Thank God for the Russia-Georgia War!...For it means that there will not be a Russia-Ukraine war….If Georgia was a redline for us, then Ukraine is a triple red line

—Sergei Karaganov, chair of the Russian Presidential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, December 2011, at an international conference in Shanghai

The war that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been waging in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, violates one of the central lessons of Russia’s international history: Do not go to war in Europe without some powerful European allies on your side, not to mention without such allies or even the unimaginable scenario of all of Europe (even neutral Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden) aligned against you.

Just to cite the most famous examples: Between 1700–1721, Peter the Great defeated Sweden for predominance in the Baltic in alliance with Denmark, Poland, and Saxony; Russia’s territorial gains were recognized in the multilateral Treaty of Nystad of 1721. Between 1772–1795, when Russia under Catherine the Great eliminated Poland from the political map of Europe, it did so in close collaboration with Prussia and Austria, who each received their share. Between 1812–1815, Russia defeated Napoleon and sealed the peace at the Congress of Vienna in league with Britain, Austria, and Prussia. When Russia crushed the Hungarian constitutionalist revolution in 1849, it did so at the express invitation of Austria. And between 1941–1945, Stalin’s Russia defeated Nazi Germany in a “Grand Alliance” with the United States and Britain.

Where this rule has been violated, or rendered null and void by circumstances, the results have been disastrous for Russia: Russia was defeated on Russian soil in the Crimean War fighting alone against a Franco-British-Turkish coalition, supported from afar by Austria. In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, a diplomatically isolated Russia was forced by a united German and British front to give up most of its gains the previous year in the Russo-Turkish War. During the First World War, while Russia was formally allied with Britain and France, British inability to force the Turkish straits meant that Russia had to fight the combined armies of Germany, Austria and Turkey practically unaided, resulting in the collapse of the Tsarist system and the rapid emergence of Soviet Communism. And by the early 1980s, the strategic incompetence of the Brezhnev generation had led to a situation where the Soviet Union stood isolated against a coalition of powers including the United States, NATO Europe, Japan, and China whose combined economies were at least seven times higher than that of Soviet Russia’s and whose technological superiority was much vaster still. Gorbachev understood the impossibility of this situation and made his bold break with the Soviet past. Putin has repeated this blunder, as retired Russian colonel Mikahil Khodoryonok stated to a shocked viewership on Russian television on May 16, underscoring Russia’s dangerous strategic isolation.

Of course, Putin did not think that he would be waging a major war in Europe: he did not believe that Ukraine was European, he did not even believe that it was a real nation (as he told U.S. President Bush in April 2008), and he certainly could not have believed that Ukraine—even with the support of NATO countries—could put up much of a fight against the Russian Army. Such a war would be over in a matter of several weeks, at most, as Putin has boasted on a number of occasions since 2014. In evidence, Russian troops attacking Kiev in late February 2022 carried their parade uniforms in their backpacks.

Converging vectors

Russia’s war in Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022, is the byproduct of three converging vectors:

1. A Russian colonialist vector, one that sees a sovereign Ukraine as both artificial and threatening to Russia’s security interests and identity as a great power. This vector has been a constant in one form or another since the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus cannot by itself explain the war begun in early 2022.
2. An American maximalist vector, one that has tried to deny Russia the kind of sphere of influence along its borderlands that the United States has always claimed for itself in the Western Hemisphere. This vector, which Washington began to assert forcefully during the Orange Revolution of Fall 2004, was accelerated after 2014 as Ukraine was on the path to de facto integration into NATO. (See the U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership, signed November 10, 2021, as a culminating point in this process.)
3. A Ukrainian ethno-nationalist vector, one that seeks to expunge Russian cultural-linguistic influence in Ukraine by way of consolidating a sovereign Ukraine anchored in Euro-Atlantic instead of Eurasian institutions. Measures taken by the Ukrainian government to remove the status of Russian as a second official language of Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2019, are emblematic of this tendency: under Zelensky, and in spite of his own predilection for moderation, the Ukrainian government resumed efforts along these lines, efforts that in 2014 helped trigger the Moscow-backed revolt against Kyiv in several of Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

By mid 2021, Putin evidently concluded that his various attempts to reconcile Ukraine’s formal sovereignty with Russia’s core interests (as he defined them) had failed and that the Americans were unwilling to concede a distinctive Russian zone of influence along Moscow’s most sensitive borderland. Ukraine would have to be compelled by force of arms to respect Moscow’s agenda.

