whose policies, tariffs and expanding membership posed severe challenges to the exports of the socialist countries. None of them considered the Soviet advice to reduce trade with Western Europe and diminish their economic vulnerability vis-à-vis EEC protectionism. Although all officially respected the bloc policy of non-recognition, views on the idea of EEC-CMEA negotiations varied greatly. Sticking to the defence of national sovereignty, Romanian authorities constantly refused to hand foreign-trade policy to the CMEA level.²⁴³ The leaderships of Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria initially supported group negotiations with the EEC, calculating they would have a stronger bargaining position together; yet they also maintained the possibility of dealing bilaterally with the EEC. Eventually, when attempts at bypassing the competence of the EEC failed, all European socialist states but the GDR established unofficial yet very substantial contacts with the EEC Commission and signed sectoral deals with it. The Soviet attempts to establish an EEC-CMEA agreement that would allow Moscow to control allies’ relations with the EEC never stood a chance due to the staunch opposition of Romania (and the EEC) and the more or less lukewarm positions of most other CMEA members.²⁴⁴

Overall, the historiography noted here did not deny the existence of Soviet pressures or influence on national authorities, nor the concern that the latter had about possible Soviet reaction to their policy decisions. Yet it is evident that Soviet influence had diverse degrees of pervasiveness across time and across countries.

The agency and autonomy of the smaller allies of the Soviet Union materialised in actions aimed at altering the content of a Soviet initiative to a significant extent (e.g. CSCE), or resisting and eventually killing Soviet initiatives (e.g. CMEA supranational integration), or in promoting initiatives without previous consultation with Moscow or the group (e.g. pan-European conference; trade deals with the EEC). In some cases, action was pursued individually; in others, steps were taken in coordination with one or some members of the bloc.

In all three domains examined here, Central and Eastern European states also practised consultations in the Warsaw Pact and the CMEA. Research has demonstrated that rather than being instruments of Soviet dominance, these organisations actually favoured the multilateralisation of political discussions and enhanced the national assertiveness of the smaller European countries vis-à-vis the superpower and the power of the bloc.²⁴⁵

Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era and the current war in Ukraine

After the end of the Cold War, the new governments in Central and Eastern European countries prioritised membership of the EU as the road to consolidate democracy, reform the economy and catch up with the wealthy part of the continent. This ‘return to Europe’ was an integral part of nation-building in the post-socialist era.

Yet the development of Central and Eastern European countries in the 1990s and 2000s has demonstrated that the latter did not share a distinct regional identity. The Visegrad group exemplifies the matter well. Created in February 1991 between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to coordinate their integration into the EU and NATO, the group was never cohesive or spoke with a single voice. National interests also became dominant in the attempt at conceptualising Europe; it soon became evident that, though eager to join the EU, most of these countries were reticent to give up bits of their recently conquered full sovereignty to the supranational institutions.²⁴⁶

I would thus argue that the Cold War period experience helps us understand both the loose connections of these countries as a group and their predominant tendency to emphasise national peculiarities, pursue national interests and, above all, hold tight to national sovereignty. Moreover, the ongoing process of identity searching in the 2000s has led these countries to experiment with affiliation to various sub-regional groupings, in what Ostap Kushnir calls ‘a multiplication of “Central and Eastern Europes”’.²⁴⁷ This situation was favoured by the absence of the Soviet/Russian threat, the diverse political and economic development across these countries and their membership (or not) of the EU.

Now Putin’s war against Ukraine has led to an important reshuffle of these groups’ identity constructions. In May 1992, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk’s initiative for joining the Visegrad group fell on deaf ears, as the latter saw Ukraine as a burden on their journey towards the ‘return to Europe’ and NATO and EU membership. When in 1999 the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma called for Baltic-Black Sea Cooperation, the authorities in the Baltic states were sympathetic but non-committal, as they also favoured NATO and EU membership. After the Russian invasion last February, the governments of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania acknowledge Ukraine as part of the historical Europe and thus worthy of solidarity and defence. The governments of Hungary, Czechia, Bulgaria and, to some extent, Romania, Slovakia and Moldova predominantly emphasise Russia’s breach of universal values of territorial integrity and sovereignty, which is also the position of Western European countries. Yet, unlike the latter, all ‘former Eastern European’ countries also perceive the Russian aggression as the revival of the Soviet threat to their identity, security, sovereignty and place within Europe.

Arguably, in explaining the mismatch between the Cold War experience of the Soviet Union of the Western European states on the one hand and the Central and Eastern states on the other, Cold War history helps our understanding of some of the geopolitical and cultural features of the current war in Ukraine. It sheds light on the more intense reactions of the ‘Eastern’ group, as well as the various degrees of intensity, which peak in the case of the Baltic states and Poland. It can also contribute to understanding the predicaments in the process of soul-searching and identity-building that Ukrainian society (as well as the people of Moldova and Belarus) are facing, the solution of which cannot prescind from emancipation from the Russian threat.

Yet, as mentioned at the beginning, the Cold War is but a phase in these regional nations’ longer histories in which the presence of Russia was deeply felt and often resented. The process of emancipation from Russian threat, interference or undesired influence therefore also pertains to a longer term than the Cold War era, and this in itself would suffice to argue against understanding the current events as a new Cold War from the viewpoint of Central and Eastern Europe.

Kristina Spohr: ‘NATO enlargement and Putin’s war in Ukraine: policy and history between myth and reality, 1989–2022’

On 5 July 2022, Europe was counting day 132 of Russia’s war in Ukraine. That day, barely two months after lodging their applications to join the Atlantic Alliance, Finland and Sweden signed their Accession Protocols at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.²⁴⁸ Once the admission has been ratified, all of Northern Europe – from the Barents Sea to the Baltic – will become a cohesive NATO defence area. And Russia will have to confront the new realities of its direct border with the Alliance doubling in length.

This development will be one of the most tangible, long-term geopolitical consequences of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. In fact, against President Vladmir Putin’s divide-and-rule aspirations towards the Western alliance, the war in Ukraine has spectacularly backfired on him, leading instead to the unexpected revival and indeed expansion of the transatlantic community that he loathes and had hoped to curtail.²⁴⁹

How did we get here? What did Europe’s geopolitical development and NATO’s evolution since 1990 have to do with Putin’s decision in 2022 to seek forcibly to ‘take back’ Ukraine and thereby fundamentally challenge Europe’s post-Wall order? And what has the role of history and historical narratives in the policies pursued ever since the end of the Cold War been?

*****

The immediate road to the 2022 war, it appears, started with several waves of massive Russian troop deployments on Ukraine’s eastern border during 2021. On 17 December 2021, Putin unexpectedly presented an ultimatum to the United States and to NATO, formally demanding binding security guarantees from them. In the published draft for a security agreement with the United States, the Kremlin specifically asked Washington to bar former Soviet republics from ever joining NATO and to refrain from any military cooperation with these countries. What’s more, NATO should pull back its troops to the positions of 1997 and the United States withdraw its own forces and weapons including its nuclear missiles from Europe altogether. Putin’s goal, in short, was for Russia and the West to rebuild their post-1991 relations from scratch – with the America evicted from Europe.²⁵⁰

A week of intensive diplomatic talks in mid-January 2022 – with the United States, with NATO and within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – ended without results. The subsequent written answers by NATO and the United States formally rejected Russia’s demands.²⁵¹ Yet, according to Washington, the United States did ‘set out a serious diplomatic path forward’ by proposing discussions over reciprocal restraints on short- and medium-range nuclear weapons and limits to the size and locations on military exercises.²⁵²

On the major issues of principle, however, there was never any room for negotiation between NATO and Russia. The Kremlin would not be given any veto power over the presence of nuclear weapons, troops or conventional arms in NATO countries. And the Alliance would not rescind its historic ‘open door’ policy, namely that any state that wants to join can seek to do so on the basis of its sovereign decision.²⁵³ The right for a country to freely choose its security arrangements and alliances was one of the key principles of the European security order, rooted in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and reconfirmed by all signatories, including Moscow, in the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990 and beyond.²⁵⁴ NATO therefore – for all the question marks over its inner cohesiveness in recent years – plainly rejected Russia’s move to create a Europe of different zones of influence.

But herein lay the crux for Russia. The post-Wall world, as it had crystallised since 1992, was no longer acceptable to the Kremlin. Putin was no more satisfied with a policy of keeping peace at any cost. In 2019 he had declared the liberal order ‘obsolete’ while pressing, together with China’s Xi Jinping, for a polycentric ‘post-West world order’, finally ending what they believe has been a lengthy and loathsome United States-led ‘unipolar moment’.²⁵⁵ In their shared view, only a handful of great powers are truly ‘sovereign’ – which led Putin to declare on 17 June 2022, that Russia was taking its place in a new world order whose rules would be set by ‘strong and sovereign states’.²⁵⁶ Xi in turn praised the ‘good momentum of development’ in Sino-Russian bilateral relations since the start of the year ‘in the face of global turmoil and changes’ and insisted Beijing would keep backing Moscow on ‘sovereignty and security’.²⁵⁷

This particular worldview, which disregards the most basic principles of territorial sovereignty and the sovereign equality of states, naturally clashes with more progressive Western positions on international law and politics that explicitly grant the same full agency to smaller and bigger states. To be sure, Russia and China have signed up to these norms, too. Yet their narrow reading of sovereignty and, in our terms, ‘flawed’ perception of the pillars of modern-day international relations lead them to believe that treaties guaranteeing the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of smaller countries located in their ‘spheres of influence’ are, in effect, meaningless.

Putin made quite clear in late 2021 that the geopolitical status quo in Europe now had to be changed.²⁵⁸ He wants to create a cordon sanitaire between Russia and the West: with a first zone of influence in its ‘near abroad’ immediately subordinate to Moscow; a buffer – stretching from Poland to Bulgaria, effectively the former Warsaw Pact without the GDR – in which no foreign troops may be stationed; and, finally, an area of Western European NATO countries that would be freed from US nuclear weapons.²⁵⁹ All of this finally to thin out any US presence on the continent, while ‘restoring’ the Russian sphere in what used to be its East European empire.²⁶⁰

Not only did NATO member states reject such a ‘solution’ outright. The former neutrals, post-Cold War EU members Finland and Sweden, also found themselves dealing intensively with the NATO issue because of the Kremlin’s aggressiveness. Finland, with its long border with Russia, was particularly keen to reduce tensions, but did not mince its words vis-à-vis Moscow. In his 2022 New Year’s speech, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö boldly stated that Russia’s proposals contradicted the ‘European security system’ adding that, as he saw it, in the 2020s ‘spheres of interest’ were simply out of place. Finland’s independent political manoeuvrability had to remain intact, including ‘the possibility … to submit an application for NATO membership’, with Helsinki’s main aim being to prevent Russia and the United States from making decisions on European security over the heads of the small, independent European states.²⁶¹

For Putin, any talk of NATO enlargement was a red rag. As he saw it, NATO poses a threat to Russia, and NATO’s ‘open doors’ contradict supposed ‘Western assurances’, allegedly given to his country and the Soviet leadership some 30 years ago. Since the Cold War, he insisted in December 2021, NATO with its ‘five waves of expansion’ had ‘cheated, just brazenly tricked’ Russians without any consideration for their security interests.²⁶² This, he believed, now had to reversed.

Russia has always talked of NATO ‘expansion’. But it is worth noting that this language carries connotations of territorial annexation. The Russian Federation certainly ‘expanded’ territorially when it annexed Crimea in 2014. In this way it imposed its empire by force. Yet, the United States – as a European power post-1945 – was an ‘empire by invitation’.²⁶³ NATO was ‘enlarged’ when states voluntarily applied and eventually joined the organisation as new members, just as Greece, Turkey and West Germany had acceded in the 1950s and Spain in 1982. What is more, while the first two enlargement waves post-Wall – in 1999 and 2004 – moved NATO east into 10 states on former Warsaw Pact terrain, from Poland to Romania and Estonia to Slovenia, the next three waves moved south into the Balkan region (nowhere near Russia), to Croatia and Albania in 2009, to Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. As a result, if anything, spaces that were previously conflictual or politically and economically volatile post-1991, were stabilised thanks to NATO, making Russia’s neighbourhood more, not less, secure.

Not that any of this was of import, however. With Putin’s mind set on the warpath, the Russian government’s final steps prior to the invasion of Ukraine were carefully orchestrated. They began on 17 February 2022, when the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that ‘in the absence of will on the American side to negotiate firm and legally binding guarantees on our security from the United States and its allies’, Russia was ‘forced to respond, including with military-technical measures’.²⁶⁴

Four days later, Putin marshalled his Security Council members on ‘live’ TV, bullying and harassing them as they confirmed Russia’s recognition of its proxies – the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lukhansk – as fully independent states. His own speech was rambling, but extremely angry and passionate. In it, he tried to bend Ukraine’s complex history to his own vision. The very idea of Ukrainian statehood, he claimed, was a fiction. And while blaming Lenin for ‘separating, severing what is historically Russian land’, he went on to describe Gorbachev’s decision in 1991 to give Ukraine the right to become independent of the Soviet Union ‘without any conditions’, as just ‘crazy’. Above all, he turned his ire onto the West – because it was the United States, he declared, that had ‘infected’ Ukraine ‘with the virus of nationalism and corruption’, turning it into a ‘colony with a puppet regime’ and leading it away from its rightful place within a greater Russia.²⁶⁵

As a misreading of history, Putin’s speech was extreme even by his standards, though we must recognise that it clearly reflected just how entrenched he had become in his own convictions and views of the past. It ignored, most obviously, the fact that in 1991, as the USSR teetered on the brink of collapse, more than 90% of Ukrainians (including majorities in the regions of Donbass and Crimea) had voted for independence.²⁶⁶ It also made no reference to Ukraine’s commitment in 1994 under the Budapest Memorandum to commit to the Non-Proliferation Treaty by eliminating ‘all nuclear weapons from its territory’ – one third of the former Soviet Union’s arsenal – in return for formal ‘security assurances’ from Britain, the United States and most notably Russia.²⁶⁷

During his own turn at the Council meeting, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov offered a much shorter and more succinct, but no less revealing, rendition of the Kremlin’s view of the recent past.²⁶⁸ This contained the long-perpetuated myth of Western promises not to enlarge NATO made during German unification diplomacy in 1990. Lavrov even claimed to have proof of a Western stab in Russia’s back – a ‘new’ document from the UK National Archives, ‘recently’ unearthed by an American International Relations (IR) scholar, and the subject of a sensationalist article in the German magazine Der Spiegel only four days earlier.²⁶⁹

Unsurprisingly, none of these claims bore close scrutiny. The British document had been declassified almost five years earlier. It was a note on a quadripartite discussion on ‘Security in Central and Eastern Europe’, held in March 1991 by the foreign ministry political directors from Britain, France, Germany and the United States, not an official negotiation by top politicians in leadership positions. It contained nothing that could serve as proof of binding pledges that limited NATO’s size in perpetuity, though it was clear that NATO enlargement eastward was then not on the agenda – because it was in nobody’s, and certainly not the Alliance’s, interest to ‘ostracise’ the USSR.²⁷⁰ Both journalist and academic had evidently fallen for the ‘fallacy of the lonely fact’, but this did not trouble the unscrupulous propagandists in the Kremlin. On the contrary, Lavrov could not have hoped for a better gift at such an opportune moment. And Der Spiegel was not alone.²⁷¹

Debate across the Western media – especially in the United States and Germany – among pundits and within policy and academic circles was rife.²⁷² In the United States IR specialists around John Mearsheimer and in Germany Putinversteher, such as Klaus von Dohnanyi, argued that the West was ultimately to blame for Russian invasions (Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine), and not Russia’s own imperialism or nationalism in Putinist guise.²⁷³ To be sure, these narratives of Russia’s purposeful slighting, marginalisation and abasement by a West, forever triumphalist and arrogant, had been circling for almost the entire post-Wall era. After all, there had been the American declarations of the ‘end of history’, coupled with the belief in Western victory in the Cold War due to US and European military pressure and the siren song of capitalism and democracy.²⁷⁴ But now, in 2022, it was argued the West, having decades earlier failed wholeheartedly to search for pan-European options to help Russia integrate, had to finally recognise what it had sown: it should, they held, accept responsibility for having made a ‘fateful error’ by provoking Russia and for creating a dangerous situation by extending an anti-Soviet alliance further and further into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.²⁷⁵ In other words, Putin’s violent pushback was completely understandable and should not have come as a surprise.

