Putin argued that he couldn’t accept the threat of NATO on Russia’s borders if Ukraine became a member, but the result of his catastrophic miscalculation is that NATO’s border with Russia has actually doubled in length.
London
How things change. Just five years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the military alliance of the United States, Canada and Europe that had deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years, was close to dissolution. According to a report in the New York Times, the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” President Donald Trump repeatedly said throughout 2018 that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Trump told his national security officials that he didn’t see the point of the military alliance, which he considered a drain on the United States’ budget. Without the US, NATO could not survive. At the time there was growing concern in the democratic world about Donald Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Vladimir Putin secret from even his own aides. So Trump’s real motives were deeply suspicious.
Today NATO is flourishing, all thanks to President Vladimir Putin. Although the reasons for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine are unclear, Moscow’s narrative on the reason for the war changes from day to day, Kremlin apologists and those sympathetic to Moscow argue that he had to invade Ukraine to stop it becoming a member of NATO. In the real world there was, of course, no imminent possibility of this happening, although Kyiv had repeatedly requested membership since Russian forces annexed Crimea in 2014. It was this invasion that shifted public opinion. Polling in 2012showed that less than 20 percent of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. Unsurprisingly, a poll conducted in December 2016, two years after the annexation,revealed that this had risen to 71 percent.
At a time when 98 percent of Ukrainians hate Putin and Russia, it’s hard to recall that in the years up to 2014 Putin’s popularity throughout Ukraine was consistent at about 50 percent, according to Gallup. Following the annexation, this fell to less than 5 percent and now close to zero, even among ethnic Russians in the country.It requires very few brain cells to conclude that Vladimir Putin could have retained influence and achieved many of his objectives in Ukraine by being nice rather than being nasty. Unfortunately for Ukraine and the world,Vladimir Putin finds it difficult to be nice and inevitably he chose the wrong option.
The “NATO threat”mantrawas repeated day after day by the Kremlin as Russian troops, aided by Prigozhin’s Wagner forces pounded military and non-military Ukrainian infrastructure, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including thousands of children. But even if there had been a miniscule element of truth in Putin’s logic, look at what’s happened. When Russian forces rolled into Ukraine 508 days ago there were 30 countries in NATO; last week with the accession of Finland and the Sweden’s imminent accession it will grow to 32. The two Nordic countries are staunch democratic Western powers and they have invested more in their defences than most NATO members. Their inclusion will strengthen the alliance militarily, diplomatically and geographically in Europe. Putin argued that he couldn’t accept the threat of NATO on Russia’s borders if Ukraine became a member, but the result of his catastrophicmiscalculation 18 months ago is that NATO’s border with Russia has actually doubled in length.
A resurgent NATO is also set to tighten its grip on the Baltic Sea due to the latest accessions. The Baltic Sea is a crucial maritime gateway for the Russian fleet, which has bases near St Petersburg and in the heavily fortified Kaliningrad enclave, the former Konigsberg which the Soviet Union stole from Germany after WWII. During the Cold War, only Denmark and Germany at the far western edge of the Baltic were in the alliance. Once freed from the Soviet Union, Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the three Baltic republics in 2004, which put most of the Baltic’s southern shore under alliance control. Now, with Sweden and Finland dropping their neutrality, which in Sweden’s case goes back hundreds of years, and joining NATO, Russia will have only limited access from the north. The alliance’s presence in the Arctic, a region increasingly strategic to Russia and China, will also be expanded.
And then there’s Ukraine.
Most experts agree that Ukraine’s NATO membership is essential if the West wants to deter Vladimir Putin, or a Putin-like future Russian leader, from attacking the country again. Today, Ukraine has the largest battle hardened armed forces in Europe, increasingly trained along NATO lines using NATO-standard equipment, so integration would be a simple matter. Whether membership is realistic depends on the political will of NATO leaders, and this was on display in Vilnius last week.
With Putin’s shadow looming over the country, it’s not surprising that Ukraine’s wish to join NATO dominated the two-day summit, at which Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy was guest of honour.Earlier he had vented his disappointment with the wording of the summit’s communique, which contained a reference to ‘conditions’ that Ukraine should meet before receiving an invitation to join NATO. On Wednesday the Ukrainian leader toned down his comments, and Britain’s Prime Minister Sunak struck a sympathetic note, saying that he understood “Volodymyr’s desire to do everything he can do to protect his people and to stop this war and we will continue to give him the support he needs”. In the end, Ukraine got closer to membership, although the final communique on the Ukraine-NATO relationship moved only slightly beyond the language of the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit.
The dilemma for NATO is that if Ukraine is admitted to the alliance while the war continues, Kyiv could call for the Article 5 guarantee, which would result in NATO directly fighting Russia, a claim that Moscow persistently makes although patently untrue.Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo accurately summed up the position: “We have to stay outside of this war but be able to support Ukraine. It’s to the benefit of everyone that we maintain this balancing act”. On the other hand, if NATO members give Ukraine a clear promise to allow membership when the war is over, this would incentivise Moscow to continue the war indefinitely, perhaps hoping for the second coming of Donald Trump.
The compromise came on the final day of the summit when the alliance launched a new forum for deepening ties with Ukraine: the NATO-Ukraine Council. This is intended to be a permanent body where the alliances 32 members and Ukraine can hold consultations and call for meetings in emergency situations. “Today we meet as equals”, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, “I look forward to the day we meet as allies”.
A welcome outcome for Kyiv came from the G7, six members of which are also in NATO, which met in the sidelines of the summit. With the United States in the lead of both organisations, the G7 partners offered Ukraine long-term security guarantees in the form of weapons sales, military training and reconstruction assistance, while emphasising their“enduring support to Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and territorial integrity, rebuilds its economy, protects its citizens, and pursues integration into the Euro-Atlantic community”.
Of course, none of this would have happened if Vladimir Putin hadn’t illegally invaded Ukraine last year. With his forces in disarray and mutinous noises from his generals, with NATO on a high with increasing membership and greater spending on defence, he must now consider 24 February 2022 to be a moment of madness. All he has achieved is a long-simmering resentment about the war, with rounds of finger-pointing and recriminations inside the Kremlin, which could soon open a power vacuum that disgruntled advisers could exploit. Sir Lawrence Freedman, the distinguished emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, said recently that Putin will find it difficult to rebuild his image in the eyes of the Russian people. “The unintended consequences of this war are now threatening his regime”, he said. “Any suggestion that he wants to get out of the war will aggravate the image of weakness; sticking with the war, regardless of losses will aggravate his actual weaknesses”.Putin’s only achievement is to become NATO’s greatest asset. Well done, Vlad!
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.