By Evan Gottesman
Support from the American public for arming Ukraine against Russia and its proxies in the Donbass is rising. A February Pew Research Center poll found that support increased by 11 points from April 2014. Earlier that month, amid ceasefire talks with Russia, U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President François Hollande mulled the possibility of furnishing Kiev with weapons. With the truce in East Ukraine unraveling, the temptation to arm new allies is greater than ever. Yet this is a dangerous proposal, one that seriously misjudges Moscow’s behavior while placing the NATO alliance at risk.
Supplying Ukraine with Western weaponry offers no guarantee of repulsing Russia’s ongoing assault in the Donbass. It does carry a strong risk of hardening the Kremlin’s position and inciting Russia to more aggressive action.
Dr. Yulia Nikitina, who teaches at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, contends that arming Kiev, “will only reassure Vladimir Putin that the West is waging a proxy war in Ukraine to counter Russia.”
Indeed, Ukraine’s importance to Moscow cannot be overstated. The country has been central to Russia’s strategic interests for centuries and remains so today. Ukraine forms a critical buffer zone that historically insulated Russia against hostile powers during the Cold War. Long before then, the Czars acquired these territories as buffer zones because Russia’s land borders grew too long to be conventionally defensible. The Kremlin seeks to retain influence in these states today for that very reason. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger prudently observed amid last March’s Crimean annexation crisis that, “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country.”
Ukraine is presently a critical transit state for Russian oil and natural gas. Sevastopol, rented by the Kremlin after 1991 and annexed in March 2014, is Russia’s only directly accessible warm-water port. These attributes are too valuable to cede, and for Russia, the risk of losing Ukraine to the West is real. Even during pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych’s tenure, the Ukrainian parliament barely passed legislation extending Russia’s lease on Sevastopol. With a pro-Western administration in Kiev, Russia sees its position as even more precarious.
In this context, it is unreasonable to expect that Moscow will reverse course simply because Ukraine receives Western arms. If anything, increased foreign involvement could heighten Russia’s sense of urgency. If Russian leaders feel cornered, they may react assertively and violently in Ukraine. NATO governments should understand Russia’s position, even if its actions violate a postwar liberal international system that sanctifies territorial integrity and condemns unilateralism. This world order, embodied in institutions like the United Nations, is primarily a Western invention. Enforcing this structure in the former Soviet Union can be dangerous and even inimical to Western interests.
Thus Russia’s efforts to preserve its clout in the post-Soviet space are widely perceived in the West as imperialistic. Moscow certainly wishes to remain a hegemon in its old domain, but the country only maintains one base outside its former empire—a small naval facility in Syria. This is telling of the limits of Russia’s strategic ambitions beyond its traditional sphere of influence.
“Russia does not have any proactive expansionist strategy,” Dr. Yulia Nikitina further explained World Policy Journal. “It just reacts to Western interference in the affairs of states from the Eurasian region that Russia considers to be the zone of its interests.”
Click the maps above to compare the Cold War balance of power with today's Russia-NATO confrontation
There is some tacit recognition among Western powers that the former Soviet Union is a Russian neighborhood. France and Germany blocked Georgian entry into NATO in 2008. The U.S. and its allies condemned Russia’s invasion of Georgia later that year, but did not provide the embattled South Caucasus republic with any practical support. This approach stands in sharp contrast with reckless proposals like arming Ukraine—or policies that emerge when Russian actions in the post-Soviet space are judged as Western defeats.
A more holistic view reveals a remarkable expansion of Western power in the past twenty-five years. NATO now includes former members of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, and the Baltics, once part of the U.S.S.R. itself. During the Cold War, NATO only reached the inter-German border. Now, the coalition extends to the Russian frontier—nothing short of a dramatic NATO victory. NATO policymakers should understand that Russian wars in Ukraine and Georgia are hardly Western defeats, even if they are erroneous to the West’s liberal international system.
The ongoing crisis with Russia is now placing NATO’s viability at risk, which should be more alarming than violations of Ukraine’s borders or the Western world order. Growing divides plague the alliance. Member countries cannot seem to present a united front towards Moscow. Where Germany prefers a diplomatic solution, the U.S. is more inclined to provide weapons to Kiev. By contrast, Hungary, a NATO state, maintains good ties with Russia: Vladimir Putin visited the country in February and concluded a gas deal with Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The alliance’s eastern members, like Poland and the Baltics, are understandably fearful of American inaction as the specter of a hostile Russia looms large in the Polish national consciousness especially.
Disunity in the Western coalition is compounded by threats to NATO’s core purpose: mutual defense. While Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty promises collective security, there is no practical guarantee that NATO would support a besieged ally against Moscow. Enforcing the treaty could invite destructive conflict in Europe, but failure to uphold Article V renders NATO obsolete.
While treaties are only good on paper, American military presence is solid insurance that Russia will be contained to its own space. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act features a vague commitment to avoid permanent allied troop presence in the coalition’s new Central and East Europe member states: “the Alliance will carry out its collective defence and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.”
Despite these stipulations, the U.S. dispatched troops and armor to Poland and the Baltics in 2014. Originally marketed as temporary, the American presence was extended last fall. Washington would be wise to render these missions indefinite as NATO members would likely welcome stronger U.S. security assistance, meaning new deployments carry the added benefit of mending intra-alliance fissures.
During the Cold War, the West succeeded by containing Moscow to the existing Soviet sphere of influence. NATO must extricate itself from direct involvement in Ukraine. The U.S. should pursue ways to protect vulnerable alliance members rather than overreach by funding Kiev's war effort. NATO members must understand Russia’s strategic limits and respond accordingly; restricting Moscow to its former borders rather than intervening recklessly wherever the rules of the Western order are violated. The way forward must be a new containment.
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Evan Gottesman is an editorial assistant at World Policy Journal.
[Photo courtesy of Wikimedia, maps by Evan Gottesman]