In all this we must not forget that Putin himself and his closest nationalist acolytes have for over 20 years now gone to great lengths to construct and widely disseminate their own narrative of Russian victimisation. In doing so, they created their own entirely different reality and logic, which Putin as a self-taught ‘history man’ internalised and weaponised.²⁷⁶ In their creation of a synthesis, with some real factual reference points enveloped in blatantly biased interpretation, historical nuances and complexities are of little import.²⁷⁷

What matters for Putin is the idea that the Soviet Union, which under Stalin’s leadership liberated Europe from the Nazis and for nearly half a century had stood as one of the two pillars of global power, was sold out in 1991. Soviet collapse he deemed to be ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’.²⁷⁸ ‘40% of territory’ – ‘what had been built up over 1000 years’ – was lost. But this, he asserted, was also a ‘humanitarian disaster’ of epic proportions, a real ‘tragedy’, because it left 25 million Russians in newly independent countries, cut off from the motherland.²⁷⁹

Russia’s great dissatisfaction with the direction that Europe’s order took after 1991 and Putin’s intense revanchism are, however, tied less to this story of a domestically driven collapse than to a belief in having its weakness ruthlessly exploited by the Euro-Atlantic Alliance.²⁸⁰ And so, his specific obsession with the creeping ‘cultivation’ of Ukraine by NATO, in order to supposedly turn the country into a ‘springboard against Russia’, is not merely linked to his alternative reading of 1000 years of Russo-Ukrainian ‘historical unity’. It stems above all from an endemic feeling of impotence and defensiveness in the Kremlin in the face of the West’s soft power: beacuse there is simply the transparent and intensely vexing inability of Russia to counteract the attractiveness of the European social model, to which Kyiv has been increasingly drawn.²⁸¹

Either way, with his history lectures and writings, Putin did not simply make manifest his views. We can now appreciate that he was ventilating them to wind himself and his electorate up for his mission to have Ukrainians physically ‘returned’ to the bosom of the Russian Volk – and to do so by war.

To justify this course of action, he specifically mixed two myths which indicated his predisposition to go ‘back to the future’. First, that the West-oriented Zelenskyy government of Ukraine was a band of neo-‘Nazis’ who were operating with US assistance and oppressing ‘Russians’ in Donbass. Russia’s war, or rather the ‘special operation’ as Putin calls it, was the much-needed tool to de-Nazify and free Ukraine once more, to repeat (‘можем повторить’) the victory of 1945, and to thus ‘reclaim’ (not conquer) what historically belonged to Russia. The second myth peddled claimed that the United States with its global reach had not only found an eager partner in ‘Nazified’ Ukraine, but, worse, that Washington had been using NATO as its main instrument against Russia and indeed was deliberately surrounding it.²⁸²

For the Russian leader, the ‘Nazis’ of Ukraine and the geopolitical calculations of Washington and its NATO allies were two sides of the same coin. Russia, Putin kept arguing, had been continuously deceived and its legitimate influence in its own neighbourhood ignored. The only option left to rectify these injustices was to use force.

*****

Seeing that divergent outlooks on Europe’s recent past have become so central to the impasse in contemporary Russia-West relations and that NATO came be at the heart of this ‘war of the narratives’ and of the actual war itself, we must ask: is there any truth in Putin’s complaints?²⁸³

The fact is, as early as 1993, Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, considered NATO’s eastward expansion illegal.²⁸⁴ Four years later, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a former adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev and head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, stated that several Western leaders had assured the Soviet leadership that ‘not one country leaving the Warsaw Pact would enter NATO’.²⁸⁵ Ten years after that, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, it was Putin who asked: ‘What happened to the assurances given by our Western partners after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?’²⁸⁶ And in 2014, during the annexation of Crimea, he again spoke once more of the treason of 1990.²⁸⁷

So, did ‘NATO’ or the ‘West’ make a binding promise at any point to refrain from eastward enlargement, only to make a clandestine volte-face?

The historical files in the East and the West prove that Putin’s narrative of broken promises is fabricated and constitutes part of a false-memory syndrome. It rests on both a misunderstanding of diplomatic processes in 1990 and a misrepresentation of the content of the so-called ‘2 + 4 Treaty’ on the final settlement of the German question in the same year.²⁸⁸

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, German and Soviet leaders had to confront a number of complex problems, including what would happen to the 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in East Germany (GDR) and when and how the USSR would give up its Allied reserved rights over Germany. Eventually, Moscow agreed to withdraw its troops and to relinquish its rights as a Second World War victor power. As part of this negotiation, a unified Germany also gained full sovereignty. The Federal Republic was therefore free to choose its alliance affiliation, which resulted in its remaining a NATO member, even though the country had grown considerably in size.

According to Putin’s narrative, Moscow only conceded on these issues because NATO had assured the Kremlin that it would not expand ‘one inch eastward’. It was US secretary of state James Baker who uttered these much-quoted words on 9 February 1990.²⁸⁹ They were not (as is sometimes implied) made by US president George H.W. Bush who, of course, had ultimate responsibility for US policy.

Baker’s main aim was to allay Soviet fears of a larger, unified Germany by offering assurances that neither NATO command structures nor NATO troops (what he referred to as ‘NATO jurisdiction’) would be transferred to the ‘territory of the former GDR’. Yet Baker’s ‘not one inch eastward’ formula would have made it impossible to apply NATO security guarantees (especially Article 5) to the whole of Germany.²⁹⁰ Bush, who as president had the last word,therefore suggested to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a separate letter that same day that he should, in the future, speak of a ‘special military status’ for the GDR.²⁹¹

A meeting between Bush, Baker and Kohl in Camp David on 24–25 February 1990 confirmed this latter wording, superseding what Baker as well as his German counterpart, Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, had been saying in the earliest exploratory phase of negotiations on German unification, as they hoped to gain Soviet acquiescence to quick German unity in the first place.²⁹²

Special provisions and obligations as regards the GDR territory were subsequently included in the legally binding text of the 2 + 4 Treaty (under Articles 4 and 5), which formally re-established German unity and served as the final settlement of the German question since 1945.²⁹³ This treaty placed significant restrictions on the deployment of foreign NATO troops and nuclear weapons on East German soil. In return for his willingness to compromise on these points, Kohl granted Gorbachev, in bilateral talks, a financial package totalling around DM 100 billion, in the form of loans and economic aid, which financed the withdrawal of the Red Army soldiers. This essential sweetener, as well as the concession of massive reductions of the combined size of the German armed forces, is something Putin never mentions.²⁹⁴

To be clear, then, the talks at foreign-minister level in February 1990 were never about ‘NATO expansion’ into Eastern Europe per se. They were focused on the specific issue of NATO’s defence posture in the wake of German unification – and the two issues should not be conflated. It is also important to remember that the Warsaw Pact was still in existence during these talks, so NATO enlargement was in any case a moot point. And, finally, Eastern Europe was not addressed in the 2 + 4 Treaty on Germany. This simply did not touch on the issue of NATO’s future boundaries in any way, not even indirectly.

Consequently, for the rest of 1990 and in 1991, Western leaders generally operated on the premise that an opening of NATO to Central and Eastern European states (CEE) or even the Baltics – who were seeking to re-establish their independence from the USSR – was not on the cards. Instead, together with Gorbachev and the leaders of the former satellites, they first focused on the CSCE process following the signing of the Charter of Paris in November 1990, in order to affirm their desire to enhance the prospects for stability on the continent at large and to foster ‘European security partnership’, across the old East-West divide. Germany, France and Britain also debated future options for closer European security cooperation within EC/EU structures, including the Western European Union (WEU), and how this might sit with a changing Atlantic Alliance and an evolving CSCE in what was a rapidly transforming continent.²⁹⁵ At the same time, the West seriously considered Soviet needs. It clung on to Gorbachev and the idea of a reformable, reinvented Soviet Union, fearing ‘Balkanisation’ or, worse, ‘Lebanonisation’ in the East, as well as the collapse of the painstakingly built-up arms-control regime.²⁹⁶ And so it extended its ‘hand of friendship’ to the Kremlin via NATO’s new North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a process of rapprochement that continued even after the USSR suddenly fragmented in December 1991.²⁹⁷

But this was the moment when the fundamentals changed. With the Soviet Union’s disappearance from the map, the global binary system fell apart and the security policy parameters in Europe were at once utterly transformed.²⁹⁸

Russia’s own tragedy after the end of the Cold War had less to do with the United States’ felt triumph or the survival of NATO, and more with Yeltsin’s failure to democratise his ‘new’ country, to create a stable market economy, to establish law and order and to build his promised ‘partnership’ with the United States and NATO, which was still on offer.²⁹⁹

By 1993 the new Russian Federation had sunk into political chaos. This gave rise to ultranationalist voices (who were obsessed with the Soviet Union’s and subsequently Russia's security, as well as with the humiliation of the Red Army’s pull-out from Eastern Europe, and who loathed the so-called ‘desertion’ by the CEE states from the Warsaw Pact to the ‘West’), as well as gave rise to Yeltsin’s increasingly autocratic rule as he fought to stay in power.³⁰⁰ He drew up a new constitution around which his super-presidency was built. Consequently, the Balts and former Soviet satellites – less stable states of the so-called Zwischeneuropa (‘the Europe in-between’), as these fledgling capitalist democracies were still inventing their post-Cold War identities – knocked on the Alliance’s door in order to shelter from Yeltsin’s Russia, which seemed increasingly threatening as the 1990s progressed. Given Yugoslavia’s bloody implosion and the wars in Chechnya, they did not want to be left in a ‘security vacuum’ or ‘grey zone’.³⁰¹

It is noteworthy that Sweden and Finland at that time believed that continuing with their independent security policies was the best way forward – so as to avoid unnecessary confrontations with the Kremlin. But by joining the EU in 1995, they too signalled their political alignment with the ‘West’. A form of military reinsurance was also gained by involvement since 1994 in NATO’s new ‘Partnership for Peace’ initiative, which over the years developed into extremely close cooperation, including joint military exercises and intelligence exchange.³⁰² Contrary to the claims of current Russian propagandists, NATO then as much as today had no institutionally driven expansion plans aimed at encircling Russia.

Instead, an increasingly beleaguered Yeltsin, beset by continuous crises and turmoil at home, turned to historical revisionism. It was he who began to interpret the 2 + 4 Treaty as a ban on ‘NATO expansion’ east of Germany, on the basis that it only permitted alliance activities on East German territory. Yeltsin (and later Putin) claimed that the failure to mention Eastern Europe, together with the stipulated restrictions in relation to former GDR terrain, signified an implicit Western rejection of eastward enlargement. The ‘spirit of the treaty’, Yeltsin wrote to the new US president, Bill Clinton, in September 1993, thus ruled out ‘the option of expanding NATO territory eastward’.³⁰³

Three years later, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, while conceding that ‘unfortunately, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze [in 1990-91] were indifferent’ to the issue of NATO eastern enlargement, declared that it would be ‘unacceptable’ for ‘NATO’s infrastructure to move towards Russia’. Such an action, he added, would be ‘the real red line’. Furthermore, beyond these ‘vertical red lines’, he saw ‘horizontal ones’ including ‘such issues as the Baltics and Ukraine’ - countries that simply should not be eligible for NATO membership. The ‘barrier’ was above all ‘psychological’, he admitted, before reverting back to Russia’s baseline: the ‘reality’ that they could just not accept ‘that NATO is open to everyone.’ And yet, Primakov also insisted that Russia did ‘not want to see the U.S. leave Europe. We think,’ he continued, ‘your presence is in our interest.’³⁰⁴

So at the same time, negotiations were taking place that would culminate in the NATO-Russia Founding Act (NRFA), signed in Paris on 27 May 1997.³⁰⁵ This Act, which paved the way for cooperation between the two sides, came well before the Madrid summit in July of that year, during which the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were invited to join the Alliance.

Negotiations over the Founding Act had directly confronted the issue of enlargement for which Russia sought some kind of ‘compensation’ in the NFRA. At preliminary bilateral talks in Helsinki in March 1997, Clinton refused to respond to Yeltsin’s call for binding restrictions on the establishment of NATO security infrastructure in new member states. And Yeltsin’s attempt to introduce a Russian veto against NATO decisions into the Act – to be directed, for example, against a future round of expansion in the ex-Soviet republics, ‘particularly Ukraine’ – also failed.³⁰⁶

Even so, after all the display of public agreement before the world press following the Act’s signing, Yeltsin, in the face of domestic criticism, knowingly went on to mis-describe the content of the NFRA in a radio address to the Russian people. He spoke of it as a reinforcement of NATO’s promise to neither ‘deploy nuclear weapons’ in new member states nor to ‘build up its armed forces close to Russia’s borders’.³⁰⁷ It was another key moment, for Yeltsin’s misleading statement became a central propaganda motif of Russian state media ever since.

Still, a close reading of the historical records in both East and West shows that the well-established narrative of broken promises is simply not true. What is clear, however, is that the hardline-conservative segment of Soviet/Russian elites struggled from the outset with the realities that came with the dissolution of the wider Soviet empire and the USSR, all the while peddling a narrative of CEE ‘perfidy’ and a ‘disturbed balance’ of power – which, they claimed, worked to the advantage of NATO and the detriment of the USSR/Russia.³⁰⁸

*****

Ultimately, it was Russia’s leadership that over time ‘abandoned the notions of integration first into the West’ (under Boris Yeltsin), and ‘then with it’ (under Vladimir Putin), while looking to ‘define itself as a self-standing great power with global reach’.³⁰⁹ The relentless abuse of history by the Putin government ever since he acceded power in 2000 needs to be categorically rejected and decisively countered. His dangerous revisionism not only threatens an order based on peaceful resolution of conflicts, self-determination and inviolability of borders. In Putin’s mind, his versions of history as well as geography trump such principles. As he proclaimed in his declaration of war on 24 February 2022, the fact that on Russia’s ‘historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape’ is ‘a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation’. And, he threatened, if they stand in his way, he is prepared to threaten Europe and the United States with consequences ‘such as you have never seen in your entire history’.³¹⁰

The war, then, is about much more than Russia seeking to absorb Ukraine and potentially other parts of the Russian ‘near abroad’. Putin sees his country as engaged in a struggle against US presence in Europe and against the post-Wall global order at large. For the West, too, this is now a war that challenges more than just territorial borders. It also strikes at the heart of the character and rules that have governed the international system since 1945. The stakes are that high.

And while no clear exit from this brutal, multi-layered conflict appears in sight yet, we feel, nonetheless, that we have already entered a new era. With destruction on a scale not seen in Europe since 1945, with nine million displaced Ukrainians, with the global economy in crisis, with all trust towards and channels of communication with Russia completely broken, with NATO soon strengthened and widened once more by Finnish and Swedish membership, we find ourselves on a rocky road into new world, the nature of which is yet undetermined, the history of which is yet to be written.

Vladislav Zubok: ‘The roots of invasion’³¹¹

Two mythologised concepts became intertwined in Putin’s mind when he commanded the Russian army to invade Ukraine across the board in February 2022. The first concerned US global hegemony and what he believed was a US neo-containment strategy to weaken and ultimately undermine Russia as a Great Power. The second concerned the future of Ukraine and its statehood, which in his imagination became a pliant subject of Washington and, as such, an instrument aimed against Russia’s influence and interests. At some point in 2021, if not earlier, Putin began to plan for an invasion of Ukraine, to effectuate ‘a regime change’ in Kyiv. In July 2021, he published a programmatic article (commissioned from a group of trusted ‘historians’). Putin wanted the world to know that Ukrainians and Russians are historically ‘one nation’, divided by circumstances, the Soviet collapse, external machinations and internal enemies. Putin wrote: ‘Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning [it] into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia’.³¹² For the Russian leader, the supporters of sovereign Ukraine were the ‘Nazis’ and not independent actors. Rather, he wrote, they were subalterns in the geopolitical calculations of Washington and its allies, Eastern European countries, hostile to Russia. Putin repeated the same ideas in his pre-invasion speech on 21 February 2022.

Western leaders dismissed Putin’s narrative. The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, referred to the ‘absurd and mystical reasons’ offered by the Russian leader, ‘without a shred of justification’.³¹³ Months into the war, General Mark Milley, the head of the US Joint Chiefs, said that in his personal estimate, ‘Russia made a huge strategic miscalculation’. Putin blatantly violated international law and invaded a country ‘that posed no threat, no military threat to Russia … had no capability to attack Russia, and had no plan to attack Russia’.³¹⁴ Indeed, quoting a French comment on Napoleon two centuries earlier, Putin committed something ‘worse than a crime – it’s a mistake’. But what are the causes and reasons, if any, behind such a massive, horrible mistake?

For the Western political and military elites, the cause of the war lies purely in Putin’s personal folly, as well as in the authoritarian and aggressive nature of his regime. There is an established narrative that leaves almost no room for short-term geopolitical and domestic politics, for any geopolitical and historical settings rooted in the Soviet collapse and the rise of a new Russia. In this article, I argue that Putin’s war was a product of paranoid views, yet not in a clinical sense. His views have been driven by myths, yet they are not just a bundle of lies and deceptions. A myth is a powerful synthesis of actual developments, just a very biased one. Putin’s myths, like all myths, have grains of truth enveloped in wilful interpretations and self-fulfilling prophesies. They are also rooted in the traumatic and dynamic international developments of the years of the Soviet collapse and the decades after. And unfortunately, via relentless propaganda, those myths do appeal to the Russian mindset shaped by traumatic historical developments, such as collapse, survival, defeat and come-back, in an almost cyclical order.

