With thousands of Russian troops now concentrated near the Ukrainian border, the announcement that Russia and the United States Security talks soon are definitely welcome. While a decrease in tension is not guaranteed, it is much more difficult to talk to someone in the same room.
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Russia and the West have been doing just that for most of Vladimir Putin’s 21 years in power. Of course, there was a brief honeymoon period: in 2001, the president of the United States, George W. Bush, claimed that he had looked his Russian counterpart “in the eye” and had acquired “a sense of his soul.” that it was “very simple and trustworthy.” For his part, Putin was helpful in the first months of the US intervention in Afghanistan.
But things went downhill from there. Nowhere is the West’s consistent failure to understand Putin more clear than in American evaluations of Russia’s policy in Ukraine, especially the assertion by senior American officials that Putin may be seeking to “reconstitute the Soviet Union” as part of a “legacy project”.
It is easy to see why one might think that. Putin’s recent lament that the collapse of the Soviet Union Almost exactly 30 years ago it was a “tragedy” and the end of “historic Russia” was not the first of its kind. Furthermore, the current troop buildup comes less than a decade after Russia invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea.
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But the conclusion that Putin is attempting some kind of Soviet reunification is easy. The late American diplomat and strategist George F. Kennan, the architect of America’s Cold War Soviet containment policy, for whom I did research at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the 1990s, would surely take a more nuanced view. . Kennan would say that Russia’s behavior is best explained by a “special nation” mentality.
Echoing American exceptionalism, there is a sense among Russians that their country is fundamentally a great power with a pivotal historical role to play. According to a 2020 poll, 58 percent of Russians support the country going its “own special path,” and a whopping 75 percent think the Soviet era was the “best time” in their country’s history.
What the Russians want is not to revive the USSR, but to preserve the status and influence of their country, which means maintaining their sphere of influence.
More importantly, however, only 28 percent of those surveyed report that they wish to “get back on the path that the Soviet Union was following.” In other words, what the Russians want is not to revive the USSR, but to preserve the status and influence of their country, which means maintaining their sphere of influence. The idea that the West could pursue an eastward expansion of NATO without retrogression was always pure madness.
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Kennan recognized this from the beginning. In 1998, when the US Senate ratified NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, it predicted that Russia would “gradually react quite adversely” and the West would claim that this is “how the Russians are.” Since then, Nato has expanded to 11 other former communist countries, including three former Soviet republics. And indeed, Putin is now demanding that NATO deny membership to the former Soviet countries and reduce its military deployments in central and eastern Europe. To nobody’s surprise The United States and its allies refused.
Indeed, the West has consistently rejected the Kremlin’s security concerns related to ex-Soviet countries and has portrayed Russian resistance to NATO’s expansion eastward as paranoid revenge. No one threatens Russia, logic goes; Russia is the one that threatens its neighbors, even invading Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.
But the West cannot reasonably expect the Kremlin to accept at face value NATO’s claim that it is a purely defensive alliance. After all, since the end of the Cold War, Nato has drawn ever closer to Russia’s borders, embracing lands to which Russia is bound by history, geography, and security interests.
That is not all the West is wrong about Russia. Many in the United States and Europe also appear to be convinced that the surge in nationalist sentiment that followed the annexation of Crimea has faded forever.
(Read on: Borrell promises Ukraine ‘full support’ of the European Union vis-à-vis Russia).
Again, the reasons for this perception are easy to discern. When the fighting in eastern Ukraine got too bloody, Kremlin propagandists had to work overtime to bolster Putin’s approval ratings. And they only partially succeeded over time, the Russians grew weary of militant rhetoric and today have little appetite for war.
But this does not mean that the Russians are willing to sacrifice their own perceived security. On the contrary, by ignoring the Russians’ concerns about Nato, the United States and Europe will strengthen support for Putin. Already, only four percent of Russians blame the Kremlin for the recent troop surge, and the rest blame the United States or Ukraine.
When Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president, Volodymyr Zelensky, dresses up and praises the military, or pushes for a firm commitment on the country’s membership in NATO, ordinary Russians get the message that there is a threat to security at the border, and it is not the Russian troops who are now there. Ukrainian politicians only reinforce this impression by proclaiming that the country must prepare to retake Crimea by force.
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The United States wants to avoid something like a repeat of the 2014 events in Ukraine. This seems the most fair. But geopolitics is a matter of cold calculation, not justice. And while the “exceptional” United States has long been able to act in its own strategic interest without, as one author put it, “the consequences of doing so,” the time may have come to account for new variables, namely, that Russians also see their country as exceptional.
At least until that changes the cycle of crisis will continue, with increasing and potentially catastrophic risks. “Such is the destructive potential of advanced modern weapons,” said Kennan, “that another great conflict between any of the major powers could cause irreparable damage to the entire fabric of modern civilization.”
NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA *
© PROJECT SYNDICATE
MOSCOW
* Professor of International Affairs at The New School, she is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler), most recently, of ‘In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Once Time Zones’, St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
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