War in Ukraine: The Reunification of Germany and The Broken Promise of The United States
How the West helped to fuel conflict in Eastern Europe.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, the biggest invasion since World War Two, the world has changed. It wouldn’t be exaggerated to say that it started a new era in international relations.
The Ukrainian military, after a bloody battle, has been able to push back the invaders in several places, like in the Kiev region and, more recently, in Kharkiv, near the Russian border. The Russians retreated after the first phase of its so-called “Special Operation”, meant to decapitate the Ukrainian government, and turned their efforts to the Donbas region, where the battle for Ukraine continues fiercely.
In the past days, the Ukrainian troops besieged in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol finally surrendered to the Russians, after a historical battle that some are already calling it a contemporary Thermopylae.
In effect, the resolve of the Ukrainians to resist the invaders has caused the Russians considerable damages, whilst Putin’s troops repeated its strategy of scorched-earth, devastating cities and killing scores of civilians — as it is happening now in Severodonetsk — , while possibly comitting war crimes, as indicated by the scenes of carnage in places like Bucha and Irpin.
The war is now in a stalemate with no end in sight. Ukraine has been heavily bombarded with thousands casualties, both military and civilian, and millions of refugees and internally displaced citizens. Nearly 4 million left the country. Meanwhile, Russia has been heavily sanctioned in an unprecedented level. All this happenend in a relatively short period of time.
The current general perception of the war in the West tends to attributing the responsibility for the conflict solely to the President of Russia, Mr. Vladimir Putin. Even though this might be true to some extent, endorsing this view without looking back to the broader geopolitical context seems to be only a short-sighted perspective. This article has the objective of putting some context to this event while it is still happening.
At a first glance, in effect, one might trace the origins of the conflict back to 2014, when a popular uprising overthrowed the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovyc out of presidency during the Euromaidan protests that crossed the whole country. Following this episode, it came the annexation of Crimea by the Russians in a covert (but not that much) operation, as well as the civil war in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine.
At this point one might ask 'why the regime change in Ukraine caused so much anxiety in the Kremlin that they would foment war on European soil, against a nation that has long-term historical ties to Russia?’ There’s no simple answer and no honest answer could attribute solely one cause to it.
However, one of the main causes of anxiety can be found in the article 85 of the Constitution of Ukraine, that says:
Art. 85. The authority of the Verkhovna Rada [equivalent to Congress] of Ukraine include:
(…)
5) determining the principles of internal and foreign policy, realization of the strategic course of the state on acquiring full-fledged membership of Ukraine in the European Union and in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization;
In other words, aspiring NATO membership it’s in the Ukrainian Constitution and a Constitution isn’t only a written organization of a State but also a political project. And of course, the integration with the European Union it’s encharted, and this was the primary issue around the protests that ousted Yanukovyc in 2014 in the first place. The pro-Russian leader, at that ocasion, had favoured an economic deal with Russia rather than one with the European Union, infuriating millions of Ukrainians that went to the streets in protest.
The article 85 says that the Ukrainian parliament it’s obliged to seek NATO membership and full-fledged membership in the Europen Union. Of course that doesn’t mean that they would be accepted in the alliance, giving that they would have to meet some requirements and also be accepted by every country-member’s parliament as well — Turkey and Croatia, for instance, are already presenting objections to the recent application of Finland and Sweden to become members.
While this ammendment to the Constitution came in 2019, some of the events here described as Russian aggressiveness are much older, like the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It follows that this aspiration by the Ukrainian state, at least officially, dates back to 2008, the year of the Declaration of Bucharest — a document signed by Ukrainian and NATO officials that said, in its section 23, that:
23. NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. Both nations have made valuable contributions to Alliance operations. We welcome the democratic reforms in Ukraine and Georgia and look forward to free and fair parliamentary elections in Georgia in May. MAP is the next step for Ukraine and Georgia on their direct way to membership. Today we make clear that we support these countries’ applications for MAP. Therefore we will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications. We have asked Foreign Ministers to make a first assessment of progress at their December 2008 meeting. Foreign Ministers have the authority to decide on the MAP applications of Ukraine and Georgia.
In the end it didn’t work out that well, because Germany and France vetoed Ukraine, but the seed was planted and the risk of a possible membership dind’t disappear over time — as we can see in the Ukrainian Constitution. For the Russians, as the famous journalist Vladimir Pozner said, an Ukrainian entry in the alliance would represent an existential threat. Not only because of the common history of the two countries, going back to Yaroslav, the Wise (978–1054), a kiyvan monarch that appears in both countries money notes, but also because of the strategic importance of Ukraine to Russia.
To illustrate this importance, one might look to the fact that Russia’s Black Sea fleet is located in Sebastopol, Crimea — and this explains why it was invaded in the very first moments after the fall of Yanukovyc. Besides that, a huge portion of the Ukrainians are native Russian speakers, specially in the Eastern part of the country — where the support for Yanukovyc was massive — and the Russians regard them as a minority.
But what’s the West’s role on this situation? Some argue that the Euromaidan protests were orchestrated by the Americans, but this isn’t the line we’ll follow here, for it is too difficult to talk about what happens behind the scenes. Rather, we’ll discuss the broader geopolitical context of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
To understand Russia’s concerns, we shall go back in time a few decades and move beyond Ukraine: the year is 1989 and the place is Germany. A promise was made and then, soon afterwards, it was broken.
As a consequence of the Second World War, Germany was divided in two parts: West Germany, who remained within the sphere of influence of the US and its allies and later became a member of NATO; and East Germany who was part of the USSR’s sphere of influence and a member of the Warsaw Pact — the antagonizing alliance of the communist bloc. When back in the late 80s and early 90s Germany was in the process of reunification, she was caught in the middle of a huge geopolitical dilemma: which, if any, of the alliances would prevail in the reunified country?