The settings

It is tempting to look for the roots of the ongoing war as early as the Russian empire, perhaps even earlier, when geopolitics and backwardness shaped Russia’s uneasy relations with its neighbours, usually other empires, and periodic come-backs from ruins of statehood to new expansion and imperial glory. This deeper history certainly forms part of the persistent factors that continue to motivate Russian nationalist reactions to war and diplomacy. It is also useful to remember the periods of mutual alienation and hostility between ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’ that created a strong pattern. One scholar refers to the Russian state as an important ‘other’ in the European identity formation.³¹⁵ Another scholar explored a reciprocal effect of this on the Russian nationalist identity.³¹⁶ Yet all historical patterns, imperialist imaginations and nationalist grievances, however traumatic and deep, may fade away in one context and revive, like a dangerous virus, in another. Putin is the primary actor of the Ukrainian war, and it is safe to assume that the settings most relevant for this tragedy span through the last 30 years of his life, during the period that spans the Soviet collapse and the formation of a Russian state on the ruins of that collapse.

In 1989–91, the ideas of reformist communism espoused and empowered by Mikhail Gorbachev triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Soviet state. Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to return the Soviet Union into the ‘family of civilized nations’, meaning above all Western Europe and the United States. Instead, he allowed for the mobilisation of anti-Soviet nationalist projects that drove him out of power.³¹⁷ Gorbachev’s failure had another unintended effect: it destroyed a possibility of gradual integration of the entire Soviet space into Europe, which was his original design. Instead, every new ‘independent’ state in the post-Soviet space was on its own, looking up to the West as the sole centre of the international system, while operating in an intensely anarchic and insecure regional environment.

In 1992, Boris Yeltsin emerged as a primary winner of politics in the post-Soviet space. He pursued the mission of Russia’s ‘independence’ from the Soviet Union, and couched it in anticommunist and liberal terms. Western liberal ideas of the free market, open society, destruction of ‘empire’ and individualism briefly became a dominant trend among the educated professional groups of Russian society, including members of the ruling party and bureaucracy. The Cold War mentality in those groups gave way to almost euphoric pro-Western moods. Yeltsin and his supporters regarded the West, particularly the United States, as a teacher and eventually a partner.³¹⁸ At the same time, Yeltsin spoke about Russia as a Great Power, and regarded the future of the international community as a kind of new democratic ‘concert’ of Great Powers, not an alliance dominated by the United States. He also firmly believed that the Americans would help ‘his Russia’ to join this ‘concert’ not as a humiliated and defeated foe, but on the basis of equality and respect.

In Western governments, most significantly in Washington, London and Bonn, a political consensus developed in 1991. Its position was that Gorbachev should be encouraged and the Soviet Union should not be alienated, particularly by enlarging the boundaries of NATO. On 5 March 1991, the British ambassador to Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, wrote in his diary that John Major had reassured the Soviet defence marshal, Dmitry Yazov, that the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles would not join NATO.³¹⁹ The premise was that NATO had no purpose in expanding to Eastern Europe, and that such a move would undermine Gorbachev and badly hurt long-term prospects for stability and security in the region. Searching for evidence in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) archives, US scholar Joshua Shifrinson found a record of correspondence within ‘the quad’, the four-part consultative body of the key NATO allies, dated back to the Berlin crisis. The British participant reminded others: ‘We had made it clear during the 2 + 4 negotiations [on the reunification of Germany in 1990] that we would not extend the NATO beyond the Elbe (sic). We could not therefore offer membership in NATO to Poland and the others’.³²⁰

This evidence proves wrong the claim that Gorbachev and the Soviets ‘misunderstood’ NATO intentions in 1990–1. It also disproves the widespread assumption that the famous phrase of James Baker to Gorbachev in February 1991, that NATO would move ‘not one inch’ to the East, never concerned Poland and other Eastern European countries, but rather only East German territory. Mary Sarotte, in her well-sourced study of NATO expansion, concurs that Western reservations against NATO expansion into Eastern Europe were designed to support Gorbachev politically. There were, however, influential US policymakers who always wanted to leave the door ajar for Eastern European countries. The Soviet and subsequently post-Soviet Russian military and intelligence experts knew about it.³²¹

After the Soviet collapse, Western powers changed their calculations. A new map of Europe, energetic lobbying by the Poles and the Hungarians, and US domestic politics made NATO enlargement to Eastern Europe increasingly likely, then probable, and finally obvious. In 1994–5, Bill Clinton, acting largely in response to electoral politics and growing criticism of his foreign policy by the Republicans, openly proclaimed, first tentatively and then assertively, the desire to incorporate Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary into NATO. Many understood at the time that this introduced an indefinite ‘open doors’ policy on the part of the United States and the Atlantic Alliance. A furious debate erupted in the US political community. In 1997, George F. Kennan, the author of the containment policy of the Soviet Union, wrote an eloquent essay against the risks of NATO expansion. He stated that it would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era’. When NATO inevitably reached Russia’s borders, he warned, there would be conflict.³²²

Clinton and his people argued that NATO expansion was not a zero-sum game. It would allay historic security concerns for Eastern Europeans, doubly betrayed by Western democracies in the past century, but it would also address the security interests of Russia, the Soviet Union’s successor. Clinton’s entourage and many liberal theorists of international relations argued that NATO could not be a security threat to Russia: what kind of danger is it to have borders with peaceful democracies? Later, when Russia began to act increasingly assertively in its neighbourhood, the NATO expansionists in the United States and Eastern Europe began to argue that Kennan had been wrong all along. Russia’s behaviour had nothing to do with NATO, they said. And it was fortuitous that the bloc had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness to extend protection to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.³²³ The complex causality in this case, as with so many sensitive issues, was pushed aside by the reality of growing confrontation.

After Russia attacked Ukraine, Clinton revisited the debate in The Atlantic. He claimed that his administration ‘left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin’.³²⁴ This is a surprising assertion from the former US president. In the available records there is no trace of such a ‘clear’ message. In fact, the US leadership and its allies were quite consistent about not inviting Russia into NATO. Yeltsin’s strategist, Gennady Burbulis, related a revealing episode to this author. When Yeltsin had the Soviet Union dissolved in early December 1991, he immediately sent Burbulis to Brussels to meet with Manfred Wörner, the secretary general of NATO. Yeltsin’s envoy told him that Russian reformers ‘decisively consider a possibility of joining NATO as part of our primary mission to remove all conditions for confrontation’ in Europe and the world. Burbulis recalled that his words left Wörner

confused, if not shocked. He was silent for a couple of minutes and then looked into my eyes and said: ‘Mr State Secretary. Your confession is very unexpected for me. I think this is a very complicated task’. And almost without searching for arguments, he said: ‘You are such an enormous country. I cannot imagine under what configuration this may become reality’.³²⁵

The same limits of imagination characterised NATO and EU thinking about Russia in subsequent years.

Yeltsin did not give up. After Washington announced plans to expand NATO, the Russian leader asked his US partners repeatedly that Russia be ‘the first’ to be admitted to the alliance. This wish, however, had no chance of being granted. And not only because of Russia’s size and its borders with China. Geography and decades of history helped to create powerful stereotypes of Russia in the rest of Europe. The rapid end of the Cold War, Gorbachev’s heady rhetoric about ‘a common European home’, and Yeltsin’s ban on the Communist Party in 1991 could hardly change those stereotypes. For the European elite, Russia was not a good fit for European security structures. Instead, Russia, whether in its Soviet or post-Soviet ‘democratic’ guises, remained stuck in the role of ‘the other’, a role that continued to limit and define what ‘Europe’ was about.

Yeltsin hoped he could change this pattern. He still hoped to make Russia a member of Euro-Atlantic ‘concert’. The Russian president ended up disappointed and frustrated. The US hegemony, he began to suspect, was at the root of all this. Students of history know how Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, defined its triple mission: ‘To keep Americans in [Europe], Germans down, and Russians out’. This formula was expanded during the 1990s by a new component: ‘bringing Eastern Europeans in’. The Americans had played an indispensable role in balancing the European powers. The US hegemony in European affairs was reinforced by the accession of Poland, Czechoslovakia and later other countries from the former Soviet Bloc. And this hegemony, however benign, made it impossible for a Russia, democratic or authoritarian, to have a voice in European security affairs. In contrast, it gave a powerful voice to the actors that viewed Russia as a historic threat.

At the summit of Budapest in December 1994, Yeltsin castigated Clinton for presenting NATO as the only bedrock of European security, an institution that excluded Russia. The Russian warned of a ‘cold peace’. Sarotte writes that this episode caused a breakdown of trust, from which US-Russian cooperation never fully recovered. A few days later, Yeltsin ordered his military ‘to restore order’ in the secessionist region of Chechnya, in the hope of strengthening Moscow’s authority. This move backfired horribly. Yeltsin’s use of force in Chechnya reinforced the stereotype that the ‘good Bear’ could quickly turn into a ‘bad Bear’.³²⁶ In Eastern Europe and the United States, there had been always plenty of sceptics who did not want to bet on Russia becoming peaceful and democratic. Now, their warnings began to turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. In May 1997, Clinton and Yeltsin signed a Russia-NATO Founding Act that set up ‘the council’ where both could discuss issues. This stipulated:

NATO retains its full prerogatives. While Russia will work closely with NATO, it will not work within NATO. The Act makes clear that Russia has no veto over alliance decisions and NATO retains the right to act independently when it so chooses.³²⁷

In essence, Russia remained outside with no say in NATO’s ‘open door’ policy.

In spring 1999, Yeltsin became enraged again, this time over NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. The United States did this in spite of Russia’s protests and without a mandate from the UN Security Council. As Sarotte writes correctly, for many in Moscow, a combination of NATO’s incorporation of Eastern Europe and its military attack in the Balkans exposed US promises of Russia’s inclusion into a new European security architecture as a deceit. Yeltsin’s critics said: ‘Belgrade today, Moscow tomorrow!’ At a meeting with Clinton in Istanbul, Yeltsin angrily told the US president: ‘The US is not Europe. Europe should be the business of Europeans’.³²⁸

Soon the Russian president, once the hope of Russian democracy, resigned. In his bitter farewell speech, Yeltsin said he had been naïve to assume that Russia could leap ‘in one tug from the totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilised future’.³²⁹ Russian historian Andrei Zorin argued that Yeltsin’s speech signalled the end to a foundational myth of Russian democracy: that the country could make a big leap from misery and the stasis of the Cold War into economic prosperity and inclusion in a new Europe.³³⁰ At the very least, Yeltsin admitted in his speech that this myth was far removed from the country’s reality. The mythology of Russian democratisation included another important element: that the West, specifically the United States, would guide a submissive, cooperative Russia towards this future. Instead, in 1998 Russia suffered a domestic default, and US hegemony in Europe functioned in a way that was seen to ignore Russia’s security interests and play on its weakness. A competing myth, that Western promises of partnership were all one big deception, began to gain currency. It was intimately linked to mythology of Russian imperialism and nationalism.

Putin’s path to war

Vladimir Putin inherited from Yeltsin the wary approach to US hegemony and US strategic plans. During his first years as Russia’s president, he did not protest or remonstrate. Rather, he decided to prepare well and challenge US domination in Europe. On 21 February 2022, Putin expressly stated that Clinton had not reacted positively to his question about Russia joining NATO when he asked him in 2000. He commented that he and Yeltsin had repeatedly asked the US leadership to accept Russia into NATO. Clinton allegedly fudged a response.³³¹ The Russian president is well known for his capacity for deception. This time, however, the evidence was on his side. US denial only reinforced Putin’s conviction that the United States was stringing Russia along.

Putin’s fixation on Ukraine was initially not determined by NATO expansion. Yet the former gradually became a geopolitical background for the latter. Putin’s early career in the KGB and his work during the 1990s did not give him any special exposure to Ukraine’s language, culture and history. It is safe to say, though, that when Ukraine voted for independence in December 1991, Putin reacted like millions of other Russians, with a mixture of incredulity and emotional denial. The prospect of a ‘divorce’ between the two republics and the two peoples that had appeared inseparable happened too fast for the Russian mindset to adjust. Gorbachev and his liberal advisers (among them, some Armenians and Ukrainians) just could not conceive of Ukraine as a separate state, with its own army and navy. Yeltsin and most leading Russian democrats from Moscow and St Petersburg thought that it was impudence for the Ukrainians to claim Crimea, freighted with memories of Russian imperial glory, to be theirs. The Crimean peninsula was to become a bone of contention between Ukrainian and Russian states, just like Nagorno Karabakh became for Armenia and Azerbaijan.

A prominent Russian democrat, Anatoly Sobchak, became Putin’s boss in 1991, when the ex-KGB agent began his political career. The elected mayor of St Petersburg, Sobchak urged in August-September 1991 that Russia should make territorial claims on Ukraine, and not only on Crimea. He believed the existence of an independent Ukraine had the potential to trigger a war between Russia and Ukraine, similar to the one unfolding between Serbia and Croatia. There were too many economic and trade interests involved as well. ‘There would be no civilised divorce’ between Russia and Ukraine, he prophesied. Sobchak also expressed early fears of involvement by the West, which might aim to try to separate Ukraine from Russia. In autumn 1991, while speaking to a British consul, he accused the West of courting Ukrainian separatism. The British official replied that the West had no option but to deal with practical realities. Sobchak snapped back: ‘It was the West’s policy of recognising realities that allowed Hitler to rise to power’.³³² Sobchak’s views on Ukraine and the contested territories almost certainly reached Putin’s ears at the time and later, and must have resonated with his own views.

Some say now that Putin acted against Ukraine because he had never reconciled himself to the Soviet collapse, which KGB officers experienced as an almighty trauma which they sought to avenge. When we look into what happened during the last 30 years, however, this explanation does not reflect the whole truth. If Putin was always guided by this kind of thinking, why he did not seize south-eastern Ukraine in 2014–15 when there were no Ukrainian forces to offer strong resistance? And why did Putin, if he were a ‘sleeper’ agent of Soviet imperialism, tolerate Ukraine’s leaders pre-2014?

The answer to this enigma lies not only in Putin’s innate caution and opportunism, but rather in his transformation from the KGB officer who did accept the finality of the Soviet collapse into a Russian imperialist, who began to view history and the world through new lenses. George F. Kennan famously drew a difference between the world views of Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s Soviet communism. The former operated on a tight ‘now or never’ deadline, reacting to a dilemma: to use an imagined window of opportunity to build a Lebensraum for the German race or perish in the global struggle. The Soviet view, Kennan argued, was based on the Marxist credo that history was on the side of the Soviet way of life, as the more progressive system compared to capitalism. Stalin was reasonably cautious because he could afford to wait.

In 1991, Colonel Putin of the KGB acknowledged that Marx and Lenin were wrong, and he joined the ranks of those who made money and built Russian ‘wild capitalism’ by semi-legal and illegal means. During the 2000s, President Putin began to use a vastly different language. It was the language which his former boss Sobchak had used vis-à-vis Ukraine. And it reflected an outlook informed by Russian nationalism, not Soviet-inspired revenge.

In her in-depth study, Marlene Laruelle mapped out a remarkably diverse and bizarre metaverse of Russian nationalism: its attempts to expand into the past and into imaginary geopolitics stood in reverse to the physical retreat of the Russian state, its flailing weakness and corruption. Much of what Russian nationalist ‘thinkers’ and ‘philosophers’, such as Alexander Prokhanov and Alexander Dugin, postulated, was flotsam and jetsam of old Russian imperialism and Western geopolitical reveries, sometimes without any pretention of structure and logic, sometimes with a veneer of ‘scientific truth’.³³³ What was more important than crackpot ideas was the articulation of strong feelings. Russian national-imperialists had detested Gorbachev and Yeltsin for his pro-Western policies, and played a ressentiment card of Russia’s geopolitical retreat, humiliation and continuing marginalisation by the United States-led ‘first world’ or, as they preferred to call it, ‘the golden billion’. They wrote that after the Soviet collapse a mortal battle would ensue between ‘the Russian world’ and global liberal capitalism led by the United States. They painted the world in black and white and put a special focus on the Russians who were separated from the Russian Federation in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Soviet empire and stranded in the Baltic States and Ukraine. It was about living space and racial survival, without any room for compromise and peaceful co-existence.

In 1998, when the Clinton administration hosted a big gala in Washington for world leaders in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of NATO, even those Russians who persuaded themselves that they had not lost the Cold War felt it was a celebration in which Russia had no seat of honour. In 1999, when NATO began to bomb Serbia, the nationalist ressentiment broke out in a storm of indignation. Everyone could see that the US leadership and media took it upon themselves to redesign the rules of international behaviour, declaring sovereignty secondary to ‘the right to protect’ minorities. Not only a minority of Russian nationalists, but the majority of Russian elites at that point, reversed their attitudes to the United States. Those who previously trusted Western media almost unreflectingly for the first time bought into a different narrative of US ‘double-standards’, cunning and ideological hypocrisy. One no longer had to be a Russian nationalist to mistrust ‘America’. In fact, anti-Americanism became a new consensus-building principle for Russian national identity, in lieu of the missing ideology.³³⁴

When Yeltsin appointed him as successor, and during his first year in the Kremlin, Putin did not have to create anti-United States and anti-NATO paranoia because it was already predominant. A few liberals, mostly economic, who continued to tout the idea of Russia following the US lead, had been marginalised. Putin easily blended into this new consensus. For instance, in November 1999, he agreed with the minister of defence at the time that the United States was determined to weaken Russia and control the energy-rich Caspian Sea basin. Putin’s war in Chechnya was accompanied by claims that Russia had to reclaim its control over the Caucasus and continue to play its ‘historic’ role there, in view of the alleged US attempts to squeeze Russia out of the area.³³⁵ From today’s vantage point, Putin’s ‘pacification’ of Chechnya was the beginning a long and remarkably consistent trajectory to the invasion of Ukraine: same arguments and similar methods. Still, there is one variable. In 1999, Putin acted as a pragmatic geopolitically minded imperialist, but he did not display nationalist passions.

