The Foreign Service Journal, March 2020

26 MARCH 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In the second part of that sentence he was referring to eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, which were colonized by Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries, and to the decision taken on Feb. 19, 1954, by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet (when Nikita Khrushchev was general secretary of the Communist Party) to transfer the Crimean Oblast from the Rus- sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In subsequent years, Putin’s rejection of a truly independent Ukraine has become more frequent, and he often asserts that Russia and Ukraine are one nation, one people with only cultural differences. This, of course, arouses the ire of Ukrainians. Many in the Russian political elite had long chafed at NATO’s first two expansions to include nations of Central Europe and the Baltic region. Although Russia had agreed in 1997 to a joint cooperative program in the NATO-Russia Founding Act and to the 2002 reboot of the act that was designed to give new impetus to NATO-Russia relations, it never seriously invested much effort to build cooperative security through the act’s mechanisms, particularly after Putin came to power. With memories of Napo- leon and Hitler ingrained in their collective psyche, and despite possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, Russian leaders had not abandoned their historical anxiety about invasion of the homeland. They refused to accept the idea of a new security relationship with the West, even with post-Soviet reassurances by NATO of a desire for political and military cooperation. Opposing NATO also played a major role in Russian domestic politics. Increasingly, the NATO bogeyman was used by Putin and others to play on Russian fears and thereby generate domes- tic support for the Putin administration. This became especially true after the 2008 world financial crisis brought the Russian 2000-2008 economic boom to an end, and the Kremlin could no longer justify the regime’s legitimacy on the basis of steadily rising living standards. The Russian elite reverted to defining Russian security in zero-sum terms, seeing the nations on the Russian periphery as secure buffers. They refused to see the potential benefits to Russia of having more secure and economi- cally prosperous nations in Central and Eastern Europe. They did not want to recognize that NATO was fundamentally a defensive alliance and had sought to build cooperation with Moscow. They needed an enemy. CIA had organized it all. They feared that what had happened in Ukraine could happen in Russia. Putin opposed democracy in Ukraine, in part because he feared losing control of that nation, but also because he feared the impact of real democracy on his control of Russia itself. In Putin’s view, things went from bad to worse when Yush- chenko sought Ukrainian integration with Europe and NATO. Russia’s position hardened particularly over the prospect that Ukraine could become a member of NATO. In April 2008 at a summit in Bucharest, NATO leaders debated whether to grant Ukraine and Georgia a membership action plan (MAP), which would have potentially set them on the road to eventual membership in the organization. At the end of the summit, the leaders, many under heavy Russian pressure, could not reach consensus on this, simply stating instead that one day the two countries would become NATO members. Even that decision outraged Putin, who saw it as a challenge to Russia’s sphere of influence. Ironically, Russian leaders misread the decision: It actually meant, in effect, that even a MAP for Ukraine and Georgia was not going to be approved for many years. At a dinner on the final day of the summit, Putin tried to explain Russian opposition to Ukraine’s membership in NATO to President George W. Bush. Not realizing that a microphone on the table had not been turned off, Putin was heard saying to Bush: “You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.” Putin clearly was referring, first, to the western regions of Ukraine that at various points of history were controlled by Lithuania, Poland and Austria. At a national prayer event early in the morning in the center of Kyiv in late November 2013 during the “Euromaidan” revolution, Ukrainians protested the Yanukovych government’s decision to turn toward Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of signing an association agreement with the European Union. ARTHURBONDAR