The Other Side…

There are always two sides to every story. Look at the Ukraine conflict. One side, the US-led NATO, dominates the global narrative, while the other side, Russia, has been proclaimed a villain. Considering the Western-dominated global narrative, it is easier to make a solid case against Russia, but this story, too, has another side.

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed after the Second World War. The goal was to protect capitalist democracies. On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic treaty was signed. This treaty was simple, an anti-Soviet Union accord, aimed at countering aggression by the Communist bloc. It established a new balance of power in Europe. It promised collective security to all the member states as per the article 5 of the NATO treaty. It obliges member states to protect one another in case of a war. It says that “an armed attack against one ally will be an attack on all allies.” This allowed NATO members to pool and share their military resources.

However, NATO was more than just a defensive alliance. It also aimed to serve as an engine for the so-called democratization in the world, promote Western common values and interests, and push back the tide of communism. Naturally, the Kremlin saw NATO as a threat to its interests. In response, it created the Warsaw pact in 1955. It was a counterweight to NATO. The goal was the same: if one Warsaw pact member gets attacked, all others will defend it.

Council on Foreign Relations’ Deputy Managing Editor Jonathan Masters said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression is being called out, and rightly so. Invading a sovereign country cannot be justified, but what led to this invasion also remains a pertinent question?

Russia has long been wary of the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly as the alliance opened its doors to the former Warsaw Pact states and ex-Soviet republics in the late 1990s (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and early 2000s (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia). Russia’s fears grew in the late 2000s as the alliance stated its intent to admit Georgia and Ukraine at an unspecified point in the future.

For the Kremlin, the notion that Ukraine — once a pillar of the Soviet Union with strong historic ties with Russia — would join NATO was a red line. “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps towards NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act towards Russia,” Putin warned US Undersecretary for Political Affairs William J. Burns, who is now director of the CIA, before the start of NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit.

Although NATO did not announce a formal membership plan for Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest Summit, the alliance did affirm “that these countries will become members of NATO”, and it extended formal invitations to accession talks with Albania and Croatia, which became members in 2009. The NATO expanded again in 2017, admitting Montenegro, and in 2020, welcoming North Macedonia.

The warnings from Russia were clear, but NATO ignored them; call it their myopia or arrogance. They downplayed Moscow’s concerns and kept proceeding with new rounds of expansion until things blew up in Ukraine.

Russian officials say that the US government made a promise to the Soviet leaders that NATO would not expand towards eastern borders, a commitment they say came during the flurry of diplomacy following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and surrounding the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Proponents of this narrative often cite the words that US Secretary of State James A. Baker said to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990, that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction towards the east.” They say the United States and NATO have repeatedly betrayed this commitment taking advantage of Russia’s tumultuous post-Soviet period and expanded the Western alliance several times, all the way to Russia’s doorstep in the case of the Baltic States. Today, the United States says that it made no such promise, no such deal was ever struck. But hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts from US archives indicate otherwise. Nevertheless, Moscow bought the offer, it demolished the Warsaw pact in the hope that the West would follow suit. Russians expected that NATO, too, would be dissolved but that never happened. NATO refused to seize operations and to add insult to injury, they kept the door for membership open. Russia saw it as a stab in the back, and NATO kept pushing the dagger deeper.

To put it simply, much of the Eastern Europe, which once used to be part of the Soviet Union, has now joined NATO and this happened despite Russia’s protests and warnings. 

The last reasonably friendly warning from Moscow came in the year 2007 when Vladimir Putin addressed the annual Munich conference, “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders. This expansion represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask those against whom this expansion is intended. And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw pact”, he said.

In the summer following NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit — where the alliance showed its intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine — Russia invaded Georgia. Six years later, as Kyiv stepped closer to an economic partnership with another Western bloc, the European Union, Russia annexed Crimea.

These sentiments were anticipated by a host of American strategists. For example, in June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton, calling America’s efforts to expand NATO ‘a policy error’ of historic proportions. George Kennan, arguably the father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, too, called NATO expansion a tragic mistake. The former Secretary of State Strobe Talbot described the Russian perception in a similar way to how they consider NATO as a vestige of the cold war, and pointed out that if the Warsaw pact was disbanded, why did the West not dismantle NATO?

So, several voices in the Western world warned that Russia’s protests have merit and that NATO expansion could spell trouble. Yet, successive US administrations paid no heed to these warnings.  They kept expanding NATO’s security umbrella. Therefore, NATO cannot escape the blame for what’s unfolding in Ukraine

Trying to safeguard the sovereignty of a country is laudable, but inviting a state right on Russia’s border into an anti-Russian alliance is a provocation. Such moves completely disregard the historical baggage between NATO and Russia.

Many Russians were traumatised by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In an instant, they lost one-third of their territory, half of their population and most of their military might. They found themselves much weaker before the Western unity. They felt that an unjust settlement had been imposed on them and it was done in their moment of maximum weakness and vulnerability.

When we analyse why Ukraine was attacked, all of this needs to be taken into account. Does this justify the war? Absolutely not. Russia’s actions are wrong, no two ways about it but the West is not innocent either. They did not do what they could have to avert this war.