Let us examine these three “vectors,” or tendencies in turn.

The Russian colonialist vector

Russian preoccupation with Ukraine’s international orientation goes considerably beyond the typical sensitivities of great powers toward the encroachment of other powers in their borderland regions. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 Russian political elites have been uneasy, at best, with the idea of a truly sovereign Ukraine. Many Russian elites, including Putin, even deny that Ukrainians are a real people and could have any historical meaning apart from the closest integration with Russia.^[5] Time and again Russia’s post-Soviet rulers have demonstrated, under the nominally liberal Yeltsin as under Putin, that they require a droit de regard in internal Ukrainian affairs and that in its external affairs, Ukraine should be part of an exclusive Russian sphere of influence. Across three decades, Russian leaders have sought to reconcile Ukraine’s formal independence with Russian interests as defined by them. This effort took various forms, as we shall detail immediately below. What counts for our purposes is that this effort was present at the start of the post-Soviet period and that it was followed consistently in subsequent decades. In this respect, Russia’s colonialist “vector” cannot in itself explain the kind of war that Putin decided to wage in February 2022: the colonialist tendency has been a “constant” while the war represents only the most recent expression of it. It might help to clarify the issue by asking not, Why did Putin invade Ukraine in 2022 but rather, Why did it take so long for Russia to invade Ukraine? Or correspondingly, why did Russia wait 22 years before annexing Crimea in 2014?

For instance, shortly after the failed Soviet coup of August 1991, Russian President Yeltsin declared that the fate of millions of ethnic Russians residing outside of the borders of the Russian Federation (such as the more than 10 million in Ukraine at the time) was a matter of primordial interest for Russia and that Russia stood ready to intervene on their behalf if their interests were threatened.

In the first post-Soviet year of 1992, the fate of Crimea was one of the rare issues on which Russian politicians could find agreement: the Russian parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that Crimea was Russian and not Ukrainian (it had been assigned from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954). The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, a powerful politician with his eye on an eventual presidential candidacy, embraced the issue of Crimea as Russia irredenta, as did Russian Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi. Even liberal Russian intellectuals like Sergei Stankevich argued, in a view that was broadly accepted by Russian elites, that post-Soviet Ukraine and other post-Soviet states were not truly objects of international relations for Russia but rather part of Russia’s “near abroad,” where Grotian international law did not apply.

Russia’s strategic interests in Ukraine were reflected in the division of the erstwhile Soviet Black Sea fleet, based in Ukrainian Crimea, in a treaty that initially ran until 2017 and in 2010 was renewed until 2042.

For much of the decade from 1994-2004, Russian-Ukrainian relations followed a relatively quiet trajectory, as Ukraine was governed by Russia-aligned elites and the United States was absorbed in wars from Bosnia to Serbia to Afghanistan and Iraq. The “Orange Revolution” of Fall 2004 would change that.

In a typical example of how Putin sought to reconcile Ukraine’s formal sovereignty with Russia’s interests, Putin supported his preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovich (representing especially eastern Ukrainian interests) versus Viktor Yushchenko (representing especially western Ukrainian interests), by signing a five-year contract with the government in Kyiv guaranteeing a steady supply of Russian natural gas at one-fifth of the world market price. (Putin would repeat the maneuver in late November 2013.) Yushchenko was then suddenly poisoned with a concentration of dioxin 10,000 times higher than normal but survived to eventually win a hotly contested election. With the election closely monitored by thousands of West European and North American professional observers and massive crowds protesting for months in downtown Kyiv, Yanukovich was eventually defeated in a new election that proved impossible for Putin to manipulate. Putin concluded that Western “soft power” in terms of democracy promotion was in fact a sophisticated form of containing Russian power; he soon began an internal crackdown in Russia that has intensified to the present day and sought other ways to bring Ukraine to heel.

In January of 2006 and January of 2009, for instance, Putin ordered the cutoff of supplies of Russian natural gas to Ukraine—in obvious violation of the contract that Russia had signed in 2004—only to see the diplomatic intervention of the European Union, whose countries collectively were Russia’s largest customer. In each case, Putin had to back down. His crude interventions in Ukrainian affairs had shown in fact that the stability of Ukraine was in fact a matter of European security and not for Russia alone to settle.