After 2004ʹs ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kyiv, it was no longer Yugoslavia, the Caucasus and the Caspian basin in the forefront of Russian nationalist ressentiment. Now Ukraine was seen to be a new battleground, one much closer to the homeland, and down to the very core of Russian identity. Indeed, only the question of Ukraine, and above all Crimea, had the potential of captivating millions, not just a few thousand ideologised nationalists in Russia. For many years, Putin continued to view the future of Ukraine-Russian relations through pragmatic geopolitical and economic lenses. His main task in 2000–5 was to consolidate his reign on the basis of arbitrage, corruption and a pyramid of patronal loyalties.³³⁶ Bolstered by oil profits after 2000, Putin and his increasingly corrupt entourage, as well as the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, were content to play the role of a regional hegemon in Ukraine, in both financial and cultural spheres. Western politicians and non-governmental organisation (NGOs), especially in North America and the UK, stopped short of a clear proactive policy of integrating Ukraine into NATO and the EU. Ukraine for them was too large, too poor and too corrupt, and Putin was given enough leeway to act with impunity. A lack of clear strategy from the Western alliance regarding Ukraine abetted Putin’s ambitions, but also allowed him to proceed without any clear strategy – in opportunistic fashion. His reaction to the first Maidan was an attempt to cut losses, enhance his room for economic manoeuvre, and wait and see. From 2005 he moved to circumvent Ukraine by new Russia-controlled pipelines in the north, such as Nord Stream 1 and then 2, and in the south via Turkey. Ukrainian officials accused Russia of imperialism and lobbied Washington and other European capitals to block the new pipelines. A compromise looked increasingly doubtful. Putin, however, believed that time was on his side; the Russian economy was on the rise, and Ukrainian elites seemed to be eminently corruptible.

In 2007, Putin challenged the US hegemony openly in his speech at the Munich security forum. Simultaneously, he funded the creation of ‘the Russian World’ (Russkyi Mir) foundation to reach out to Russians abroad. The primary target of this foundation was Russia’s ‘near abroad’, above all, Ukraine, where 12 million ethnic Russians lived and many more spoke Russian as their native language. Putin also allocated more funds to cultivate pro-Russian Ukrainians. At the time, however, it was hard to imagine that this bureaucratic initiative, a parody of a Western non-profit organisation, would become a symbol of militarised aggression.

In 2008, the context changed dramatically. At the meeting of the alliance in Bucharest, where Putin was present as ‘a guest’, President George W. Bush suddenly declared that Ukraine would join NATO, along with Georgia, in the future.³³⁷ It was not a well-prepared step, but rather the president’s inspired improvisation. At the same time, it stemmed logically from the unlimited doctrine of NATO enlargement, which Kennan and other critics had pointed to in the late 1990s. Much has been written on this milestone event, and today few doubt that Putin received it as an affront. The war in Georgia that ensued in August 2008 was the first use of Russian lethal force outside its borders and sent shocks to the Central and Eastern European countries. Some in Russia believed later that had the United States and its allies at the time reacted with a strong show of force, it would have sobered up Putin and punctured his hubris. It is hard, however, to conceive of the Bush administration, already mired in two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, opening a third front, this time in Russia.

A pragmatic reaction in Moscow would have been to boost Ukraine’s neutrality by peaceful means and capitalise on the growing interdependence of the Ukrainian and Russian economies. Yet the drift of Putin’s Russia towards authoritarianism and kleptocracy made more and more Ukrainians look towards the West, not Russia and its corrupt friends inside the Ukrainian elites, for solutions.

The Maidan Revolution of 2013–14 was the next milestone for Putin, when he believed he reacted to a US grand strategy to separate Russia and Ukraine. The Russian president viewed Ukraine’s rush ‘to join Europe’ not as a legitimate search for a separate identity from Russia, but as a US geopolitical operation to expand NATO and its hegemony in Eastern Europe, all the way to Russia’s borders. Yet Putin’s reaction this time was not to cut losses and regroup again.

Unexpectedly for Putin, Crimea played the role of a rotten apple that fell as if by itself into his lap. In reality, the apple effect was delivered by local corrupt officials, criminals, pro-Russian businessmen and Russian paramilitary ‘volunteers’. Some attentive analysts believe that Putin opportunistically appropriated ‘a victory’ of indigenous pro-Russian forces for himself. What if he refused to send Russian troops to secure this ‘victory’? Nobody knows what would have happened. Instead, Putin did use troops and rushed a local referendum, and then annexation of the peninsula without any concern for international legality.

The act of annexation made Putin a black sheep in the West and a de facto leader of all Russian nationalists; it also responded to the pent-up Russian ressentiment like no other single event since 1991. The Crimean affair set in motion a train of largely unpredictable and irreversible developments. The message of ‘the Russian world’ suddenly transformed from a bland bureaucratic propaganda into an act of violent expansionism. The Crimean success emboldened Russian paramilitary ‘volunteers’ to go further, to secure a land corridor from Crimea to Russia and to ‘liberate’ Russian-speaking Donbass. The ramshackle Ukrainian army, manned mostly by nationalist paramilitary and volunteers, attempted to clear Donbass from the pro-Russian separatists. Putin provided lethal support to the latter. A Russian missile shot down a Dutch civilian airline. This was not a brief incursion, like in Georgia, but the first act of protracted war between the two big Slavic states, that was unimaginable, but real since the autumn of 1991.

Some observers inside and outside Russia in 2014 called Crimea ‘a suitcase without a handle’ in Putin’s hands. Russian ultra-nationalists from the start of the affair blamed Putin for timidity: he should have grabbed the entire southern part of Ukraine, they argued. Without the land corridor, Crimea would be like a Hong Kong without Kowloon. The Obama administration led the West into sanctions that cut Crimea off from international markets, money and trade. The Ukrainian paramilitary and nationalists cut off the supply of water from the Dnipro to the arable lands of the peninsula. It would take Putin four years to construct a big bridge between mainland Russia and the peninsula. The Kremlin leader behaved like someone who had stumbled into a quagmire, yet refused to accept it. The lack of stronger and unified Western sanctions against the Russian economy convinced the Kremlin leader that Russia could wage and win a geopolitical battle over Ukraine with the United States. In reality, Putin was saddled with the Ukrainian question as a geopolitical challenge he could neither escape nor let go. The historians of the US war in Vietnam may have good insights into the issue of credibility at stake; yet, of course, any other parallels are inappropriate.

Triggers for invasion

Western inability to see any rationale in Putin’s aggression is rooted in the rational actor’s approach. Putin, however, constructed his rationale himself. Some believe that he at first launched a brainwashing campaign against ‘neo-Nazis’ in Ukraine and the ‘genocide of Russians’ in Donbass as an instrument of controlling Russian public opinion. Yet at some point he seemed to become one of the victims of this brainwashing. True or not, yet at some point he converted a virtual campaign for ‘the Russian world’ into reality – to the shock of his closest entourage and the rest of Russian society.

Those in Ukraine compare Putin with Hitler. For instance, many in Ukraine imply that the Russian leader was maniacally bent on aggression, and any sign of Western softness and readiness to negotiate only abetted him to attack. For a while, however, Putin acted according to Kennan’s comparison, not as a leader racing with time, but rather a pragmatic and careful accumulator of power and wealth. He did like to surprise the West with sudden initiatives, yet never went too far. He acted more often like a calculating mafia don than an impetuous, war-driven gambler.

With every round of action-reaction between him and the United States-led Western community, Putin sank deeper into the swamp of his own making. After 2011ʹs protests against his return to the presidency, he circled the waggons, and became encapsulated in an ever-smaller circle of lieutenants and advisors. One by one, his critics disappeared. Boris Nemtsov, who warned of Putin’s war against Ukraine, was killed. Alexey Navalny and many other protesters were thrown into prison or fled Russia; and droves of media outlets and journalists became stigmatised as foreign agents. The constitution adopted in 1993 by a national referendum was emasculated in 2020 in another ‘managed’ national referendum, when a passive majority voted for what the Kremlin boss wanted.

The most troubling part of the path to invasion is Putin’s construction of an invasion as an act of inevitability. Put simply, he convinced himself that time was no longer on his side, that he had to act now. Some Russian observers routinely link it to the impact of COVID-19 and his growing concern about his mortality, on the eve of his 70^th birthday.

There were, however, other concerns that might have played a role. The victory of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a well-known comic, against Petro Poroshenko, upended Putin’s calculations about the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian quagmire, the so-called ‘Minsk process’. The cast of characters of the Minsk format included Angela Merkel as well as Poroshenko, both predictable figures and individuals that Putin recognised and was ready to deal with. Suddenly, they left the scene. In the United States, Donald Trump disappointed Putin in another sense: he was rendered impotent by Congress and ‘Russiagate’ and was also ‘gone’ as a negotiating partner. Putin felt that he was without partners, in a sense like Stalin had found himself ‘alone’ after Roosevelt and Churchill were gone.

Zelenskyy, who became the president of Ukraine in May 2019, was a new type of politician with whom Putin did not know how to talk. He mistook the young Ukrainian leader, 26 years younger than he was, for a cartoonish character. He also reasoned that Zelenskyy would likely have his strings pulled by powerful interests in the West, above all the United States. Putin and his people always had important economic interests in Ukraine. Poroshenko, despite the war, preserved many ties between the two economies. Under Zelenskyy, Ukraine took a more resolute tilt to de-coupling from its economic ‘dependency’ on Russia in favour of ties with the West. In March 2020, the Ukrainian Rada approved the act of privatisation of Ukrainian lands. It was reported that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) linked this reform to the promise of a US$8 billion package.³³⁸ The multi-stage process included a national referendum to allow the sale of land to foreigners, and, in 2024, a possibility of foreign agrarian interests coming to Ukraine.³³⁹ While many in Ukraine feared that China would be the main beneficiary, the Kremlin had different geopolitical lenses. Putin’s paranoid geopolitics focused on the United States including Ukraine in its sphere of influence (as with the Caucasus earlier), as well as on the Americans becoming owners and stockholders of the Ukrainian economy and state. Some in the Kremlin expert community may have drawn parallels between Ukraine in 2020 and the history of US neo-colonial domination in Cuba and other Central American countries a century ago.

When did Putin decide to cut ‘the Gordian knot’ of the Ukrainian question? This may have happened when he discovered a ‘history of Ukraine’ that he instrumentalised for his purposes. History, even more than ideology, tended to fuel wild aggressive designs by nationalists and not only them. Someday we will learn more about the hidden story of Putin’s ‘article’ and whether it was a propaganda fig leaf for the ongoing military preparations, or an independent variable that served as the last straw.

The growing efforts of the US and UK military and intelligence organisations to prepare the Ukrainian state and army for a future war with Russia worried Putin. US cooperation with the Ukrainian forces dated back to the 1990s, and took a systematic nature after the annexation of Crimea.³⁴⁰ Putin’s actions were the main cause of this, yet he refused to see then, as well as later, that his actions actualised the ‘security dilemma’ and made Ukraine-United States military ties stronger. Putin’s ‘article’ was a big signal for the White House. And the calamitous withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan might have given Putin wrong ideas about the resolve of Washington and London.

It is unclear how the US intelligence ‘scoop’ in August 2021 affected the last months of pre-war politics in the Kremlin. Putin probably learned about Washington’s contingency plans to increase its military presence on Russian borders and regarded it as a self-fulfilling scenario. He also possibly had learned about the US decision to send significant amounts of defensive weaponry from the Pentagon’s arsenal to reinforce the Ukrainian military. For Washington planners, those were purely defensive measures, to deter Putin’s aggression.

By that time, however, the Kremlin leader must have fully justified for himself an act of aggression as a form of self-defence. He grew to believe that time was running out for his project to ensure Russia’s survival in a globalised world. If a compromise in Ukraine were unlikely on Russian terms, then the only choice for the Kremlin was between a decisive victory and a defeat of historic magnitude, on a par with the Soviet collapse. He had to act decisively, or Russia would go down. In February 2022, this warped ‘logic’, borrowed from radical Russian nationalist thinking, made Putin attack.

NATO’s policies, including its enlargement dynamics in the 1990s and 2000s, were not a trigger by themselves in Putin’s actions. At the same time, they were very much part of the historical and geopolitical context in his mind, as he was brooding about the Ukrainian question, and later contemplated an aggression. The causality chain became twisted and ultimately topsy-turvy. While the NATO leaders, above all the Americans, did not think seriously about the formal incorporation of Ukraine into the Alliance, for Putin it was an almost inevitable eventuality, and that required drastic military action. The perfidious Americans and British, he argued, promised that NATO would move ‘not one inch’ to the East, yet they then broke their pledge later. So they cheated the gullible Mikhail Gorbachev and his well-intended successor, Boris Yeltsin. Shortly before Putin’s invasion, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, cited in a television programme the memoirs of Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia, as evidence.

Mythologised history can be a mover and shaker of politics and wars, when it takes hold of people’s minds, particularly those at the helm of states. Western observers recognise this in a backhanded way, when they wonder why Russia’s vast bureaucracies, and the majority of its people, did not recoil in horror when their leader launched his war. Any investigations into the impact of NATO enlargement on the Russian elites have become sidelined by the war, and current security and geopolitical concerns in the West. Still, as this overview suggests, it would have been much better for Western leaders to acknowledge what happened in the 1990s without prevarication. A candid effort to get the story of NATO enlargement straight would probably not have stopped Putin or prevented the tragedy of Ukraine. But it would have settled the issue once and for all, and thus denied Putin, as well as his sympathisers in the West, any real grounds for credibility.

As the war lasts, with unexpected debacles for Putin’s military forces, an unprecedented Western-led attack on Russia’s finances and economy, and terrible carnage for Ukrainian civilians, the ‘fight or perish’ psychology becomes the means of last recourse for the Putin regime. For some members of Russian officialdom and a surprising number of Russians, myths of national survival in an epic battle against the West, tales of Russian fate and sacrifice, still remain a shield from the catastrophic reality. How resilient will this mythologised consciousness remain? Will it suddenly crumble one day, like the communist ideology from the last century? Or will it keep resurrecting as a phoenix, as it has several times in history? Only the near future can answer these questions.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ See Jim Holmes, ‘What Would Clausewitz Say about Putin’s War on Ukraine?’, US Naval Institute 148, 2022, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/march/what-would-clausewitz-say-about-putins-war-ukraine accessed 1 November 2022.

² In March 2022 President Zelenskyy complained that ‘for years we heard about the apparently open door’ [to NATO] ‘but have already also heard that we will not enter there’. Quoted in Isobel Koshiw, Jon Henley and Julian Borger, ‘Ukraine will not join Nato says Zelenskiy, as Kyiv Shelling Continues’, The Guardian, 15 March 2022. Two months later Ukraine’s foreign minister lamented that ‘13 years had passed’ since the Bucharest Summit of 2008 where NATO had agreed to keep a door open to Ukraine and ‘not a single step had been taken to implement that decision’. ‘NATO has not Taken a Single Step Since 2008 Towards Offering Ukraine MAP – Kuleba’, Ukrinform, 27 May 2022.

³ See Joel Hickman, ‘Why Finland and Sweden’s Accession Is a Game-Changer for NATO’, CEPA, 28 June 2022, https://cepa.org/article/why-finland-and-swedens-accession-is-a-game-changer-for-nato/ accessed 1 November 2022.

⁴ The full text of Putin’s speech delivered to the Russian nation on 24 February 2002 can be found in The Spectator, 24 February 2022.

⁵ Vincent Ni, ‘“They were Fooled by Putin”: Chinese Historians Speak out Against Russian Invasion’, The Guardian, 28 February 2022.

⁶ These famous words – ‘no limits’ and no ‘forbidden zone of cooperation’ – were in fact first used not in the 5000-word communique issued by Russia and China on 4 February 2002, but earlier. See ‘Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng: There is No Limit to the Friendship. No Forbidden Zone to the Cooperation and No Ceiling to the Mutual Trust between China and Russia’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 3 December 2021.

⁷ Ryan McMaken, ‘Russia and China Aren’t the Natural Allies Many Assume Them To Be’, Mises Institute, 24 February 2022, https://mises.org/wire/russia-and-china-arent-natural-allies-many-assume-them-be accessed 1 November 2022.

⁸ James Dobbins, Howard J. Shatz and Ali Wyne, ‘Russia is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China is a Peer Not a Rogue’, RAND Corporation, 2019, https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE310.html accessed 1 November 2022.

⁹ Andrew Roth, ‘Putin Compares Himself to Peter the Great in Quest to take back Russian Lands’, The Guardian, 10 June 2022; and Agnes Komaromi, ‘Two Conflicting Visions for Russia – Part I: Putin’s Favourite Tsar, Alexander III’, Hungarian Conservative, 2 November 2022.

