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One of the few positive outcomes of recent exchanges among U.S., European, and Russian diplomats has been the firm rejection by the Biden administration and its allies of Kremlin demands that NATO “never, never, ever” admit Ukraine as a member. Acquiescing to such a demand would leave Ukraine and Georgia in a dangerous gray zone, neither with NATO nor with Russia. It would violate NATO’s founding charter, which maintains an open-door policy toward prospective European states; the United Nations’ founding charter; and the Charter for European Security of 1999, which updated the Paris Charter of 1990 and reiterates “the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance.” Like the Charter of Paris, the Charter for European Security—which Russia signed and is obligated to observe—declares that no state “can consider any part of the [European] area as its sphere of influence.”

These arguments are flawed and should be rejected once and for all. To follow their recommendations would be to reward Putin for his aggression.

And yet a sphere of influence is exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks. Some Western analysts seem to be taking his side, arguing that NATO should close its door (as Michael Kimmage recently did in Foreign Affairs) and no longer follow through on the pledge it made in 2008 that Ukraine, along with Georgia, will ultimately become members of the alliance. Ukraine is not going to join any time soon anyway, these analysts argue, so why not make this concession to Putin in the hope it would reduce the possibility of a Russian military attack? After all, they assert, the encroachment of NATO on Russia’s borders over the years has been one of the main sources of friction in relations with Moscow.

These arguments are flawed and should be rejected once and for all. To follow their recommendations would be to reward Putin for his aggression and assign blame for the current state of affairs not to the Russian leader, where it belongs, but to the enlargement of NATO, which has helped stabilize the European continent for more than seven decades. Putin invokes NATO enlargement as a convenient excuse when his real fear is the emergence of successful, democratic, Western-oriented countries along Russia’s borders—especially Ukraine. Indeed, when Russia’s 2014 invasion began, there was not a single U.S. tank in Europe, and no prospect of U.S. or NATO missiles being deployed to Ukraine (even as the Kremlin deployed Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad). To focus on other countries’ interest in joining NATO as the cause of Putin’s aggression gets it backward: Russia’s neighbors feel the need to look to the West, including to NATO, because of Putin’s revanchist aggression.

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