STAND OFF BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE WEST - A NEW NORMAL

Today’s standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine can be traced back to
2004, a little more than a decade after the end of the Cold War. By some accounts,
Putin’s perception that Russia is under threat goes back to historic invasions of Russia:
Karl the XII’s in the 18th, Napoleon’s in the 19th and finally, Hitler’s in the 20 th (“Russia
Cannot Afford to Lose, so We Need a Kind of a Victory”: Sergey Karaganov on
What Putin Wants, 2022). His historical gripes also extend to the Soviet Union’s first
leader, the Bolshevik revolutionary Lenin, who Putin says weakened Russian territorial
integrity by “creating” Ukraine–a contested revisionist claim. But whatever the precise
length of this timeline of perceived injustice and threat, it has been abundantly clear
since the mid-2000s that Putin is dissatisfied with the status quo of Russia’s position in
the world (Press, 2016). Over the past decade, the Western response to Putin’s
rhetorical and territorial provocations has been tepid. Instead of deterring Russia, the
U.S. and Europe pursued a three-pronged strategy. First, security-wise, they worked to
force Russian revanchism east by expanding NATO, thereby preserving a united
Germany and deterring possible military confrontations west of Poland in the north and
Croatia in the south. Second, politically, they expected democratization to grease the
wheels of NATO expansion, enticing former Soviet allies, satellites and republics
without the U.S. or Europe needing to openly or “aggressively” push NATO farther east.
Finally, economically, the West signaled its friendly intentions to Russia through
economic appeasement, expecting that commerce, finance and socialization would
encourage Western values among Russians.

Putin was unpersuaded by these economic inducements. Seeing the balance of power
tilting away from him and the balance of threat increasing both militarily and politically,
he pushed even harder against the norms and limits the West believed would restrain
him. As a result, after the war in Ukraine, the rift now emerging between Russia and the
West is likely to become a permanent feature: a new normal dividing the geopolitical
and geoeconomic landscape for as long as Putin’s regime, or a similarly revanchist one,
remains in power.

East and West

During his 2005 state of the nation address, Putin lamented the collapse of the Soviet
Union, calling it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and a “genuine
tragedy” for the Russian people. “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen
found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory,” he noted, interweaving his
own nostalgia with regrets about lost lands. This statement, like others he’s made since,
implied that the geopolitical rebalancing Russia sought would require the recuperation
of territory (The Associated Press, 2005).

That speech came in the wake of the anti-regime “color revolutions” that had swept
across the former Soviet Republics, such as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the
2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Putin
believed that these democratic uprisings were the product of Western meddling, and
became “obsessed” with the idea that millions of Russians had been “trapped outside
Mother Russia,” as Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, recently remarked to
The New York Times (“The Making of Vladimir Putin,” 2022).

By 2007, Putin was openly repeating former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s criticisms
of the unipolar order led by the United States and the security threat he felt it posed to
Russia. At the Munich Security Conference that year, he identified three key complaints
(Shanker & Landler, 2007). First, he resented NATO’s expansion into the Baltics.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had joined the alliance in 2004, and Putin said this could
be considered an offensive move against Russia. Second, he decried U.S. election
monitoring and regime-change efforts in the former Soviet republics, which the Kremlin
considers to be within its “sphere of influence.” To Putin, U.S. democracy promotion
was a “Trojan horse” that would destabilize Russia and further rebalance power toward
the United States (Burns, n.d.). Third, Putin protested a proposal to build an anti-
missile shield over the United States, with bases in Eastern Europe, saying it would
create a disequilibrium in the balance of threat and fear that had preserved nuclear
stability during the Cold War.

Those fears seemed justified in January 2008, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor
Yushchenko requested a NATO membership action plan, a program of advice and
support that would pave the way for the country to join the alliance. William J. Burns,
then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, warned that this development would not go down
well with Moscow, writing in a report to Rice that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the
brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite” and “a direct challenge to Russian
interests” (Burns, 2019).

Later that same year, at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin issued explicit warnings to
the West. He made it clear to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary general,
that he viewed expansion up to Russia’s border as a “direct threat” (Dawar, 2008).

In response to Russia’s warnings, NATO deferred immediate plans to offer such

roadmaps to Ukraine and Georgia. But Bush remained keen on NATO expansion, and
as a result, the Bucharest Summit declaration included a promise to eventually
incorporate both countries into the alliance. It even set a timeline, asking NATO’s
foreign ministers to make a “first assessment of progress at their December 2008
meeting.” According to then-Danish Foreign Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Putin
left the summit in a rage, fuming against the West for disregarding his line in the sand.

From Russia’s perspective, the prospect that Ukraine and perhaps Georgia could join
NATO fueled domestic fears of the country’s “encirclement” by hostile states. If the bids
were successful, Russia would have a rival military alliance positioned on its Western
frontier, creating a hostile corridor extending from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Belarus,
sitting between Lithuania and Ukraine, would remain as Russia’s only buffer in a
fundamentally altered geopolitical landscape.