¹⁰ Bobo Lo, Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing and the New Geopolitics (Washington: Brookings, 2008); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998); and Joseph Nye, ‘A New Sino-Russian Alliance?’ Project Syndicate, 12 January 2015, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-china-alliance-by-joseph-s–nye-2015-01 accessed 1 November 2022.

¹¹ ‘Leaders of the State Duma Factions met with Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress’, The State Duma, Moscow, 9 September 2022.

¹² ‘President Xi Jinping Meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The People’s Republic of China, 15 September 2022.

¹³ ‘Greeting to PRC President Xi JinPing on Re-election to Post of China’s Communist Party Central Committee’, President of Russia, Moscow, 23 October 2022.

¹⁴ Yang Sheng, ‘Chinese FM Informs Russia about 20^th CPC National Congress: “Any Attempt to Stop Two Countries from Marching Forward” Doomed to Fail’, Global Times, 28 October 2022.

¹⁵ For a useful collection of Mao’s thoughts about Stalin spanning the period 1938 to 1966, see ‘Mao’s Evaluations of Stalin: a Collection and Summary’, 6 September 2006, https://massline.org/SingleSpark/Stalin/StalinMaoEval.htm accessed 1 November 2022.

¹⁶ See Steven I. Levine, ‘Some Thoughts on Sino-Soviet Relations in the 1980s’, International Journal 34, no. 4 (1979): 649.

¹⁷ See Vladislav Zubok, ‘The Soviet Union and China in the 1980s: Reconciliation and Divorce’, Cold War History 17, no. 2 (2017): 121–41.

¹⁸ For a discussion of how official China reacted to Soviet collapse, see Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), 427–8.

¹⁹ For a full text of the 2001 Treaty, https://www.peaceagreements.org/view/1735 accessed 1 November 2022.

²⁰ Guangqiu Xu, ‘The Chinese Anti-American Nationalism in The 1990s’, Asian Perspective, 22 (1998): 193–218.

²¹ ‘China, Russia sign Pact’, World News, 23 April 1997.

²² See Putin’s famous Munich speech of 2007 where he describes unipolarity as being ‘unacceptable … impossible’ and leading to ‘unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions’. ‘Speech and Following Discussion at the Munich Security Conference’, President of Russia, February 10, 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/copy/24034 accessed 1 November 2022.

²³ See Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (London: William Collins, 2020).

²⁴ See also Peter Dickinson, ‘How Ukraine’s Orange Revolution Shaped Twenty-first Century Geo-politics’, The Atlantic Council, 22 November 2020.

²⁵ Putin could not have been clearer. Opening the door for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO put Russia in a ‘very complicated position’. See ‘Text of Putin’s Speech at NATO Summit (Bucharest, 2 April 2008)’, https://www.unian.info/world/111033-text-of-putin-s-speech-at-nato-summit-bucharest-april-2-2008.html accessed 1 November 2022.

²⁶ Michael Emerson, ‘Post-Mortem on Europe’s First War of the 21^st Century’, CEPS Policy Brief, 167, 27 August 2008.

²⁷ See Patrick C. Terry, ‘The Libya Intervention (2011); Neither Lawful nor Successful’, The Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa, 48 (2015): 162–82.

²⁸ ‘Security Council Fails to Adopt Draft Resolution on Syria as Russian Federation, China Veto Text Supporting Arab League’s Proposed Peace Plan’, United Nations Meeting Coverage, Security Council, 5 February 2012, https://press.un.org/en/2012/sc10536.doc.htm accessed 1 November 2022.

²⁹ Nicholas Wong, ‘China’s Veto on Syria: what Interests are at Play?’, Open Democracy, 25 July 2012.

³⁰ David M. Herszenhorn and Chris Buckley, ‘China’s New Leader, Visiting Russia, Promotes Nations’ Economic and Military Ties’, New York Times, 22 March 2013.

³¹ Zachary Keck, ‘China-Russia Relations Endure? With Xi JinPing in Moscow and Beijing’s Interests Overlap on More Issues than is Often Realised’, The Diplomat, 23 March 2013.

³² ‘Chinese President Xi JinPing in Russia for First Foreign Tour’, BBC News, 22 March 2013.

³³ Herszenhorn and Buckley, ‘China’s New Leader, Visiting Russia, Promotes Nations’ Economic and Military Ties’, New York Times, 22 March 2013.

³⁴ Quoted in Shannon Tiezzi, ‘China Backs Russia on Ukraine’, The Diplomat, 4 March 2014.

³⁵ ‘Putin seeks BRICS Moves to Protect against U.S. “Sanction Attacks”’, Reuters, 14 July 2014.

³⁶ Alexander Gabuev, ‘Friends with Benefits? Russian-Chinese Relations after the Ukraine Crisis’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 29 June 2016, https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/06/29/friends-with-benefits-russian-chinese-relations-after-ukraine-crisis-pub-63953 accessed 1 November 2022.

³⁷ Quote in Nysha Chandran, ‘Serious Rivalry still Drives China-Russia Relations Despite Improving Ties’, CNBC, 14 September 2018.

³⁸ Olga Alexeeva and Frederic Lassere, ‘The Evolution of Sino-Russian Relations as seen from Moscow: the Limits of Strategic Rapprochement’, China Perspectives 3 (2018): 69–77.

³⁹ In May 2014, President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the China-Russia Joint Statement on a New Stage of Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination.

⁴⁰ See Gaziza Shakhanova and Geremy Garlick, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union: Exploring the “Greater Eurasian Partnership”’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 39 (2020): 33–57.

⁴¹ Veerle Nouwens and Sarah Lain, ‘What’s Behind Sino-Russia Exercises in the South China Seas?’ RUSI, 22 September 2016.

⁴² Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, ‘Putin brings China’s Great Firewall to Russia in Cybersecurity Pact’, The Guardian, 29 November 2016.

⁴³ ‘Russia Among 37 States Backing China’s Policy in Xinjiang’, The Moscow Times, 13 July 2019.

⁴⁴ Siemon T. Wezeman, ‘China, Russia and the Shifting Landscape of Arms Sales’, SIPRI, 5 July 2017.

⁴⁵ Alec Blivas, ‘Sino-Russian Military Exercises Signal a Growing Alliance’, US Naval Institute, June 2021. See also Richard Weitz, Sino-Russia Security Ties, NBR Special Report 66, 17 July 2017, https://www.nbr.org/publication/sino-russian-security-ties/ accessed 1 November 2022.

⁴⁶ The quote on ‘no limit’ military cooperation between China and Russia can be found in U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, 20 April 2022.

⁴⁷ Zaheena Rasheed, ‘Why are China and Russia Strengthening Ties?’, Al Jazeera, 25 November 2021.

⁴⁸ Quote from Nigel Gould Davis of the IISS can be found in ibid.

⁴⁹ Feng Zhang, ‘China’s Response to the U.S. Rebalance to China’, Security Challenges 12 (2016): 45–60.

⁵⁰ See for example, Minghao Zhao, ‘Is a New Cold War Inevitable? Chinese Perspectives on US-Strategic Competition’, Chinese Journal of International Politics 12 (2019): 371–94.

⁵¹ See ‘U.S. Views of China Turn Sharply Negative Amid Trade Tensions’, Pew Research Center, 13 August 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/08/13/u-s-views-of-china-turn-sharply-negative-amid-trade-tensions/ accessed 1 November 2022.

⁵² ‘Trends in Chinese Reporting on the European Union’, European Parliament, 2021, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/690710/EPRS_BRI(2021)690710_EN.pdf accessed 1 November 2022.

⁵³ See ‘China’s Place on the NATO Agenda’, IISS 27 (2021).

⁵⁴ Rhyannon Bartlett-Imagawa, ‘NATO, Asia Pacific Partners Agree to Bolster Cooperation’, Nikkei Asia, 8 April 2022.

⁵⁵ ‘NATO is Systemic Challenge to Global Security and Stability’, People’s Daily, 5 July 2022.

⁵⁶ As early as 2012 Putin had been arguing that ‘domestic socio-economic problems that have become worse in industrialised countries as a result of the (economic) crisis are weakening the dominant role of the so-called historical West’. See Thomas Grove, ‘Russia’s Putin says the West is in Decline’, Reuters, 9 July 2012.

⁵⁷ Charles S. Kupchan, ‘The Right Way to Split China and Russia: Washington Should Help Moscow Leave This Bad Marriage’, Foreign Affairs, 4 August 2021.

⁵⁸ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828 accessed 11 November 2022. Also see ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 24 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843 accessed 11 November 2022.

⁵⁹ For example, Serhy Yekelchyk, The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

⁶⁰ Most recently, M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale, 2021).

⁶¹ Sarotte, Not One Inch, 1.

⁶² ‘Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy’, President of Russia, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/copy/24034 accessed 25 February 2022.

⁶³ An exception is the study of 1993–5 by Liviu Horovitz, ‘A “Great Prize,” But Not the Main Prize: British Internal Deliberations on Not-Losing Russia, 1993–1995’, in Oxana Schmies, ed., NATO’s Enlargement and Russia: A Strategic Challenge in the Past and Future (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2021), 85–113. Also, Andrew Monaghan, ed., The UK and Russia: A Troubled Partnership, Part 1 (Swindon: Conflict Studies Research Centre, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, 2007); Andrew Monaghan, ‘UK-Russia Relations: A Bad Case of Mutual Misunderstanding’, The Foreign Policy Centre, 2011; Richard Sakwa, ‘Russo-British Relations in the Age of Brexit’, IFRI, February 2018.

⁶⁴ In general, Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and Sarotte, Not One Inch.

⁶⁵ NATO, ‘20 Years Ago: London Declaration Marks Birth of New NATO’, 2 July 2010, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_64790.htm?selectedlocale=en accessed 11 November 2022; NATO,’ Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance’, 6 July 1990, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_23693.htm accessed 11 November 2022.

⁶⁶ John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (London: Sceptre, 2011), 374.

⁶⁷ Douglas Hurd, ‘Making the World a Safer Place: Our Five Priorities’, Daily Telegraph, 1 January 1992.

⁶⁸ Joint Declaration by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Russian Federation, 30 January 1992, https://johnmajorarchive.org.uk/1992/01/30/mr-majors-joint-declaration-with-the-russian-federation-30-january-1992/ accessed 2 December 2022.

⁶⁹ UN Security Council, Note by President of the Security Council, S/23500, 31 January 1992, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/196971?ln=en accessed 4 December 2022.

⁷⁰ Treaty on the Principles of Relations between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Russian Federation, 9 November 1992, https://london.mid.ru/en/press-centre/gb_en_relations_8/ accessed 2 December 2022.

⁷¹ ‘How Yeltsin Helped Thaw the Big Freeze with Britain’, The Guardian, 23 April 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/23/russia.uk accessed 2 December 2022.

⁷² NATO, Declaration of the Heads of State and Government, 11 January 1994, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24470.htm?mode=pressrelease accessed 2 December 2022.

⁷³ ‘Mr Major’s NATO Summit Statement – 10 January 1994’, https://johnmajorarchive.org.uk/1994/01/10/mr-majors-nato-summit-statement-10-january-1994/ accessed 2 December 2022.

⁷⁴ Sir Brian Fall, 2017, 71–3, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge (BDOHP). Also, ‘Elizabeth II visits Russia on Wave of Royal Gossip’, Washington Post, 18 October 1994.

⁷⁵ Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 171–82.

⁷⁶ Hurd to Prime Minister, ‘Russia’, November 21, 1994, PREM19/5227, The UK National Archives, Kew, UK (TNA).

⁷⁷ Defence Secretary to Prime Minister, ‘Chequers Seminar’, 5 January 1995, PREM 19/5227, TNA.

⁷⁸ See Horovitz, ‘A “Great Prize,” But Not the Main Prize’, 85–113.

⁷⁹ Clinton-Blair Transcripts, Telcon, 8 February 2000, William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum, Clinton Digital Library, Little Rock, Arkansas (CDL).

⁸⁰ Clinton-Blair Transcripts, Telcon, 27 May 2000, CDL.

⁸¹ For example, Condoleezza Rice, ‘Promoting the National Interest’, Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 45–62.

⁸² NATO, Founding Act, 27 May 1997, https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm accessed 2 December 2022. For an early account, Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 9/11 to 9/11 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 122–5, and, for the latest, Sarotte, Not One Inch, 275–300.

⁸³ UNSC, S/1999/328, 26 March 1999, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/document/kos-s-1999-328.php accessed 1 December 2022.

⁸⁴ On Kosovo, James Ellison, ‘The Search for World Order and the Wars in Kosovo and Iraq’, Britain and the World 14, no. 1 (2021): 69–93; and M. E. Sarotte, ‘From the Soviet Collapse to the Kosovo Crisis: The Role of Mistaken Assumptions’, Cold War History 21, no. 4 (2021): 594–9.

⁸⁵ Rodric Braithwaite, ‘NATO Enlargement: Assurances and Misunderstandings’, ECFR, 7 July 2016.

⁸⁶ Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), 243–4.

⁸⁷ Blair, Journey, 244–5. Also, Sir Roderic Lyne, 2006, 53–5, BDOHP.

⁸⁸ House of Commons, Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘Relations with the Russian Federation’, 15 February 2000, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmfaff/101/10102.htm accessed 9 December 2022.

⁸⁹ ‘Blair Courts Outrage with Putin’, The Guardian, 11 March 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/11/russia.ethicalforeignpolicy accessed 9 December 2022. Also, Blair, Journey, 244.

⁹⁰ ‘News Conference Following Russian-British Talks’, President of Russia, 17 April 2000, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21379 accessed 9 December 2022.

⁹¹ ‘News Conference Following Russian-British Talks’, President of Russia, 21 November 2000, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21123 accessed 9 December 2022.

⁹² Clinton-Blair Transcripts, Telcon, 23 November 2000 CDL.

⁹³ ‘Blair Happy to be Putin’s Link to the West’, CNN, 21 November 2000, http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/11/21/blair.putin/index.html accessed 9 December 2022.

⁹⁴ See, Ellison, ‘Search for World Order’, 83–6.

⁹⁵ Lyne, 123, BDOHP.

⁹⁶ Ibid.

⁹⁷ ‘Joint Press Conference with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’, President of Russia, 21 December 2001, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21456 accessed 30 October 2022.

⁹⁸ Lyne notes that Blair’s NATO-Russia Council proposal was made despite opposition in the US Pentagon and among some NATO members. Lyne, 123, BDOHP.

⁹⁹ Angela Stent, ‘The Impact of September 11 on US-Russian Relations’, Brookings, 8 September 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/09/08/the-impact-of-september-11-on-us-russian-relations/ accessed 8 December 2022.

¹⁰⁰ Lyne, 124–5, BDOHP.

¹⁰¹ Blair, Journey, 451.

¹⁰² ‘U.K.-Russia Relations’, C-SPAN, 26 June 2003, https://www.c-span.org/video/?177193-1/uk-russia-relations accessed 9 December 2022.

¹⁰³ ‘Statement and Answers to the Questions at the Press Conference at the Conclusion of Talks with Prime Minister of Great Britain Anthony Blair’, President of Russia, 27 June 2003, http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/copy/48208 accessed 9 December 2022.

¹⁰⁴ Lyne, 59, BDOHP.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 56–9.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 60.

¹⁰⁷ Blair, Journey, 359 and 451.

¹⁰⁸ ‘Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 25 April 2005, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931 accessed 9 December 2022.

¹⁰⁹ ‘Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy’, President of Russia, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/copy/24034 accessed 25 February 2022.

¹¹⁰ Blair, Journey, 245 and 359.

¹¹¹ On 29 March 2004, seven nations joined NATO, six of whom were former Soviet Bloc states. On 1 May 2004, 10 nations joined the EU, including eight former Soviet Bloc states.

¹¹² Sir Anthony Brenton, 2010, 26, BDOHP.

¹¹³ ‘Under Russia’s Spy-rock Scandal’, Christian Science Monitor, 25 January 2006; and UK Parliament, Hansard, Volume 453, ‘Alexander Litvinenko’, 27 November 2006, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2006-11-27/debates/0611275000004/AlexanderLitvinenko accessed 1 December 2022.

¹¹⁴ ‘Russia Suspends British Council Regional Offices’, Reuters, 12 December 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-britain-council-idUSL1288433020071212 accessed 1 December 2022. Brenton, 26–7, BDOHP.

¹¹⁵ UK Parliament, HC 695, The Litvinenko Inquiry, 21 January 2016.

¹¹⁶ House of Commons, Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘Global Security: Russia’, 7 November 2007.

¹¹⁷ House of Commons, Defence Committee, ‘Russia: A New Confrontation?’, 30 June 2009.

¹¹⁸ UK Parliament, Cm 7948, ‘Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review’, October 2010.

¹¹⁹ ‘Russian Spies in UK “at Cold War Levels”, says MI5’, The Guardian, 29 June 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/29/russian-spies-cold-war-levels accessed 1 December 2022.

¹²⁰ The White House, ‘U.S.-Russia Relations: “Reset” Fact Sheet’, 24 June 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/us-russia-relations-reset-fact-sheet accessed 9 December 2022.

¹²¹ UK Government, ‘NATO Statement’, 22 November 2010, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nato-statement accessed 9 December 2022.

¹²² Dame Anne Pringle, 2018, 33 and 36, BDOHP.