Writing in 2011, I observed:

“Time and again in dealing with Ukraine, Putin’s government seemed incapable of elementary scenario planning. Putin assumed that he could deal with the government of sovereign Ukraine as he had handled so many troublesome problems and individuals within Russia, that is, through the overwhelming application of superior power resources. During three successive crises, each of Russia’s making, Putin failed to appreciate the subtleties of exercising influence under conditions of complex interdependence. Instead of setting up Ukraine for an easy checkmate, Putin had himself been maneuvered into a multilevel chess game of indefinite duration. The successive crises of 2004-2009 suggest that the extremely centralized ‘vertical of power’ that Putin had established was failing in some elementary functions of strategic planning (ironically, the subject of Putin’s candidate thesis). Were Putin’s subordinates, leery of seeming to cross their boss, providing him with a distorted and incomplete picture of Ukrainian realities, or was Putin himself in part blinded by an obsession with bringing Ukraine to heel? The evidence to date supports both hypotheses.”

The election of Viktor Yanukovich as Ukraine’s President in 2010 appeared to usher in a détente in relations between Moscow and Kyiv. He had his parliament renounce intentions to join NATO and extended the Russian lease for its Black Sea fleet based in Crimea by 25 years. At the same time, Yanukovich refused to join Putin’s recently created Eurasian Union. He appeared to be trying to maintain a delicate balancing act between pro-Russian and pro-Western elements in Ukrainian politics, as shown in his commitment for Ukraine to sign an Association Agreement with the EU by the end of 2013.

Yanukovich was acting in the shadow of the five-day Russia-Georgia war of August 2008, which was waged by Russia to undermine Georgia’s aspirations to join NATO. (These had been encouraged by a NATO summit communique of April 2008.) Indeed, I heard a senior Russian foreign policy advisor state in December 2011 at an international conference in Shanghai, “Thank God for the Russia-Georgia war!...For it means that there won’t be a Russia-Ukraine war. If Georgia was a red line for us, then Ukraine is a triple red line.” The combination of the Yanukovich government and the ominous lesson of Russia’s invasion of Georgia seemed to have assured Ukraine’s place as a reliable vassal of Moscow.

Yanukovich’s commitment to a pact with the EU encouraged anti-Russian forces within the country, especially in the western half, and alarmed Putin. The EU’s negotiations with Kyiv were on an exclusively bilateral Brussels-Kyiv basis: EU officials refused Russian requests that, given the profound interdependence of the Russian and Ukrainian economies, Moscow be included in any arrangements that Kiev might make with the EU. In response, by summer 2013, Moscow had placed an embargo on most Ukrainian exports to Russia—its chief market—but without eliciting any change in the adamantine EU position that Moscow had no say in the Association accord. When the time came to sign the agreement in November, Yanukovich balked and Putin immediately came forward with inducements for Ukraine to forsake its European option: $15 billion in immediate credits (versus $1 billion on offer from Brussels) and long-term discounts on the purchase of Russian natural gas. Putin thought that he had won his bet: he had figured out how to keep Ukraine close to Moscow while respecting its formal sovereignty.

The ensuing crisis showed the strains that making an exclusively pro-Russian or pro-Western orientation posed for Ukraine’s stability and territorial integrity. Two months of urban protest, some of it armed, and the collapse of Kyiv’s authority west of the capital, led to the repudiation of an agreement brokered by EU leaders (with Putin’s representative in attendance), the collapse of Yanukovich’s government, and its replacement by a pro-American government representing predominantly western Ukrainian interests. It was at this point that Putin ordered the seizure and eventual annexation of Crimea and the reinforcement, if not instigation, of revolt against Kyiv in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. All of Putin’s efforts to exploit Russia’s enormous superiority in material power over Ukraine had failed to induce the latter to accept Moscow’s tutelage. The colonial assumption in Russian policy had been there all along; but it wasn’t until 2014 that Putin concluded that direct physical force would have to be used. It would take another eight years for Putin to decide to actually conquer the bulk of Ukraine.

The American maximalist vector

What took place between 2014–2022 was the crystallization of a U.S. effort to advance American influence in Ukraine whatever Moscow might think about it.^[11] Already in April 2008, NATO, at U.S. insistence and against French and German opposition, had publicly stated that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join the alliance.^[12] (There were no guidelines for them to join—this mollified Paris and Berlin—but in effect Ukraine got the worst of both worlds: a vague promise that provoked Moscow without any corresponding protection from NATO.) As noted above, Moscow thought that it had made its point during the war against Georgia less than four months later. And indeed, for a time, the Obama Administration—preoccupied with getting Russian cooperation on an Iran nuclear deal--relaxed its efforts to expand U.S. influence along Russia’s borderlands. Yet the unilateralist preference undergirding U.S. policy was well expressed by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who in July 2009, while visiting Georgia and Ukraine, stated publicly that U.S. power was so superior to that of Russia that the Americans in effect had the whip hand in the relationship.^[13]