And strategically speaking, access to the Black Sea is crucial to the Kremlin, since it
provides the most expedient passage to the Mediterranean Sea. Russia is one of six
countries bordering the Black Sea, along with Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and
Georgia. If the latter two became alliance members, Russia would be left as the only
non-NATO country in the set. But for a similar reason, Ukraine and Georgia have a
significant incentive to join the alliance, since as it stands, they would have to fend off
any amphibious attacks from their Russian neighbor without any guaranteed assistance
from others on the Black Sea (Eckstein & Ozberk, 2022).
Just a few months after the Bucharest Summit, Russia extracted a heavy price for
NATO’s open-door policy toward Ukraine and Georgia. In August 2008, before the
membership action plan process had started, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of
Georgia. The provocation could be keyed a success: The West mounted no challenge.
The European Union proposed a cease-fire on Russian terms, and the U.S. offered to
“reset” relations with Moscow (Dickinson, 2021).

Seeing little resistance to his revisionist designs, Putin took on the other potential NATO
member, Ukraine, six years later. In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s
Crimean Peninsula, which, it’s worth noting, juts into the Black Sea. Simultaneously, he
incited Russia-friendly separatists to seize territory in the country’s eastern Donbas
region, before backing them up with a full-scale Russian invasion. At this point, the U.S.
and its allies condemned and sanctioned Russia for its incursion and annexation of
Crimea.

A few years later, Rasmussen, who had served as secretary general of NATO and was
then a special adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, urged incoming U.S.
President Donald Trump to establish military bases on NATO’s eastern front, with the
rationale that “Putin only respects a firm hand” (Brown, 2016). By 2017, the alliance
had deployed rotational battlegroups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Putin was quick to warn his rivals that he saw the bases near Russia’s border as well as
the EU and NATO’s continued courtship of post-Soviet states as a “direct threat” that
would provoke a response. But Ukraine and Georgia continued to pursue NATO
membership, and this year, Putin’s worst nightmare – NATO “coming with its missiles to
our doorstep” – has finally become a reality.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, NATO responded by increasing its
forward presence in Eastern Europe, stationing more battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary,
Romania and Slovakia (Russia to Achieve Its Objectives in Ukraine “in Any Case,”
Putin Tells Macron, n.d.). Moreover, since the invasion, Finland and Sweden have
accelerated their own discussions about joining the alliance, despite their long tradition
of “neutrality.” If Putin’s former adviser, Sergey Karaganov, is right that the Russian
president’s “real war is against Western expansion,” the current war is an abject failure
(“Russia Cannot Afford to Lose, so We Need a Kind of a Victory”: Sergey
Karaganov on What Putin Wants, 2022).

NATO went East to maximize the power and security of the West. Russia, feeling
insecure, resisted that eastward movement, using conquest to assert its sphere of
influence. But its unwillingness to accept the structure and principles underpinning the
world order that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only encouraged
former Soviet republics and satellite states to go West.

Today’s new security context marks a watershed moment in NATO’s strategy toward
Russia. If there was any ambiguity in NATO’s Eastern ambitions, there is none now. In
addition to Finland and Sweden’s potential memberships, further deployments and
reassurances to countries on the alliance’s eastern rim are inevitable. Russia may soon
face a two-front standoff in its northwest and southwest, reminiscent of Germany’s
Western-Eastern predicament during World War I.

The sea change in Russo-European relations cannot be overstated. In the words of

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, “Russia is not the neighbor we thought it was”
(PM: Nato Decision Must Happen This Spring, 2022). Had the West been attentive to
Russia’s red flags, it might have effectively deterred its belligerence, by for example
offering Ukraine NATO membership with full security guarantees. With the West’s
awakening, NATO’s strategic concept is in for a major overhaul, regardless of whether
Russia pulls out of Ukraine before the alliance’s Madrid Summit in June. Its last
strategic concept, issued in November 2010, viewed Russia as a “strategic partner” and
appealed to a shared “respect of democratic principles and the sovereignty,
independence and territorial integrity of all states in the Euro-Atlantic area” (“Strategic
Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation” Adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon, n.d.). This
language is likely to be replaced by calls for security-seeking deterrence and open
strategic competition.

The Legacy of Appeasement

If Putin’s strategy has backfired, the West, too, is now seeing the consequences of its
soft efforts to reorient Russia around the ideals of political and economic freedom. In the
words of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the hope
was for Russia to “build a modern economy based on its human talent in science,
technology, and the arts,” instead of falling back onto “its 18th-century empire fueled by
natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a
powerful military” (Clinton, 2022). European allies therefore encouraged stronger ties
with Russia wherever they saw the opportunity.

This was particularly the case when it came to energy trade. By the beginning of the
1980s, gas reserves in the North Sea had been depleted, and Europe had to look for
alternative suppliers to meet its energy needs. Later, climate change also hastened a
diversification of fuels to reduce reliance on coal.