¹²³ House of Commons Library, Research Briefing 7135, Military Assistance to Ukraine, 2014–2021, 4 March 2022.

¹²⁴ UK Government, ‘Strengthening the NATO Alliance: Article by David Cameron and Barack Obama’, 4 September 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/strengthening-the-nato-alliance-article-by-david-cameron-and-barack-obama accessed 9 December 2022.

¹²⁵ Mission of Ukraine to the European Union, ‘Protocol’, 5 September 2014, https://ukraine-eu.mfa.gov.ua/en/news/27596-protocolon-the-results-of-consultations-of-the-trilateral-contact-group-minsk-05092014 accessed 9 December 2022.

¹²⁶ UK Parliament, Ukraine: Question for Ministry of Defence, 11 September 2014, https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2014-09-11/209093 accessed 9 December 2022; Ukraine: Equipment, Statement, 20 October 2014, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldhansrd/text/141020-wms0001.htm#1410206000082 accessed 9 December 2022; Service Personnel (Ukraine), 25 February 2015, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2015-02-25/debates/15022591000002/ServicePersonnel(Ukraine) accessed 9 December 2022; Defence Secretary announces further UK support to Ukrainian Armed Forces, 6 March 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-secretary-announces-further-uk-support-to-ukrainian-armed-forces accessed 9 December 2022; and ‘UK Relationship with Ukraine Strengthened by Defence Agreement’, 18 March 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-relationship-with-ukraine-strengthened-by-defence-agreement accessed 9 December 2022.

¹²⁷ UK Parliament, Cm 9161, ‘National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015’, November 2015.

¹²⁸ ‘PM Speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet’, 13 November 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-to-the-lord-mayors-banquet-2017 accessed 29 October 2022.

¹²⁹ UK Government, ‘Novichok Nerve Agent use in Salisbury: UK Government Response, March to April 2018’, 18 April 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/novichok-nerve-agent-use-in-salisbury-uk-government-response accessed 9 December 2022.

¹³⁰ Statement by General Mark Carleton-Smith, RUSI Land Warfare Conference, June 2018.

¹³¹ UK Parliament, HC 932, ‘Moscow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK’, 21 May 2018.

¹³² Chatham House, ‘Managed Confrontation: UK Policy Towards Russia After the Salisbury Attack’, October 2018.

¹³³ UK Parliament, Intelligence and Security Committee, Press Notice, 21 July 2020.

¹³⁴ UK Parliament, HC 632, Intelligence and Security Committee, ‘Russia’, 21 July 2020.

¹³⁵ Chatham House, ‘The UK’s Kleptocracy Problem’, 8 December 2021.

¹³⁶ ‘Why It Took the UK a Long Time to Become a Russia Hawk’, Financial Times, 24 April 2022.

¹³⁷ UK Parliament, CP 403, ‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age’, March 2021. Also, UK Parliament, CP 411, ‘Defence in a Competitive Age’, March 2011.

¹³⁸ ‘The Russia Challenge for “Global Britain”’, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 19 March 2021, https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2021/03/russia-uk-integrated-review accessed 1 December 2022.

¹³⁹ ‘Remarks by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked and Unjustified Aggression on Ukraine’, The White House, 24 February 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine/ accessed 11 December 2022.

¹⁴⁰ Ivo Daalder, ‘The Return of Containment’, Foreign Affairs, 1 March 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-03-01/return-containment accessed 11 December 2022.

¹⁴¹ For further on these points, see my recent book: Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

¹⁴² Robert Kaplan, ‘The Ukrainian Pivot: Why NATO Is More Crucial Than Ever’, The National Interest, 24 February 2022, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukrainian-pivot-why-nato-more-crucial-ever-200805 accessed 11 December 2022.

¹⁴³ ‘Finnish President: Putin Took NATO Application News “Very, Very Calmly”’, Foreign Policy, 3 June 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/03/sauli-niinisto-interview-nato-putin/ accessed 9 December 2022.

¹⁴⁴ Cited in ‘How Putin’s Assault on Ukraine Turned Europe’s Russia Policy on its Head’, Financial Times, 1 March 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/c60bf50e-27f2-495f-a57c-d025416f6ab3?shareType=nongift accessed 7 December 2022.

¹⁴⁵ For a more detailed discussion see Hanhimäki, Pax Transatlantica, 42–94.

¹⁴⁶ ‘Biden and Macron Take on War in Ukraine, Trade Issues in Bilateral Meeting’, Politico, 1 December 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/01/biden-macron-united-front-meeting-00071590 accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁴⁷ For a summary of the pessimistic economic outlook for 2023 see: ‘Confronting the Crisis’, OECD Economic Outlook 2022, Volume 2, https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/f6da2159-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/f6da2159-en accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁴⁸ ‘U.S.-Europe Trade Booms as Allies Draw Closer’, Wall Street Journal, 10 November 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-europe-trade-booms-as-old-allies-draw-closer-11668914679 accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁴⁹ Daniel Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan, Transatlantic Economy 2022, https://transatlanticrelations.org/publications/transatlantic-economy-2022/ accessed 10 December 2022. Also see Hanhimäki, Pax Transatlantica, 68–94.

¹⁵⁰ Cited in ‘In Washington, Macron goes on the Offensive for Europe’, Le Monde, 1 December 2022, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2022/12/01/in-washington-macron-goes-on-the-offensive-for-europe_6006276_7.html accessed 11 December 2022.

¹⁵¹ On the way personal experience influences policymakers, see Robert Jervis, Perceptions and Misperceptions in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. 239–70.

¹⁵² See, for example, ‘National Security Council Report, NSC 68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”’, 14 April 1950, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, US National Archives, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116191 accessed 1 December 2022. ‘Remarks by President Biden on the United Efforts of the Free World to Support the People of Ukraine’, Royal Castle, Warsaw, Poland, The White House, 26 March 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-united-efforts-of-the-free-world-to-support-the-people-of-ukraine/ accessed 12 September 2022. See also Biden’s State of the Union address on 1 March, ‘Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address as Prepared for Delivery’, The White House, 1 March 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/01/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-delivered/ accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁵³ Anton Troianovski and Javier C. Hernandez, ‘Putin Goes into Battle on a Second Front: Culture’, New York Times, 25 March 2022.

¹⁵⁴ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 24 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843 accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁵⁵ ‘P. Shelest’s Analysis for the CPSU CC’, 21 May 1968, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, TsDAHOU, F. 1, Op. 25, Spr. 28, Ll. 102–12, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113082 accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁵⁶ Mark Kramer, ‘The Kremlin, the Prague Spring, and the Brezhnev Doctrine’, in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), esp. 329–34.

¹⁵⁷ Document No. 128: Unofficial Enunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, 16 September 1968, excerpts, in Jaromir Navratil, ed., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 502–3.

¹⁵⁸ ‘Russian Documentary on “Helpful” 1968 Invasions Angers Czechs’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1 June 2015.

¹⁵⁹ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 24 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843 accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁶⁰ Artemy Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Odd Arne Westad, Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially ch. 10; and Anatoly Chernyaev’s diary from Soviet Politburo meetings on 13 November 1986, and 21–22 January 1987, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/220088 and https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117230 both accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁶¹ See Putin’s article, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, President of Russia, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 accessed 12 September 2022. See also his speech on Ukraine, 24 February 2022.

¹⁶² ‘Session of the CPSU CC Politburo’, 10 December 1981, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, TsKhSD, F. 89, Op. 66, D. 6, L1. 1–11, translated by Mark Kramer, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/110482 accessed 12 September 2022. See also the remarks by Mikhail Suslov at the same session.

¹⁶³ In his 21 February 2022 ‘Address to the People of Russia on the Donbas Problems and the Situation in Ukraine’, Putin complained that the West rejected Russia’s proposal of a European Security Treaty in 2008 and new Russian proposals in December 2021, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/vladimirputindonbassandukraine.htm accessed 12 September 2022. On the 2008 and 2021 Russian proposals, see Vladimir Socor, ‘Medvedev Proposes All-European Security Pact during Berlin Visit’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 9 June 2008; Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Erlanger, ‘Russia Lays out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal with NATO’, New York Times, 17 December 2021.

¹⁶⁴ X (George Kennan), ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs 25 (1947): 857.

¹⁶⁵ For an Argument about Brezhnev’s Reliance on his International Stature vis-à-vis the United States, see Vladislav Zubok, ‘The Soviet Union and Détente of the 1970s’, Cold War History 8, no. 4 (2008): 427–47.

¹⁶⁶ Yasser Ali Nasser, ‘Ukraine War Looks Different in the Global South’, Democratic Left, 8 July 2022.

¹⁶⁷ Natasa Miskovic, Harald Fischer-Tine and Nada Boskovska, eds., The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi-Bandung-Belgrade (New York: Routledge, 2014).

¹⁶⁸ Lorenzo Kamel, ‘Hong Kong, Ukraine, and the Rise of the Global South’, The National Interest, 20 July 2022; and James Traub, ‘Cold War 2.0 is Ushering in Nonalignment 2.0’, Foreign Policy, 9 July 2022.

¹⁶⁹ Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Quote from 76.

¹⁷⁰ Christian F. Ostermann, Between Containment and Rollback: The United States and the Cold War in Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021); and Steven J. Brady, Eisenhower and Adenauer: Alliance Maintenance under Pressure, 1953–1960 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

¹⁷¹ Catey Edmonson, ‘Annotated Transcript: Zelenskyy’s Speech to Congress’, New York Times, 16 March 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/transcript-zelensky-speech.html accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁷² ‘Address by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Bundestag’, President of Ukraine, 17 March 2022, https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/promova-prezidenta-ukrayini-volodimira-zelenskogo-u-bundesta-73621 accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁷³ Willy Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, trans. by J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978); Olaf Scholz, ‘The Global Zeitenwende: How to Avoid a New Cold War in a Multipolar Era’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023. The article was published in December 2022.

¹⁷⁴ Egon Bahr, ‘Change through Rapprochement’, GHDI, 15 July 1963, https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=81 accessed 12 September 2022.

¹⁷⁵ Jonathan Stern, ‘Gas Pipeline Co-operation Between Political Adversaries: Examples from Europe’, Chatham House, January 2005; Felix K. Change, ‘Legacy of Ostpolitik: Germany’s Russia Policy and Energy Security’, e-notes, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 8 May 2014; and German Eastern Business Association, ‘50 Years of Pipes for Gas: German-Russian Century Deal and German-American Economic Crimes Novel’, Mittel- und Osteuropa Jahrbuch 2020, 17 June 2020.

¹⁷⁶ Elizabeth Pond, ‘W. Germans Sign Huge Pipelines Deal with Soviets and get just what they Wanted’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 November 1981.

¹⁷⁷ Patrick Wintour, ‘“We Were all Wrong”: How Germany got Hooked on Russian Energy’, The Guardian, 2 June 2022.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid.

¹⁷⁹ In November 2022, German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) declared that ‘knowing what we do today, the decision to pursue Nord Stream 2 following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was Germany’s contribution to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine’. He observed that Germany must ‘confront this truth directly’. Cited in Gabriel Rinaldi, ‘Berlin’s Push for Nord Stream 2 Contributed to Ukraine War, German Minister says’, Politico, 29 November 2022.

¹⁸⁰ Katrin Bennnold and Erika Solomon, ‘The Shadowy Arm of a German State Helped Russia Finish Nord Stream 2’, New York Times, 2 December 2022. On Warnig’s close relationship with Putin since they met in 1991, see Dirk Banse and Florian Flade, ‘Circles of Power: Putin’s Secret Friendship with ex-Stasi Officer’, The Guardian, 13 August 2014. On Warnig’s key role in Nord Stream 2, see Loveday Morris, Kate Brad and Souad Mekhennet, ‘Flows of Russian Gas and Cash Entangled German State in Dependent Web’, Washington Post, 23 November 2022.

¹⁸¹ Scholz, ‘The Global Zeitenwende’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023.

¹⁸² AFP, ‘Ost- und Westdeutsche sind im Ukraine-Konflikt gespalten’, t-online, 3 February 2022.

¹⁸³ Pia Lamberty, Corinne Heuer and Josef Holnburger, ‘Belastungsprobe für die Demokratie: Pro-russische Verschwörungserzählungen und Glaube an Desinformation in der Gesellschaft’, Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, Berlin, November 2022, https://cemas.io/publikationen/belastungsprobe-fuer-die-demokratie/2022-11-02_ResearchPaperUkraineKrieg.pdf accessed 10 December 2022. See also Dmitry Vachedin, trans. by Emily Laskin, ‘“There are Many Losing Sides in this War, Germany Among Them”. A New Poll Suggests that Russian Propaganda has Swayed German Public Opinion’, Meduza, 6 November 2022.

¹⁸⁴ ‘Umfrage zum Ukraine-Krieg: Duetsche zweifeln an Effekt von Ölsanktionen’, ntv, 7 June 2022.

¹⁸⁵ ‘Meinungsumfragen: Deutsche empfinden Gesellschaft als gespalten – grosse Unterschiede beim Thema Ukraine’, Tagesspiegel, 27 July 2022.

¹⁸⁶ Yehonatan Abramson, Dean Dulay, Anil Menon and Pauline Jones, ‘Why are Germans Losing Enthusiasm for Helping Ukraine?’, The Monkey Cage, Washington Post, 25 November 2022.

¹⁸⁷ ‘Umfrage: Ost und West reagieren unterschiedlich auf Krieg’, Zeit Online, 16 April 2022.

¹⁸⁸ ‘Ukraine-Krieg spaltet Deutschland-in Ost und West’, RTL News, 6 September 2022.

¹⁸⁹ Katrin Bennnold and Erika Solomon, ‘The Shadowy Arm of a German State Helped Russia Finish Nord Stream 2’, New York Times, 2 December 2022.

¹⁹⁰ Melissa Eddy (the New York Times Berlin bureau chief) speaking to the American Council on Germany, Zoom, 5 December 2022. Eddy was speaking in a personal capacity, not for the newspaper.

¹⁹¹ Ben Knight, ‘What’s Behind Eastern Germans’ Empathy for Russia?’, Deutsche Welle, 27 May 2022. Schwedt is now using some US crude oil brought by ship to the port of Rostock and then by truck to Schwedt, and in early December, Germany and Poland came to an agreement for Poland to also help supply oil to Schwedt, utilising crude oil delivered by sea to the port in Gdansk, https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/20221201-joint-declaration-of-germany-and-poland.html accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁹² ‘Mehrheit will keine finanzielle Nachteile für Russland-Sanktionen in Kauf nehmen’, Stern, 12 September 2022, https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/sanktionen-gegen-russland–deutsche-wollen-keine-finanziellen-nachteile-32717066.html accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁹³ ‘Ukraine-Krieg spaltet Deutschland-in Ost und West’, RTL News, 6 September 2022.

¹⁹⁴ ‘Russland-Bild der Deutschen’, Infratest dimap, https://www.infratest-dimap.de/umfragen-analysen/bundesweit/umfragen/aktuell/russland-bild-der-deutschen/ accessed 10 December 2022. See also MDRfragt – Redaktionsteam, ‘Russlandpolitik Zwei Drittel sehen gröβere Spaltung zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschen’, MDR, 3 October 2022.

¹⁹⁵ Hanns W. Maull, ‘Germany and the Use of Force: Still a “Civilian Power”?’, Survival 42 (2000): 56–80.

¹⁹⁶ Scholz, ‘The Global Zeitenwende’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023. See also his ‘Zeitenwende’ speech to Bundestag, 27 February 2022.

¹⁹⁷ On German military aid, including weapons, delivered to Ukraine, see the website of the German Defence Ministry, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/military-support-ukraine-2054992 accessed 10 December 2022; and Joint Press Conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Olaf Scholz, 1 December 2022.

¹⁹⁸ Anne Applebaum, ‘Germany is Arguing with Itself over Ukraine’, The Atlantic, 20 October 2022; and Liana Fix, ‘On the Ukraine War, Germany has a Leadership Problem: Here’s Why’, In Brief, Council on Foreign Relations, 14 October 2022, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/ukraine-war-germany-has-leadership-problem-heres-why accessed 10 December 2022.

¹⁹⁹ Daniel Friedrich Sturm, ‘Jeder vierte Bürger sieht Sicherheit Deutschlands durch Moskau nicht bedroht’, Die Welt, 17 October 2022, https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article241630333/Umfrage-Jeder-vierte-Buerger-sieht-Sicherheit-Deutschlands-durch-Moskau-nicht-bedroht.html accessed 10 December 2022; and Körber Stiftung, ‘Deutsche lehnen militärische Führungsrolle in Europa ab’, 17 October 2022, https://koerber-stiftung.de/presse/mitteilungen/deutsche-lehnen-militaerische-fuehrungsrolle-in-europa-ab/ accessed 10 December 2022.

²⁰⁰ Emily Haber, ‘How Putin’s War in Ukraine has Moved Germany into a New Era’, Washington Post, 5 December 2022.

²⁰¹ Timothy Snyder, speech to the Bundestag, 20 June 2017, published as ‘Germans must Remember the Truth about Ukraine – For Their Own Sake’, Eurozine, 7 July 2017, https://www.eurozine.com/germans-must-remember-the-truth-about-ukraine-for-their-own-sake/ accessed 10 December 2022. See also Jennifer Popowycz, ‘The “Holocaust by Bullets” in Ukraine’, US National World War II Museum website, 24 January 2022, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/ukraine-holocaust accessed 10 December 2022.