The Obama years leading up to the Ukraine crisis in late 2013 were essentially ones of neglect as far as Ukraine policy was concerned. The U.S. was happy to let the EU take the lead in diluting Russian influence in Ukraine but once the crisis exploded, the Americans moved with alacrity. In February 2014, i.e., before the Russian move in Crimea, in a phone conversation caught and broadcast by Russian intelligence, U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Gregory Pyatt reviewed prospective members of a post-Yanukovich Ukrainian government, indicating those deemed reliable, unreliable, or uncertain.^[14] As it turns out, the eventual composition of the government, headed by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenuk, corresponded closely to the Nuland-Pyatt preferences and was a decidedly Russophobic administration.

The Obama White House was caught by surprise by the Russian seizure of Crimea but in the aftermath initiated a program of economic and military support for Kyiv that would culminate in the signing of the U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership of November 2021. For instance:

• Overall, between 2014-2021, the United States provided Ukraine with more than $2.7 billion in security aid, making it the 7^th largest such recipient in the world and the largest in Europe.^[15]
• Beginning in 2017 with the Trump Administration, the U.S. expanded its aid to including weapons, including the now famous Javelin portable anti-tank missiles.
• Already by mid-2019, the U.S. Army was training Ukrainian military units in Lviv, including at least one battalion certified as NATO-compatible (some of those units were then sent to fight Russian-backed rebel forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine);
• Ukrainian military units were based in Lublin, Poland (a NATO member), serving under Polish command; and
• Ukrainian units were serving in Iraq under Polish command.

In effect, Ukraine was well on the way to becoming a strategic partner with the United States and NATO several years before Putin took the decision to invade. These efforts culminated in the signing, on November 10, 2021, of the U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership. Key passages of this pact include:

• “The United States and Ukraine share a vital national interest in a strong, independent, and democratic Ukraine…deepening Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions [is a priority].”
• Guided by the April 3, 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration of NATO”…..[promising Ukraine membership in NATO].
• “The[y agree to implement] defense and defense industry reforms, deepening cooperation in areas such as Black Sea Security, cyber defense, and intelligence sharing, and countering Russian aggression.” (N.b. In 2021, NATO conducted six major naval exercises in the Black Sea that included the Ukrainian navy, while the UK signed an agreement on naval cooperation with Kyiv.)
• “The United States remains committed to assisting Ukraine with ongoing defense and security reforms and to continuing its robust training and exercises. The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability” (i.e., of Ukrainian and NATO armed forces).
• “Ukraine intends to continue to enhance democratic civilian control of the military, reform its security service, and modernize its defense acquisition processes to advance its Euro-Atlantic aspirations.”

It should be noted that while Russia had been maneuvering its troops along the borderlands with Ukraine since some time earlier, Moscow began to issue its quasi-ultimata to the United States and NATO about the relationship of NATO to Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly only beginning December 17, 2021, that is, five weeks after the signing of the strategic partnership agreement between Kyiv and Washington (i.e., in mid-December 2021). In reply, the U.S. government kept repeating, up to the Russian invasion, that it would never compromise on Ukraine’s right to join NATO. This is perhaps the clearest instance of the Russian colonialist and U.S. maximalist vectors converging to frame a zero-sum contest for predominant influence in Ukraine. That this could have been anticipated is suggested by remarks that this author made at a conference in Warsaw in June 2019:

“It is difficult to see how Putin’s government, or any likely alternative to it, can accept the logic of Ukraine’s de facto integration into NATO. By pursuing policies toward Ukraine that assume that the country must be in the exclusive orbit of Russia or the West, Russia and the West have been pushing Ukraine—with its numerous East-West fault lines—toward partition. Indeed, this has already begun…To preclude further partition, not to mention a direct U.S.-Russian confrontation over Ukraine, U.S. national security elites will have to address an issue that their Russophobia…prevents them from admitting, i.e., that Ukraine cannot be stabilized without Russia’s agreement…As far as Russia is concerned, its leaders need to take Ukraine’s sovereignty seriously, or they risk creating a kind of continental, anti-Russian “Cuba” on their most sensitive western borderlands. As for Washington, how long will it take for American leaders to realize that providing a power like Russia with nothing to hope for and much to fear is a recipe for impasse at best and war at worst?”

