The United States and the European Union fear that Russia has everything ready to invade its neighbor Ukraine and that only the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin is missing. His American counterpart Joe Biden communicated this information to several European leaders on Friday and even anticipated that the attack would begin this week.
(It may interest you: US intelligence fears that Russia is ready to attack Ukraine)
Russia seeks to tie Ukraine to its sphere of influence for fear that it will end up joining NATO. Already in 2014 he tried to destabilize it by forcibly seizing the province of Crimea and supporting armed Donbas separatists after Kiev agreed to sign a trade and political cooperation treaty with the European Union.
The northwestern governments demand that the Kremlin withdraw its men from the Ukraine border, but Moscow demands in return that NATO, if not on paper, abandon in practice all the countries it has accepted into its fold since 1997: Estonia, Latvia , Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia and Albania.
NATO rejects this demand and also says that its door is open to any European country and that all countries must be able to freely decide which alliances they agree to. That the era of spheres of influence ended with the end of the Cold War.
Russia, for its part, alleges that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders promised it, in exchange for its troops leaving East Germany and allowing German reunification, that NATO would never go further east than Germany. No treaty or agreement says that.
(Read here: US reiterates attack on Ukraine possible ‘at any time’)
The end of the Cold War meant the end of the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance that united the former Soviet Union with the countries of its sphere of influence in Europe. These countries joined, after their democratic transitions, first in NATO (as of that year 1997 to which Russia wants to return) and later in the European Union (as of 2004).
Moscow thus lost most of its influence in a wide region. Still under his political influence were now independent countries such as Belarus or Ukraine itself. If the former remains anchored to Moscow, the latter tries to tie itself to Brussels, headquarters of NATO and the European Union.
In 2008, at a NATO summit in Bucharest, then US President George W. Bush invited, against the judgment of European governments, Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. That promise came to nothing because after Bush there was no interest in Washington and because the Europeans don’t think it’s a good idea to integrate a country in conflict with Russia. But is Russia right and was it promised that NATO would not expand?
For some it is a myth and for others an absolute truth. President Putin has made reference in recent weeks to that supposed promise. The Soviet Union and later Russia never received a formal promise that NATO would not go beyond its 1990 limits, but in Russia the arguments that the Alliance has given to expand are also criticized.
The dominant debate in Washington and Brussels ensures that Eastern European countries that were once controlled by Moscow – and by the boots of the Soviet Army, as after the crushing of the pro-democracy revolutions in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968 – decided freely joining the Atlantic Alliance and that this enlargement caused tens of millions of people to shake off Soviet domination.
The Russians see it differently. They understand that the West betrayed the goodwill of the Russian political generation that made the transition from the Soviet Union to present-day Russia.
(In other news: ‘We are prepared for scenarios other than diplomacy’: Biden)
If such a promise existed, at least verbally, it is to be found in 1990. In February of that year, a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and while the reunification of Germany was being debated, US Secretary of State James Baker traveled to Moscow and met with President Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia feared such reunification because NATO would grow eastward with reunification.
Baker told Gorbachev that everyone, the United States, Europe and Russia, was more interested in having a Germany within NATO -and thus militarily controlled- than outside, in no man’s land between the two blocs -and so on. less military control.
Baker did not promise Gorbachev that NATO would never go to eastern Germany because the issue was simply not discussed at that meeting. Because probably neither of them foresaw that possibility then. He wasn’t on any agenda. In his canonical and detailed work on the history of Europe, the British historian Tony Judt tells that, if in some capitals of Eastern Europe there was talk of a future incorporation into the European Union, there was no debate about an eventual entry into NATO. .
The day after meeting with Baker, the Russian president met with the German Helmut Kohl, who was seeking approval for the reunification of his country. Nor did they speak of hypothetical expansions of NATO, but it was implied that the reunified Germany would indeed be a member of the Atlantic Alliance.
What Western capitals did accept was that there would be no NATO troops of non-German nationality on East German soil. In 1999, three of the most important countries in the region joined the Alliance: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Gorbachev acknowledged in a 2014 interview with the Kommersant that in 1990 no one spoke of an expansion of NATO.
The Russians repeat that in the spirit of those negotiations and the agreements signed in those years, it was understood that beyond the incorporation of East Germany motivated by reunification, there would be no further expansion of NATO. But no agreement or treaty put it in writing and Western leaders repeat that it is a myth. Putin says that Russia was deceived. In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin said that NATO’s enlargement was not about European security, but rather aimed at provoking Russia and lowering the level of trust.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
FOR THE TIME
BRUSSELS
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