Does NATO Bear Any Responsibility for the Ukrainian Tragedy?

Ukraine's military servicemen sit in the back of military truck in the Donetsk region town of Avdiivka, on the eastern Ukraine front-line with Russian-backed separatists on Feb. 21, 2022. Aleksey Filippov/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Feb. 24 was the day Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military assault on neighboring Ukraine, and many lives have already been lost. In recent weeks, the U.S. and UK administrations had been warning that an attack was imminent, but was this situation avoidable?

The seeds for it may have been planted in 2014, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who wished to strengthen ties with Russia, was overthrown and replaced by the pro-Western Petro Poroshenko. Many accused the European Union of having some involvement in that bloody uprising, which also suited NATO’s eastward push.

Putin referred to this incident when he addressed his citizens prior to the current Russian attack.

“We see that the forces that carried out a coup in Ukraine in 2014 seized power and are holding it through sham electoral procedures,” he said.

Or was it further back, in 1954, when then-leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev handed control of Crimea to Kyiv from Moscow? Sixty years later, when Putin sent his troops into the peninsula in 2014, he felt he was correcting a relatively recent act of administrative folly. He also felt he had no choice.

I recently reported about why Crimea matters so much to Russia. Its port of Sevastopol isn’t just home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, it’s also the only port that the largest country on Earth has access to that doesn’t freeze over in the winter. Until 2014, it was having to rent it from its breakaway neighbor.

After Ukraine gained independence from Russia in 1991, it took six years before the partition treaty was signed and negotiations for dividing military assets between them were completed. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was allowed to operate from part of the then-Ukrainian-owned port under a lease deal that was supposed to last until 2017, when it was to have been renegotiated.

However, in 2008, during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian government declared that the lease wouldn’t be extended and that the Russian fleet would have to leave Sevastopol by 2017. Although an agreement was eventually hammered out, it highlighted the strategic vulnerability that Russia faced and may have influenced Putin’s eventual decision to take back control of Crimea.

The West viewed the annexation as an indefensible act of expansionism, even though the Crimean parliament had already voted in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Russia saw it as a matter of national security.

That was affirmed by Putin recently at a news conference in Moscow with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He said that as a future NATO member, Ukraine could once again feel emboldened to evict Russia from Crimea.

He asked whether the West had considered the implications of such an action.

“Are we supposed to go to war with the NATO bloc?” Putin said. “Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not.”

They’re certainly giving it plenty of thought now.

Putin told the Russian people in his pre-invasion speech, “What I think is important to emphasize further is that the leading NATO countries, in order to achieve their own goals, support extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, who, in turn, will never forgive the Crimean and Sevastopol residents for choosing reunification with Russia.”

The West rejects his accusations and firmly believes that Crimea should be returned to Ukrainian control. Russia’s action is still viewed as an illegal annexation of the peninsula, even though a referendum held shortly afterward purported to show that most of its citizens approved of the action.

But asking Russia to return the territory back to Ukraine could be compared to asking the United States to hand back to Mexico the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, which were acquired through a war that started when the United States annexed Texas and ended with Mexico losing 55 percent of its territory.

The Russian incursion may be fresher in memory, but the Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848 cost the lives of tens of thousands of troops on both sides, while there were just six deaths in Crimea. Also, while the United States had no historic claim to those states, Russia’s claim on Crimea dates as far back as 1783, when it was annexed during the reign of Catherine the Great.

None of this will comfort those caught up in the Ukrainian conflict, but it’s important to know how this juncture has been reached.

There are many parallels with the five-day, 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, which is also situated on the Black Sea, after Russia claimed that the former Soviet republic was seeking to become a NATO member.

Despite winning that conflict, Russia didn’t maintain its presence in Georgia and still has no diplomatic relations with its neighbor. But it did deliver independence for the two separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, as it’s now seeking to do with Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine.

This time also, Putin has told his nation and the world that “our plans do not include the occupation of Ukrainian territories,” although he was almost certainly omitting its two breakaway regions mentioned above, as well as Crimea.

That would be in keeping with what Putin has told Western leaders dating back to U.S. President George W. Bush, who promoted NATO’s enlargement policy in the East up to the Russian border. A long-term occupation of Ukraine, therefore, would be an own goal, as its neighbors, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, have all become NATO members.

Just why he decided to invade at this time was made clearer when he told his fellow Russians: “Now, they [Ukrainians] also claim to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not allow this to happen.”

Putin was referring to the speech that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave at the Munich security conference on Feb. 19, while standing alongside smiling U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.

Zelensky threatened to reverse the 1994 “Budapest Memorandum,” which was the agreement that saw Ukraine give up what was then the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in exchange for security guarantees.

“Today, we have neither weapons nor security,” he told attendees in Germany.

In response, Putin told his people, “This is a real threat not just to our interests, but to the very existence of our state, its sovereignty—this is the very red line that has been talked about many times. They crossed it.”

Zelensky traveled to Munich to gain support for his beleaguered nation. But by threatening to give Ukraine nuclear strike capability once again—and this time under the aegis of NATO—he probably sealed its fate. If so, it was a diplomatic disaster of the greatest magnitude.

To understand the extreme reaction in Moscow to his threatening announcement, think back to 1963 and the horror felt in the United States when the Soviet Union tried to place medium and long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy received huge praise for peacefully resolving what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Putin has chosen an invasion.

However, English historian Paul Johnson noted that part of the deal that JFK made with Khrushchev was “to allow the continuation of a communist regime in Cuba in open military alliance with Soviet Russia,” which made it “an American defeat,” according to Johnson.

“The worst it had so far suffered in the Cold War,” he said.

It was an unnecessary concession, as then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk admitted.

“So long as we had the thumbscrews on Khrushchev, we should have given it another turn every day,” Rusk said.

But instead, over the ensuing years, JFK’s compromise has resulted in an incalculably high number of deaths as Moscow used its new satellite in Havana to export Marxist revolutions across South America, Central America, and Africa with impunity. Why else were Cuban forces fighting wars as far away as Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Mali?

Putin is only too aware of this and the similar dangers his administration might face if Ukraine joins NATO—and not just of having nukes on his border. The ex-KGB man may also fear that NATO might use its new satellite nation as a base to sow revolutionary discontent across Russia.

Rather than pressing so hard for Ukraine to join NATO, the situation might have been avoided if Western powers had recognized Russia’s historic claim to Crimea and kept Ukraine as a nuclear-free zone.

Indeed, already in 1996, George F. Kennan, who was the architect of the initial U.S. Cold War policy, called NATO’s expansion into former Soviet territory a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions” and “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era”—presumably eclipsing JFK’s blunder and for which the Ukrainians are now paying a terrible price.

NATO has thus far resisted calls to commit combat forces, as the alliance knows that such an escalation would only lead to more bloodshed, even at a conventional level. There are also no guarantees that it wouldn’t escalate to the unthinkable.

Especially if they keep poking the Russian bear, as Zelensky has done again by requesting Ukraine’s immediate membership in the EU.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.