Andrew C. Kuchins is a senior fellow at the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and Eastern European Studies at Georgetown University, where he conducts research and writes on Russian foreign and security as well as domestic policy. He is a senior associate and former Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2000 to 2006 he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he served as director of its Russian and Eurasian Program in Washington, D.C and as director of the Carnegie Moscow Center in Russia. He has also held senior positions at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a BA from Amherst College and an MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
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Russia’s ties with the West hit an all-time post-Cold War low after the annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s catalytic role in the war in the Donbas in the first half of 2014. The Ukraine crisis put an exclamation mark on the fact that a quarter century after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the West together had failed to create a new, stable European security framework in which all players felt that their interests were adequately met. The war in Ukraine came especially as a shock to Europe, as at times in the summer of 2014 and winter of 2015 the intensity of fighting and destructive consequences were as bad or worse than the continent had experienced since World War II.
The crisis was a long time in the making, with roots going back at least to the debates twenty years ago about NATO enlargement. In fact, the Russian narrative starts with their belief that in negotiating the reunification of Germany in 1990, Gorbachev was assured by the Bush I administration that NATO would not expand its military infrastructure east into former Warsaw Pact states, let alone former Soviet republics, as the Soviet Union still existed at that time. NATO’s attack on Serbia in March 1999 struck a deep and enduring blow in the security psyche of the Russian political elite, showing they were virtually powerless to prevent Washington and its allies from taking actions in nearby countries that Moscow viewed as diametrically countering its interests.
Further enlargement of NATO and ballistic missile system deployments in Europe in the following decade only deepened Vladimir Putin’s view that the existing European security system was illegitimate because from his perspective Russian interests were systematically ignored. He saw the West taking advantage of Russia during a period of historical weakness. While Western policymakers at the time claimed they were working very hard to integrate Russia into essentially Western institutions and norms, the bottom line is that the West was not willing to allocate any decision authority to Russia in NATO. Then Russian President Dmitri Medvedev put forward a proposal in 2009 for a new European security architecture, but the proposal was poorly thought out and basically brushed aside by Washington and its European allies.
While the Russian list of grievances is long and familiar, Russian policymakers never seemed open to asking themselves the question why central and east European states looked west rather than east for institutional security guarantees. Of course, a long history of imperial and hegemonic behavior on Moscow’s part had a lot do with their choices, but a Russia in the 1990s waging a brutal war on its own territory in Chechnya and where democratic parties and politicians rapidly lost power also hardly served as a magnet.
Cataloguing all of the mistakes and misunderstandings over the past quarter century that extinguished our hopes and dreams for a “Europe whole and free” and the “belt of peace from Vancouver to Vladivostok” to the situation today that resurrects some features of the Cold War is not the goal of this chapter. But again, one clear lesson we all must absorb from this experience is that if Russia feels aggrieved and left out of key aspects of European security decision-making, neither Europeans nor Russians will ever really feel secure.
Further, what is most distressing about the current state of affairs is that the most successful aspect by far of post-Cold War Russian-Western relations, the deep economic integration between Russia and Europe, is gradually unwinding under the pressure of the West’s economic sanctions against Russia for its violations of Ukrainian sovereignty. Western sanctions policy reverses nearly a quarter century’s efforts to integrate Russia more deeply into Western and global economic multilateral institutions as well as much deeper and multifaceted bilateral economic ties with European states as well as the United States. The last significant achievement of the Obama Administration’s reset with Russia was the successful conclusion of Russia’s 19-year negotiations to accede to the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2012. Only a little more than a year and a half later, Washington was pushing its European allies and Japan hard to isolate Russia, mainly through punitive economic sanctions.
Russia has not helped its case by habitually criticizing its European partners as lackeys of Washington for supposedly acting in a manner counter to their own interests, as viewed from Moscow. Not only were such comments interpreted as insulting by European leaders, they did not reflect the growing outrage in most European capitals with Russian policy in Ukraine and, to put it politely, the disingenuousness of Putin and his colleagues in not acknowledging any role of Russian armed forces in supporting the insurgents in the Donbass. Even Putin’s most empathetic and effective European mediator, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was repulsed by Putin’s continuous lies and obfuscation. The dramatic achievement of post-World War II Russo-German rapprochement, whose roots date back to generations to the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt in the late 1960s, has eroded significantly. A deep lack of trust permeates Russia’s relations with the West today.