²⁰² Tiffany Wertheimer, ‘Babyn Yar: Anger as Kyiv’s Holocaust Memorial is Damaged’, BBC, 3 March 2022.

²⁰³ On Germany grappling with the divided past and the trauma of the Berlin Wall, see Hope M. Harrison, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of United Germany, 1989 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

²⁰⁴ Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013), 200.

²⁰⁵ Ibid., 200–2. M.E. Sarotte, ‘The Classic Cold War Conundrum is Back’, Foreign Policy, 1 July 2022.

²⁰⁶ Hill and Gaddy, Mr. Putin, 201.

²⁰⁷ Catherine Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Frédéric Bozo, A History of the Iraq Crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003, trans. Susan Emanuel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

²⁰⁸ ‘Remarks by President Charles Michel following the Special European Council on Ukraine’, European Council, 25 February 2022, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/02/25/remarks-by-president-charles-michel-after-the-special-meeting-of-the-european-council-on-ukraine/ accessed 1 August 2022. For a detailed analysis, see Peter Ludlow, ‘February 17 & 24, Russia and Ukraine’, Post-Summit Briefing 2022/1, European Council Studies (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).

²⁰⁹ For the Versailles declaration, see https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/54773/20220311-versailles-declaration-en.pdf accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹⁰ For a timeline, see ‘Timeline – EU Restrictive Measures against Russia over Ukraine’, n.d., European Council, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions/restrictive-measures-against-russia-over-ukraine/history-restrictive-measures-against-russia-over-ukraine/ accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹¹ European Commission, ‘Russia’, n.d., https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/russia_en#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20EU%20was,amounted%20to%20%E2%82%AC257.5%20billion accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹² Josep Borrell, ‘The Sanctions Against Russia are Working’, European Union External Action, 16 July 2022, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/sanctions-against-russia-are-working_en accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹³ See ‘Ukraine Refugee Situation’, UNHCR, n.d., https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹⁴ My calculations on the basis of the UNHCR figures. By way of comparison, the number arriving in the UK currently stands at 143,100.

²¹⁵ European Council, ‘Ukraine: €17 Billion of EU Funds to Help Refugees’, Press Release, 4 April 2022, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/04/04/ukraine-council-unlocks-17-billion-of-eu-funds-to-help-refugees/ accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹⁶ Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IWF Kiel), ‘Ukraine Support Tracker’, n.d., https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹⁷ IWF Kiel, ‘Government Support to Ukraine’, n.d., https://app.23degrees.io/embed/5V9AdDpw1pmLxo1e-bar-stacked-horizontal-figure-1_csv accessed 1 August 2022.

²¹⁸ Ludlow, Post-Summit Briefing 2022/1, 4.

²¹⁹ Peter Ludlow, ‘March 10 and 11: Re-Setting EU Priorities in the Face of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Defence, Energy and the Economy’, European Council Studies, Post-Summit Briefing 2022/2, 4–5.

²²⁰ European Council, EUCO 24/22, 24 June 2022, European Council, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/57442/2022-06-2324-euco-conclusions-en.pdf accessed 1 August 2022.

²²¹ European Council, ‘European Peace Facility’, n.d., https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/european-peace-facility/ accessed 1 August 2022.

²²² European Commission, ‘REPowerEU’, n.d., https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_22_3131 accessed 1 August 2022.

²²³ European Council, ‘Member States Commit to Reducing Gas Demand by 15% Next Winter’, Press Release, 26 July 2022, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/07/26/member-states-commit-to-reducing-gas-demand-by-15-next-winter/ accessed 1 August 2022.

²²⁴ Peter Ludlow, ‘24–25 March: The EU, the United States/NATO, Ukraine and Russia’, European Council Studies, Post-Summit Briefing 2022/3.

²²⁵ Maria Gainar, Aux origines de la diplomatie européenne: les neuf et la coopération politique européenne de 1973 à 1980 (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2012), 559.

²²⁶ ‘Europe’s Fight to Stay United over War in Ukraine’, Financial Times, 29 July 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/de9056bf-9121-4b17-b569-f5e889e4eff0 accessed 1 August 2022.

²²⁷ Vojtech Mastny, ‘Why Did the Cold War End Peacefully? The Importance of Europe’, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 9 (2007): 8–10.

²²⁸ Ostap Kushnir, ‘Overcoming “Otherness”: Central and Eastern European Nations and the Idea of “Europe”’, The International Spectator 57, no. 4 (2022): 5–7.

²²⁹ For instance, Ivan Berend, ‘What is Central and Eastern Europe?’, European Journal of Social Theory 8 (2005): 401–16; Ivan Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe since 1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, eds., A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

²³⁰ Robert Bideleux and Richard Taylor, eds., European Integration and Disintegration: East and West (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

²³¹ Laurien Crump, ‘The Multilateralisation of Soviet Bloc Security: The Hungarian Revolution from an Eastern European Perspective’, Corvinus Journal of International Affairs 1, no. 3 (2016): 1–15.

²³² Crump, ‘The Multilateralisation of Soviet Bloc Security’, 11.

²³³ Csaba Békés, ‘East Central Europe, 1953–56’, in The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume I: Origins, ed. Melvyn Leffler and Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 341.

²³⁴ Laurien Crump and Angela Romano, ‘Challenging the Superpower Straitjacket (1965–1975): Multilateralism as an Instrument of Smaller Powers’, in Margins for Manoeuvre: The Influence of Smaller Powers in the Cold War Era, ed. Laurien Crump and Susanna Erlandsson (London: Routledge, 2019), 13–31.

²³⁵ Wanda Jarzabek, ‘Hope and Reality: Poland and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1964–1989’, Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Working Paper 56, Washington, DC, 2008, 6.

²³⁶ Crump and Romano, ‘Challenging the Superpower Straitjacket’.

²³⁷ Wanda Jarzabek, ‘Preserving the Status Quo or Promoting Change: The Role of the CSCE in the Perception of Polish Authorities’, in Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe, ed. Oliver Bange and Gottfried Niedhart (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009): 144–59; Jarzabek, ‘Hope and Reality’.

²³⁸ Aleksandra Komornicka, ‘From “Economic Miracle” to the “Sick Man of the Socialist Camp”: Poland and the West in the 1970s’, in European Socialist Regimes’ Fateful Engagement, ed. Angela Romano and Federico Romero (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 78–106.

²³⁹ Elena Dragomir, ‘The Perceived Threat of Hegemonism in Romania during the Second Détente’, Cold War History 12, no. 1 (2012): 111–34.

²⁴⁰ Angela Romano, ‘The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: A Reappraisal’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London: Routledge, 2014), 231.

²⁴¹ Mihail E. Ionescu, ‘Romania, Ostpolitik and the CSCE, 1967–1975’, in Helsinki 1975, 129–43.

²⁴² Romano and Romero, European Socialist Regimes’ Fateful Engagement.

²⁴³ Elena Dragomir, ‘Breaking the CMEA Hold: Romania in Search of a “Strategy” Towards the European Economic Community, 1958–1974’, European Review of History 27, no. 4 (2019): 494–526.

²⁴⁴ Angela Romano, ‘Untying Cold War Knots: The EEC and Eastern Europe in the Long 1970s’, Cold War History 14, no. 2 (2014): 153–73; Suvi Kansikas, Socialist Countries face the European Community: Soviet-bloc Controversies over East-West Trade (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

²⁴⁵ Kansikas, Socialist Countries; and Laurien Crump, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–1969 (London: Routledge, 2015).

²⁴⁶ Kushnir, ‘Overcoming “Otherness”’, 7.

²⁴⁷ Ibid., 9.

²⁴⁸ ‘NATO Allies Sign Accession Protocols for Finland and Sweden’, NATO, 5 July 2022, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_197763.htm accessed 1 July 2022. As of 25 January 2023, Hungary and Turkey are the sole NATO members who have yet to ratify Finland's and Sweden's accession to the Alliance.

²⁴⁹ Kristina Spohr, ‘Putin’s War Backfires on Russia by Reviving the West’, Financial Times, 28 April 2022.

²⁵⁰ ‘Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (RUS MFA), 17 December 2021, https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/ accessed 1 July 2022; ‘Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees’, RUS MFA, 17 December 2021, https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790818/ accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁵¹ Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger, ‘U.S. and NATO Respond to Putin’s Demands as Ukraine Tensions Mount’, New York Times, 26 January 2022.

²⁵² Remarks by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Press Briefing Room, Washington DC, 26 January 2022, https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-13/ accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁵³ On NATO’s open-door policy, see ‘Enlargement and Article 10’, NATO, 6 July 2022, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm accessed 10 July 2022. See also, Daniel S. Hamilton and Kristina Spohr, eds., Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security After the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019).

²⁵⁴ Helsinki Final Act 1975, https://www.osce.org/helsinki-final-act accessed 1 July 2022; and Charter of Paris for a New Europe 1990, https://www.osce.org/mc/39516 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁵⁵ Interview with Putin by Lionel Barber and Henry Foy in Moscow and Alex Barker in Osaka, ‘Vladimir Putin Says Liberalism Has ‘Become Obsolete’, Financial Times, 28 June 2019; Lizzie Dearden, ‘Russia’s Foreign Minister Calls for “post-West World Order” in Speech to Global Leaders’, The Independent, 18 February 2017. On China and Xi’s ambitions, see Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs 70 (1990/1): 23–33; see also Nathan A. Sears, ‘China, Russia, and the Long “Unipolar Moment”’, The Diplomat, 27 April 2016.

²⁵⁶ ‘Putin Asserts Strong, Sovereign Russia against Sanctions “Blitzkrieg”’, Reuters, 17 June 2022. A week earlier on 9 June, he had stated that there was ‘no in-between, no intermediate state: Either a country is a sovereign, or it is colony, no matter what the colonies are called. And a colony has no historical prospects’, RUS MFA Twitter, https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1534978070293139456 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁵⁷ ‘Xi Tells Putin that China Will Keep Backing Russia on “Sovereignty, Security”’, The Japan Times, 15 June 2022.

²⁵⁸ Mark Trevelyan, ‘Putin Says Russia Has “Nowhere to Retreat” over Ukraine’, Reuters, 22 December 2021; ‘Expanded Meeting of the Defence Ministry Board’, President of Russia, 21 December 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67402 accessed 1 July 2022; ‘Vladimir Putin’s Annual News Conference’, President of Russia, 23 December 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67438 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁵⁹ William Safire, ‘On Language – The Near Abroad’, New York Times, 22 May 1994.

²⁶⁰ Cf. Nathan Hodge, ‘Restoration of Empire is the Endgame for Russia’s Vladimir Putin’, CNN, 11 June 2022.

²⁶¹ ‘President of the Republic of Finland Sauli Niinistö’s New Year’s Speech’, Helsinki, President of the Republic of Finland, 1 January 2022, https://www.presidentti.fi/en/speeches/president-of-the-republic-of-finland-sauli-niinistos-new-years-speech-on-1-january-2022/ accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁶² ‘Putin on NATO, Ukraine, Gas, COVID and the Russian Economy’, Reuters, 23 December 2021.

²⁶³ See Gier Lundestad, ‘“Empire by Invitation” in the American Century’, Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (1999): 189–21. On the United States ‘politically belonging to Europe’, see Genscher-Bessmertnykh talks, 12 June 1991, in Andreas Wirsching et al., eds., Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik dr Bundesrepublik Deutschand 1991, Bd. 1 + 2 [AAPD 1991] (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), document 196.

²⁶⁴ ‘Russia Will Be “Forced to Respond” if U.S. Does Not Engage on Security Demands’, The Moscow Times, 17 February 2022.

²⁶⁵ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁶⁶ Moscow Emb. to POL-20, Telex 1346, ‘Asia – PRT: Ukrainan presidentinvaalit ja kansanäänestys itsenäisyydeestä 1.12.1991’, 3 December 1991, Signum 21.50 NLO, Dno 1988/4668 ii Ulkoministeriön arkisto (UMA) [MFA archives], Finland. See also Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (London: Oneworld 2014).

²⁶⁷ ‘Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons’, Budapest, United Nations, 5 December 1994, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf 167ff accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁶⁸ ‘Security Council Meeting’ of the Russian Federation at the Kremlin, President of Russia, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67825 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁶⁹ The American scholar in question was Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson; the German journalist was Klaus Wiegrefe whose article appeared under the title ‘Neuer Aktenfund von 1991 stützt russischen Vorwurf’, Der Spiegel 8/2022, 18 February 2022.

²⁷⁰ Hurd/FCO to British Embassy in Washington, Telno. 460, ‘Quadripartite Meeting of Political Directors, Bonn, 6 March: Security in Central and Eastern Europe’, 7 March 1991, PREM19/3326, TNA. See also video statement by a German diplomat present at the meeting, in: ‘Nato-Erweiterung nach Osten war damals noch gar kein Thema’, Die Welt, 21 February 2022, https://www.welt.de/politik/video237048771/Zwei-Plus-Vier-Verhandlungen-Nato-Erweiterung-nach-Osten-war-damals-noch-gar-kein-Thema.html accessed 1 July 2022; and German ambassador (to the U.S.) Emily Haber’s official re-tweet (of my findings) of 28 February 2022, https://twitter.com/GermanAmbUSA/status/1498427527613800454. For Klaus Wiegrefe’s U-turn, see his piece, ‘Auswärtiges Amt zu Vereinbarungen mit der Sowjetunion: Einen Nato-Verzicht auf Osterweiterung hat es »zu keinem Zeitpunkt gegeben«; Auf SPIEGEL-Anfrage positioniert sich die Bundesregierung’, Der Spiegel 23/2022, 3 June 2022. Cf. Kristina Spohr and Kaarel Piirimäe, ‘With or Without Russia? The Boris, Bill and Helmut Bromance and the Harsh Realities of Securing Europe in the Post-Wall World, 1990–1994’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 33, no. 1 (2022): 158–93. ‘СМИ: Запад в 1991 году заявил о неприемлемости расширения NАТО на восток’, РИА Новости, 18 February 2022.

²⁷¹ David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (London: Harper Perennial, 1970), 109.

²⁷² See for example, Thomas L. Friedman, ‘This Is Putin’s War: But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders’, New York Times, 21 February 2022; Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Many Predicted Nato Expansion Would Lead to War. Those Warnings Were Ignored’, The Guardian, 28 February 2022; Jeffrey Sachs, ‘The US Should Compromise on Nato to Save Ukraine’, Financial Times, 21 February 2022. See also Mary Elise Sarotte, ‘Russia, Ukraine and the 30-year Quest for a post-Soviet Order’, Financial Times, 25 February 2022.

²⁷³ John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin’, Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (2014): 77–84, 85–9. See also Mearsheimer’s opinion in ‘Ukraine War: The West Must Take Responsibility’, The Business Standard, 15 March 2022; Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Four Western Provocations That Led to U.S.-Russia Crisis Today’, Cato Institute, 28 December 2021. Cf. ‘Was NATO Enlargement a Mistake? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts’, Foreign Affairs online, 19 April 2022; M.E. Sarotte, ‘Containment Beyond the Cold War: How Washington Lost the post-Soviet Peace’, Foreign Affairs, online November/December 2021; Sergey Radchenko, ‘“Nothing but Humiliation for Russia”: Moscow and NATO’s Eastern Enlargement, 1993–1995’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 6–7 (2020): 769–815. For the Dohnayi connection see The Sommer, ‘Ein Realpolitiker holt zum Rundumschlag aus’, Zeit Online, 11 January 2022; ‘Klaus von Dohnanyi: Die Erweiterung der NATO nach 1990 war ein Fehler’, Deutschlandfunk, 9 February 2022.

²⁷⁴ Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. See, for example, Beth A. Fischer, The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020).

²⁷⁵ George F. Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, New York Times, 5 February 1997. Cf. ‘Politisch-strategischer Fehler von historischem Ausmaß – Offener Brief zur NATO-Osterweiterung von Robert McMamara, Paul H. Nitze, Sam Nunn u.a. an Präsident Bill Clinton vom 26. Juni 1997 (Wortlaut)’, Blätter für deutsche und Internationale Politik 8/97; ‘Die Nato-Osterweiterung war ein Fehler’, Die Welt, 11 March 2022.

²⁷⁶ Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), especially chapter 4, ‘The History Man’.