Russia had both the capacity and willingness to meet Europe’s energy needs. During
the Cold War, Russian gas imports had not been an option, but by the early 2000s,
engaging Russia economically actually made good geopolitical sense. If Europe and
Russia were to become economically entangled, the thinking went, the costs of undoing
the relationship would be high on both sides, and could serve to promote peaceful, even
friendly, relations on the continent. That’s not to mention that Russia is the third largest
energy producer in the world, behind China and the United States. It has significant oil
reserves, the world’s largest natural gas reserves and is the third largest exporter of
petroleum and other liquid fuels (International - U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA), n.d.).

It made sense, then, for Europe to increase its economic ties with Russia, even if doing
so has remained controversial both on the continent and in relations with the U.S.,
which has long opposed dependence on Russia. But that strategy has meant that, in the
weeks since Russia’s invasion, as the U.S. issued a complete ban on Russian energy
imports, Europe was slow to follow suit (The White House, 2022).

Despite coordinating an array of financial and import restrictions with the United States
to contain Russian aggression and expansion (Norrlof, 2022), Europe’s high
dependence on Russian energy has restricted its sanction options. According to
Eurostat, Europe now receives most of its energy from Russia, including some 40
percent of its natural gas and 25 percent of its oil. Russia, too, is overly dependent on
Europe, which is the single largest destination for its exports, including for energy.

Within the European Union, negotiations over a comprehensive energy boycott are
sowing divisions, with some countries stalling and others pushing to forge ahead
(Sandford, 2022). While oil sanctions are more likely, EU-wide gas sanctions may
simply not be possible. Some are calling for select members to implement unilateral
import restrictions, as Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have done. The strategy is
potentially promising. A comprehensive EU gas embargo would be economically costly
for highly dependent countries, and could even weaken Europe’s strategic resilience if
the Ukraine conflict escalates to include NATO countries. But EU members that are not
excessively dependent on Russia can afford to turn off their gas valves individually, with
the aim of collectively damaging Russia.

A New Iron Curtain

However well-intentioned the authors of the liberal peace were, interdependence can be
exploited when commerce is relied upon to preserve stability, as was acknowledged by
one of its key proponents, Paul Krugman (Krugman, 2022). Despite its economic
interdependence with Europe, Russia’s security threat has now escalated beyond its
sphere of influence, intimidating prospective NATO members in Scandinavia (“Ukraine
War: Russia Warns Sweden and Finland against Nato Membership,” 2022).
Democratic states are unlikely to restore relations with Russia if it means shaking hands
with an aggressive, authoritarian regime that now poses a direct security risk to them.

Even if Russia were to reverse course, the Putin regime can no longer credibly commit
to peaceful relations with the West. With the current regime in power, a reset is highly
unlikely, and somewhat out of foreign governments’ control. Even if governments decide
to re-engage with Russia, other economic or morally motivated actors may not want to.
As of April 7, 600 companies had scaled back or suspended business in Russia
(Sonnenfeld & Tian, 2022). Some entities in the sports and entertainment industries
have even banned participation by Russian citizen’s altogether or canceled events in
Russia. In the art world, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams have cancelled their
summer arts events in London; oligarch buyers of Fabergé eggs, Kandinsky paintings
and the like are too sanctioned to participate, collapsing the market. These measures
are not the result of some extraterritorial U.S. sanctions policy. They are a product of
self-policing behavior among independent economic actors that neither require
enforcement nor can be mandated away without interfering with free markets.

Tough times lie ahead for Russia. Its gross domestic product contracted 2 percent in
this quarter and is projected to fall nearly 10 percent in the next. In an attempt to protect
the domestic currency, the Kremlin is maintaining sky-high 20 percent interest rates and
capital controls, as well as import restrictions. Sanctions on high-tech exports have
terminated production of surface-to-air missiles at Russian plants (Ukraine-Russia
War: Sanctions Shut down Russian SAM Production Plant – GUR, n.d.). The
public, too, has been affected, facing limitations on foreign currency withdrawals and
worsening food shortages (Syutkin, 2022).

A rocky road also lies ahead politically outside of Russia. Inflationary pressures are
affecting gas and food prices all over the word, and these impulses are starting to have
outsized political consequences (Ghitis, n.d.). For example, in France, the far-right
party of presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has recently seen a rapid increase in
popularity amid rising food prices (Editors, n.d.).

The basic premise of sanctions is to remove them once the sanctioned party complies
with the stated demands. But that wager depends on other economic actors following
suit and reentering the sanctioned market when it reopens. The longer the war in
Ukraine continues, with its profound human, social and economic casualties, the less
likely the corporate, sports and arts worlds are to return to business-as usual-in Russia.
A deep transformation may be underway. Today’s sanctions may not only quash
Russia’s war effort, but could bring a final end to its great power status, politically,
economically and culturally (Norrlof, 2022).
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