THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
Maintain and intensify the pressure on Russia
photo: © Drop of Light, shutterstock
Has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created NATO’s “watershed moment”?
by Dr Klaus Wittmann, Brigadier General (ret), Lecturer in contemporary history at Potsdam University, Berlin
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ertainly, the invasion on 24th February 2022, long prepared by the ever tighter military encirclement of Ukraine, marked the culmination of the gradually deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West. But this development had several “watershed moments”. Despite the view that Putin was pushed into a corner by NATO enlargement, by US condescension, etc., the West has not done everything wrong; it has made manifold offers for cooperative security.
Putin’s concept of Russia’s security It is true that since 1991 the systematic debate about Russia’s place in the European security architecture was missed and that successful development of the NATO-Russia Council was botched. But what President Putin calls security “interests” vis-à-vis a genuinely defensive Western alliance are at best political-psychological sensitivities: a humiliation complex as loser in the Cold War, “imperial phantom pain” (dissolution of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 21st century”) and frustration at not being recognised as a great power – unmindful of the fact that respect is earned, not enforced. Putin’s Russia has thus become an international spoiler state whose only real “interest” seems to be keeping democratic developments – as a threat to his power system – away from Russia’s borders. After all, repression in Russia tightened after the 2011 demonstrations against the fraudulent presidential
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elections. That “interest” is increasingly superimposed by Putin’s flawed interpretation of the history of Ukraine as part of Greater Russia with no right to its own statehood. In retrospect, some claim that an opportunity was missed when, in 2001, as new Russian President, Putin made a forthcoming speech to the German Bundestag, speaking in German and appearing very civil and mannerly. However, Western offers of inclusion and cooperation followed, and NATO enlargement was “cushioned” with the conclusion of the NATO-Russia Founding Act (1997), in which both sides declared not to be adversaries anymore. However, biographical evidence suggests that with his background in the KGB, the way he rose to power and in light of his bitterness at witnessing, in Dresden, the fall of communist East Germany without Soviet military intervention, Putin has been on his revisionist “path of revenge” since 1989. Sergei Karaganov sees Russia in the same situation as Germany after the Versailles Treaty. Absurd but indicative.
Watershed moments Some “watershed moments” must be seen in this light: the Kremlin’s wrath at NATO’s Kosovo air campaign in 1999 (at whose origin stood Russia’s refusal in the UN Security Council to compellingly warn Serbia’s President Milosevic to stop violent “ethnic cleansing”). Russia left the NATO-Russia Council, for which it was harshly criticized by NATO, who made the same mistake though during Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008. This was preceded by Putin’s angry “We are not taken account of” speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, to which one should have listened more carefully. And