²⁷⁷ See, for example, Anna Reid, ‘Putin’s War on History: The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine’, Foreign Affairs online, May/June 2022; Igor Torbakov, ‘Vladimir Putin’s Twisted Politics of History’, Eurasianet, 30 June 2020, https://eurasianet.org/perspectives-vladimir-putins-twisted-politics-of-history accessed 1 July 2022; Mark Edele, ‘Fighting Russia’s History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II’, History and Memory 29, no. 2 (2017): 90–124; Christopher Clark, ‘Krieg in der Ukraine – Zar Putin der Große’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 July 2022. See also ‘Vladimir Putin’s Historical Disinformation’, US Department of State, 6 May 2022, https://www.state.gov/disarming-disinformation/vladimir-putins-historical-disinformation/ accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁷⁸ Putin’s speech of 25 April 2005 ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию Российской Федерации’, Президент России, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁷⁹ See ‘Russian President Vladimir Putin says he Moonlighted as a Taxi Driver in the 1990s’, ABC News (Australia), 13 December 2021 and Steve Rosenberg, ‘What is Russia’s Vladimir Putin Planning?’, BBC News, 20 December 2021. Putin’s interview with the Financial Times in the lead up to the G20 summit, ‘Путин разъяснил свои слова о “геополитической катастрофе” в контексте распада СССР’, ТАСС, 27 June 2019, https://tass.ru/politika/6603347 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁰ See Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

²⁸¹ Putin,: ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, President of Russia, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 accessed 1 July 2020. See also ‘Putin Calls Ukrainian Statehood a Fiction – History Suggests Otherwise’, New York Times, 21 February 2022.

²⁸² See ‘Vladimir Putin: The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II’, The National Interest, 18 June 2020; Una Bergmane, ‘How Putin is Rehabilitating the Nazi-Soviet Pact’, Baltic Bulletin, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 28 July 2020; Miriam Berger, ‘Putin says he will “Denazify” Ukraine: Here’s the History Behind that Claim’, Washington Post, 25 February 2022; ‘Путин рассказал об отношении к лозунгу «Можем повторить»’, Izvestia, 10 March 2022; ‘Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day Speech in Full’, Moscow, 9 May 2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/read-vladimir-putin-s-victory-day-speech-in-full accessed 1 July 2022. Cf. Anne Applebaum, ‘World War II Is All that Putin Has Left’, The Atlantic, 11 May 2022; Andrew Roth, ‘Putin Compares Himself to Peter the Great in Quest to Take Back Russian Lands’, The Guardian, 10 June 2022; Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Putin Makes his Imperial Pretensions Clear’, Washington Post, 13 June 2022; and ‘Putin Asserts Strong, Sovereign Russia Against Sanctions “Blitzkrieg”’, Reuters, 17 June 2022.

²⁸³ Christian Nünlist, ‘Krieg der Narrative – Das Jahr 1990 und die NATO-Osterweiterung’, Sirius 2 (2018): 389–97. Cf. US Department of State, Case No. F-2008-02356, EUR Acting A/S Kornblum to All European Diplomatic Posts, ‘Russian Assertions about Two-Plus-Four Agreement’, National Security Archive, 23 February 1996, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16395-document-23-russian-assertions-about-two-plus accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁴ US Department of State, Case No. M-2006-01499, ‘Retranslation of Yeltsin Letter on NATO Expansion’, National Security Archive, 15 September 1993, 2, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16376-document-04-retranslation-yeltsin-letter accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁵ ‘Excerpts from Evgeny Primakov Memo to Gennady Seleznev, “Materials on the Subject of NATO for Use in Conversations and Public Statements”’, trans. S. Svrankskaya, National Security Archive, 31 January 1997, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16397-document-25-excerpts-evgeny-primakov-memo accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁶ ‘Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy’, Munich Security Conference, President of Russia, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁷ ‘Address by President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 18 March 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁸⁸ See, for example, Spohr and Piirimäe, ‘With or Without Russia?’; and Kristina Spohr, ‘Precluded or Precedent-setting? The “NATO Enlargement Question” in the Triangular Bonn-Washington-Moscow Diplomacy of 1990–1991’, Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 4 (2012): 4–54. See also Condoleezza Rice and Philipp Zelikow, To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth (New York: Twelve, 2019), 225–39 (ns. 131–37) and 281–8 (n. 50). For a range of views, see also the following recent journal special issues: ‘Legacies of NATO Enlargement: International Relations, Domestic Politics, and Alliance Management’, International Politics 57, no. 3 (2020); ‘NATO: Past and Present’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 6–7 (2020). Cf. Sarotte, Not One Inch.

²⁸⁹ For the official Soviet protocol of the Baker-Gorbachev talks in Moscow on 9 February 1990, see Aleksandr Galkin und Anatolij Tschernajew, eds., Michail Gorbatschow und die deutsche Frage: Sowjetische Dokumente 1986–1991 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), 311–16, document 71.

²⁹⁰ Ibid., esp. 316. Following Baker’s famous words, Gorbachev notably ended the conversation by suggesting that, given the current circumstances, a presence of US troops on German soil might play a moderating role (‘mäßigende Rolle’); and that it was conceivable for the USSR to consider together with United States (‘gemeinsam darüber nachdenken’) how best to deal with a united Germany, not least in the light of the path taken by the country ‘after Versailles’. He repeated several times that one would have to contemplate this issue.

²⁹¹ Letter from Bush to Kohl, 9 February 1990, printed in Hanns Jürgen Küsters und Daniel Hofmann, eds., Deutsche Einheit – Sonderedition aus den Aktem des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90 [DESE] (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 784–5, document 170.

²⁹² Memcon of Bush-Kohl talks, 24 February 1990, Camp David – First Meeting, 8–10, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX. The German Memcon is printed in: DESE, doc. 192. See also Cable (drafted by Dobbins), Baker to Amb Walters: Baker Genscher Meeting (2.2.1990), 3 February 1990, Arnold Kanter Files, Germany March 1990, GHWBPL. For Genscher’s position and his influence on Baker more generally, see also Spohr, ‘Precluded or Precedent-setting?’

²⁹³ ‘Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany’ [FRG, GDR, France, USSR, UK and USA], signed in Moscow, United Nations, 12 September 1990, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%201696/volume-1696-I-29226-English.pdf accessed 1 July 2022.

²⁹⁴ Kristina Spohr, Post Wall Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (London: WilliamCollins, 2019), 191–255. If West German Bundeswehr troops and those of the East German Nationale Volksarmee would have added up to some 720,000 (545,000 plus 175,000) soldiers, under Article 3 of the 1990 ‘2+4 Treaty’ Germans agreed to a future unified German Bundeswehr that would operate at a reduced overall force size on land and in the air of 345,000 men and women. By 2022, the size of Bundeswehr had further diminished – to around 182,000 soldiers.

²⁹⁵ See, for example, AAPD 1991, notably documents 363, 340, 190, 185, 180, 174, 159, 153, 147, 142, 138, 136, 130, 125, 123, 122, 111, 95, 88, 89, 74, 57. Cf. Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Diary 1988–1992 (unpublished). British prime minister John Major, for example, assured the Soviet defence marshal, Dmitry Yazov, in March 1991 that he did not see Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland joining NATO. Genscher too that spring believed that the ex-satellites’ NATO membership was simply not in the German interest; and while these countries had the right to choose their alliances, it was important not to apply this right ‘at this time’. Being open to CEE NATO hopes now would surely cause Gorbachev to stop granting the Balts more freedom. Generally, Kohl, Genscher and NATO secretary Manfred Wörner remained beholden to the position to avoid upsetting the Soviets, considering that at the Caucasus summit in 1990 peace had been made between the USSR and that the Red Army remained on German soil until troop withdrawal was completed in 1994. Moreover, Gorbachev’s effort to keep the Union together and to manage the country’s transformation in an orderly manner was believed to be the key to preventing the USSR from imploding and descending into civil war. In this context, Kohl seriously grappled with what he considered a legitimate Baltic independence struggle (given they had been annexed by the Soviets as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939), though he did believe that only with much patience could Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania regain independent statehood by the turn of the millennium. And as regards NATO membership, the German view was that a ‘Finnish status’ of neutrality would be the only way. US secretary of state Baker agreed that a ‘finlandised’ status was ‘the best Balts could hope for’, but he expected them to be forced into making more concessions to Moscow than Helsinki ever had.

²⁹⁶ AAPD 1991, documents 187, 190, 196, 197, 200, 206. Spohr, Post Wall Post Square, 317–18, 445–6.

²⁹⁷ ‘Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance – London Declaration’, NATO, 5/6 July 1990, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_23693.htm accessed 1 July 2022. On NACC, see Memo and Letter from Gass to Wall, The Baker-Genscher Declaration, 5 November 1991, PREM19/3760, TNA; Cable from US NATO to Sec State, Subj: NACC Ministerial Summary Report, 20 December 1991, NSC, Barry Lowenkron Files, NATO files, NATO: NAC/NACC Ministerials – Dec. 1991 Brussels, GHWBPL. See also, AAPD 1991, document 439; NACC, ‘Ministerial Declaration – Soviet Union Ends as Meeting Ends’, and ‘Dissolution of the Soviet Union announced at NATO Meeting’, NATO, 20 December 1991, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_136619.htm accessed 1 July 2022. Cf. Spohr, Post Wall Post Square, 448–50, 513; and [Russian Foreign Minister] Andrey Kozyrev, on Radio Mayak (Moscow), in Russian, FBIS Daily Report, Soviet Union, FBIS-SOV 91–247, 23 December 1991, 41.

²⁹⁸ See for example, Barry Lowenkron to Brent Scowcroft, ‘Inclusion of Independent States of Former Soviet Union in the NACC’, 10 January 1992, NSC, Nicholas Rostow Subject Files, NATO [1] (CF01329-005), GHWBPL; ‘NATO and the East: Key Issues’, no author (likely NSC), undated (early 1992; possibly for ESSG 3 February 1992), NSC, David C. Gompert Files, European Strategy Steering Group [ESSG] (CF01301-009), GHWBPL; ‘U.S. Security and Institutional Interests in Europe and Eurasia in the Post-Cold War Era’, no author, undated, enclosed with David Gompert to Robert Zoellick et al. (21 February 1992), ESSG Meeting, 19 February 1992, NSC, Barry Lowenkron Files, ESSG, (CF015270), GHWBPL; Memo by EUR Thomas M. Niles to Zoellick, ‘Security Implications of WEU Enlargement’, (drafted by KD Volker), 27 February 1992, and ‘Expanding NATO Membership’, no author, undated, enclosed with ‘Implications for NATO of Expanded WEU Membership’, undated (spring 1992). NSC, Barry Lowenkron Files, NATO (CF01526-13), GHWBPL. Cf. for similar British ideas, Memo from Weston to Goulden (confidential), The Future of NATO: The Question of Enlargement, 3 March 1992, PREM19/4329, TNA.

²⁹⁹ For Yeltsin’s hopes and promises, see Robert D. McFadden, ‘Leaders Gather in New York to Chart a World Order’, New York Times, 31 January 1992. Cf. Michael Wines, ‘Bush and Yeltsin Declare Formal End to the Cold War’, New York Times, 2 February 1992.

³⁰⁰ AAPD 1991, documents 56 and 74.

³⁰¹ Spohr and Piirimäe, ‘With or Without Russia?’.

³⁰² See Risto E. J. Penttilä and Jyrki Karvinen, Pitkä tie Natoon (Helsinki: Otava, 2022).

³⁰³ Italics are mine. See fn. 284.

³⁰⁴ Letter, Talbott to Christopher, 16 July 1996 incl. Memcon of Talbott-Primakov talks on 15 July 1996, US Department of State - Virtual Reading Room, Case No/Doc M-2017-11926/ C06570196. See also Russian ambassador (to Finland) I.F. Aboimov’s summary of Primakov’s views: VSI/POL-21/APM, Muistio no. 1, ‘Venäjän Federaation suurlähettiläs I.F. Aboimovin käynti valtiosihteeri Jukka Valtasaaren luona’, 23 January 1997, UMA, Signum 18.41 VEF, Dno 1992/22408 i.

³⁰⁵ ‘Founding Act – on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation’ signed in Paris, France, NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm accessed 1 July 2022. As ambassador Aboimov told to Finland’s Minister for Europe Ole Norrback, for Russia ‘NATO was a reality’ and ‘one simply had to cooperate with it’ (‘Sen kanssa on tehtävä yhteistyötä.’). KPO-20/KJ/ehk, Muistio no. 45, ‘Venäjän Federaation suurlähettiläs I.F. Aboimovin käynti eurooppaministeri Ole Norrbackin luona’, 7 February 1997, UMA, Signum 18.41 VEF, Dno 1992/22408 ii.

³⁰⁶ Ibid.; Memcon Clinton-Yeltsin talks, 21 March 1997, William J. Clinton – Digital Library, WJC-DL2015-0782-M-2. On Russo-US discrepancies on their reading of the details of NFRA, see, for example, David Hoffman, ‘NATO, Russia Agree on New Ties’, Washington Post, 15 May 1997.

³⁰⁷ For a summary of Yeltsin’s short speech on Echo Moskvy, 30 May 1997, see Newsline – 30 May 1997, RFERL. Cf. NATO-Russia ‘Founding Act’, which stated under point IV: ‘The member States of NATO reiterate that they have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members, nor any need to change any aspect of NATO's nuclear posture or nuclear policy - and do not foresee any future need to do so. This subsumes the fact that NATO has decided that it has no intention, no plan, and no reason to establish nuclear weapon storage sites on the territory of those members … . NATO reiterates that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces. Accordingly, it will have to rely on adequate infrastructure commensurate with the above tasks. In this context, reinforcement may take place, when necessary, in the event of defence against a threat of aggression and missions in support of peace consistent with the United Nations Charter and the OSCE governing principles, as well as for exercises consistent with the adapted CFE Treaty, the provisions of the Vienna Document 1994 and mutually agreed transparency measures. Russia will exercise similar restraint in its conventional force deployments in Europe.

³⁰⁸ See, for example, Yazov’s views as relayed by the German embassy in Moscow, AAPD 1991, document 74. See also Hannes Adomeit, ‘Inside or Outside? Russia’s Policies Towards NATO’, SWP Working Paper FG 5 1007/1 January 2007, 5–6.

³⁰⁹ Dmitri Trenin, ‘Russia’s Spheres of Interest, not Influence’, The Washington Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2009): 3–22. Cf. Stephen Kotkin, ‘Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics: Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern’, Foreign Affairs 95, no. 3 (2016): 2–9.

³¹⁰ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 24 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843 accessed 1 July 2022.

³¹¹ Parts of this text were published in Vladislav Zubok, ‘Myths and Realities of Putinism and NATO Expansionism’, Engelsberg Ideas, 6 May 2022, https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/myths-and-realities-of-putinism-and-nato-expansion/ accessed 6 May 2022.

³¹² ‘Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”’, President of Russia, 12 July 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 accessed 8 December 2022.

³¹³ ‘PM Statement on the Situation in Ukraine: 22 February 2022’, UK Government, 22 February 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-on-the-situation-in-ukraine-22-february-2022 accessed 8 December 2022.

³¹⁴ ‘ECNY Events – Gen. Mark A. Milley’, YouTube, 9 November 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQcvfRsQiyg accessed 8 December 2022.

³¹⁵ Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

³¹⁶ Marlene Laruelle, Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines and Political Battlefields (London: Routledge, 2018).

³¹⁷ More on this in Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (London: Yale University Press, 2021).

³¹⁸ Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

³¹⁹ Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite diary, National Security Archive, 5 March 1991, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16142-document-28-ambassador-rodric-braithwaite-diary accessed 8 December 2022.

³²⁰ The document is dated February 1991 and is in PREM 19/3326, TNA. Courtesy of Joshua Shifrinson.

³²¹ In general, M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch.

³²² George Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, New York Times, 5 February 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html accessed 8 December 2022.

³²³ For example, see Alexander Lanoszka, ‘Thank Goodness for NATO Enlargement,’ International Politics, 57, no. 3 (2020): 451–70.

³²⁴ Bill Clinton, ‘I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path’, The Atlantic, 7 April 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/ accessed 8 December 2022.

³²⁵ My interview with Burbulis on 21 April 2020, quoted in Zubok, Collapse, 410.

³²⁶ Sarotte, Not One Inch, 197–209.

³²⁷ ‘Founding Act’, 27 May 1997, NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm accessed 8 December 2022.

³²⁸ Sarotte, Not One Inch, 316, 332.

³²⁹ BBC News, ‘The Day Boris Yeltsin said Goodbye to Russia’, YouTube, 27 January 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGMyAnefL-8 accessed 8 December 2022.

³³⁰ Andrei Zorin, ‘Suddenly, these Outdated Ideas are used to Justify Mass Murder’, Meduza, 4 April 2022, https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/04/04/suddenly-these-outdated-ideas-are-being-used-to-justify-mass-murder accessed 8 December 2022.

³³¹ ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828 accessed 8 December 2022.

³³² Zubok, Collapse, 387.

³³³ In general, Laruelle, Russian Nationalism.

³³⁴ Shiraev and Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia, 113–14.

³³⁵ Ibid., 141.

³³⁶ See Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politic: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

³³⁷ ‘Bush Vows to Press for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO’, Reuters, 1 April 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-ukraine-bush-idUSL0141706220080401 accessed 8 December 2022.

³³⁸ ‘Ukraine Opens up Land Market in Bid for $8 Billion IMF Package’, Reuters, 30 March 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-politics-idUKKBN21H0J7 accessed 8 December 2022.

³³⁹ ‘Sale of Land in Ukraine: How it will Happen’, Deutsche Welle, 1 July 2021, https://www.dw.com/ru/prodazha-zemli-selhoznaznachenija-v-ukraine-kak-jeto-budet-proishodit/a-58045955 accessed 8 December 2021.

³⁴⁰ See the information on the US cyberwarfare assistance to Ukraine in the Financial Times, 9 March 2022.