About this dillema the famous American historian John L. Gaddis, in his The Cold War: A New History, explained that:
The critical question [of the reunification] was on what terms. East Germany was still a member of the Warsaw Pact, and over 300,000 Soviet troops were stationed there. West Germany was still part of NATO, with about 250,000 American troops on its territory. 34 The Soviet government insisted that it would not allow a reunified Germany to remain within the NATO alliance: it proposed instead neutralization. The Americans and West Germans were equally insistent that the NATO affiliation remain.
In the end, as we all know, Germany remained in the atlantic alliance, though with one concession made by the George H. W. Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev, then the soviet leader. The concession was:
The Americans, in the end, made only one concession to Gorbachev: they promised, in the words of Secretary of State James Baker, that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction one inch to the east” — a commitment later repudiated by Bill Clinton’s administration, but only after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Now there are two important considerations that we can make on the nature of this promise. The first, most obvious, is that it wasn’t a treaty in the form that international law requires, but, as pointed out by the American historian, a commitment or a political compromise that was later repudiated by the next US administration. The second, that the Soviet Union ceased to exist soon after the promise was made, giving some grounds for the Americans to not to fulfill its commitment.
To the first consideration, it has to be said that the dealings with the Soviets did not take place simply because they were nice people, but because they were a nuclear and military superpower — therefore it was a necessity to deal with them. And to the second consideration, one would be naive to think that the Soviet Union and Russia are totally different, as, for example, Russia inherited the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN’s Security Council. Again, not because they were nice people, but because Russia still was a superpower.
Soon afterwards the Soviet Union disintegrated, the former Soviet bloc was going through a hard time, deeply immersed in political and economic chaos. It was, doubtlessly, a period in which Russia was in great distress and in a fragile moment. In the midst of the promises of economic assistance and cooperation, the West increased its military presence within the former soviet sphere of influence — countries that were within the Iron Curtain. There were two major waves of NATO expansion that included on its ranks countries like Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Czeck Republic and many others.
Was this a wise strategy by the West? That’s a good question. In the West, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is commonly used as proof that joining NATO was the right thing to do for countries that border Russia. On the other hand, the Russians for years have pointed out that NATO expansion towards its border was an existential threat.
At the time of the first wave of expansion, George Kennan, the creator of the “Containment Policy” — which basically vowed to contain the Soviet Union instead of confronting it and was the policy adopted by the United States until the collapse of its rival — said in a interview to the The New York Times that:
…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking …
George Kennan was famous for his far-sighted view. Today, in the year 2022 he proved to be correct yet once again. Russia did resent and NATO expansion has been one of the greatest fuels to Russian nationalism since it started. By the time NATO expansion began, there was no risk whatsoever of Russian aggression to its neighbors. They were too busy dealing with the Chechens at the time.
In 2007 Putin gave a speech, on this ocasion he said:
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees? The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice — one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia — a choice in favour of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us — these walls may be virtual, but they are nevertheless dividing, ones that cut through our continent. And is it possible that we will once again require many years and decades, as well as several generations of politicians, to dissemble and dismantle these new walls?
It was precisely this sentiment of national humiliation, some argue, that impelled Putin for its aggressive foreign policy and hawkish behavior in the international arena. The first clear sign of its willingness to restore soviet-era prestige and influence was its hybrid war against Estonia in 2007 and then the invasion of Georgia in 2008. But at this point, NATO expansion was already materialized by at least a decade. So everything is the West’s fault? Well no, the so-called “Special Operation of Ukraine” could have been avoided and there seems to be a personal will on behalf of Putin of accomplishing some kind of “Restoration” of Russia as a great power.
For Putin the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the XXth century.’’
This restoration could have happened in a different way, not necessarily by military means. And that’s on Putin, this is his half-guilt. The problem is that the United State’s aspiration to global hegemony has turned the course of events to the bloodiest path. Putin, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care about the thousands of civilians that have been killed in the crossfire or simply massacred by his troops. It has to be said, however, that his piece wasn’t meant to simply portray the West as the villain and Russia as the victim, but to present the broader geopolitical context in which the war broke out.
Would the US accept that a country like Canada, right on its border, would enter into a rival military alliance?
The fact of the matter is that the United States invaded and sponsored coup d’etats in countries far away from its borders and for much less plausible reasons. And it wasn’t a long time ago, like the invasion of Iraq, for instance. That gives any right to the Russian state to invade Ukraine as well? No. But this comparisions show how international politics works in a realistic perspective. It’s just how it is and, of course, it isn’t right.
Much of the bloodshed that we can see today are partly a consequence of a irresponsible policy of NATO expansion. The United States did not fulfill its promise of not going one inch to the East at a time when Russia was weak, strugling with itself to discover its new identity. Now Putin convinced a large portion of the Russian population, of course with the help of state propaganda and supression of dissent, that invading Ukraine was the right thing to do.
There is a limit to what state propaganda can do and there are signs of disatisfaction within Russian society. However, it is important to have in mind that in international politics sometimes the “good guys” are the ones to blame. This isn’t whataboutism, this is History. Instead of following George Kenann’s strategy, the US and NATO, with its “Open Doors Policy”, helped to create a monster that it is now eating Ukraine. Instead of expanding NATO, they could have invited the Russians to participate in the European security system as a partner, instead of treating them like enemies.
Of course, there are even more aspects that explain this conflict, like Putin’s personality and his grip on power, and so the broken promise by itself doesn’t explain the war. But we cannot ignore that this expansion gave the Russians some reasonable concerns. The others aspects, however, shall be discussed in another opportunity.