The Ukrainian nationalist vector

Ukrainian nationalism per se was the least significant of the three “vectors” shaping the Russian decision for war in February 2022. As we have seen, Russia’s colonialist assumptions regarding Ukraine long predate the emergence of extreme right-wing forces in Kyiv during the insurrection of late 2013-early 2014. Certainly, far right-wing elements exist in Ukrainian politics but the political parties representing them, like Pravyi Sektor (Right Wing Sector) and Svoboda (Freedom), have garnered miniscule vote shares in Ukrainian elections. Those elections, it should be noted, actually saw a change in government in 2019 from the aggressively anti-Russian Poroshenko regime to that of Volodymyr Zelensky, who ran on a platform of “mild Ukrainianization” and settlement of Kyiv’s conflict with Moscow over the status of the Russian protectorates of Donetsk and Luhansk. Where Ukrainian nationalism has played a significant role, it has been in providing Moscow with language at home to justify its continued interference in Ukrainian affairs (thus Putin’s “anti-Nazi” rhetoric) and in seeking Ukraine’s rapid assimilation into EU and especially NATO practices and institutions.

One of the very first acts of the post-Yanukovich government in 2014 was to downgrade the official status of the Russian language, in a country where the majority of the citizens in Ukraine’s far eastern provinces were Russophone. While this act was eventually withdrawn in the face of Western as well as Russian opposition, the damage was done: Putin used this act to justify rebellion in Ukraine’s far eastern and southeastern provinces.

Ironically, Putin’s seizure of Crimea and fanning of revolt in the east had the political effect of overcoming the deep and multiple east-west fissures in Ukraine: prior to the 2014 presidential elections, Ukraine split on clear east-west lines over “pro-Russian” and “pro-Western” candidates. Poroshenko’s victory in May 2014, however, saw him attain majorities in virtually every province in the country where voting took place. Zelensky’s victory in 2019 reinforced this pattern, as he prevailed everywhere except in the single province of Lviv in the far west.

The center of gravity in national Ukrainian politics, however, remained anti-Russian (the state, the language, the culture, and the economy). In the preceding five years, Poroshenko’s government had made no appreciable movement toward settling the conflict in the east on the basis of the Minsk I and Minsk II accords. These implied a degree of regional autonomy within Ukraine that would have posed a veto to Kyiv’s “Euro-Atlantic” aspirations. In February 2019, President Poroshenko signed an amendment to the Ukrainian constitution making NATO membership an official goal of the country.^[24] And in late April 2019, just before leaving office, Poroshenko handed his successor a poison pill, once again downgrading the official status of Russian (it required only Ukrainian to be spoken for official purposes) and establishing ceilings on the percentages of Russian-language cultural products in the mass media, publishing, and computer software. All the while, as we have seen, Ukraine was cementing its status as a privileged partner of NATO.

Zelensky’s heroic persona during the current war has tended to obscure the generally feckless nature of his pre-war tenure as president. In spite of his commitment to conflict resolution with Russia, Zelensky was unable to command the parliamentary majorities needed to make painful compromises with Russia. The Minsk I and II frameworks remained as frozen as ever. And on March 19, 2021, Zelensky’s government approved a decree that in principle authorized the recapture of both the Donbass region of far eastern Ukraine and Crimea, including the establishment of full Ukrainian sovereignty over Sevastopol, home of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Those objectives were then incorporated into the November 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership. From the moment when Moscow began to issue its demands to NATO on December 19, 2021 until the outbreak of the wat the following February 24, neither Kyiv nor Washington made the slightest move to address Moscow’s long-standing concerns about Ukraine’s future strategic orientation. Indeed, in virtually every public pronouncement on the question, Ukrainian and American officials were adamant in reiterating their commitment to Ukraine joining NATO, come what may.

Well, it came, on February 24.

Change is required

Insofar as the three tendencies that we have analyzed—Russian colonialist, American maximalist, and Ukrainian nationalist—interacted to produce the current war, any durable settlement to the conflict will require significant changes in all three.

As to the Russian colonialist premise: can Putin’s government, or any likely alternative, fully accept the implications of Ukrainian sovereignty? That is, can Moscow accept the premises of a “Good Neighbor” policy, abstaining from efforts to manipulate Kyiv’s internal affairs and focusing exclusively on the two countries’ international interactions?

As to the American maximalist premise: can Washington make explicit what has always been implicit? That is, Ukraine will not become a member of NATO and NATO countries will not deploy weapons in Ukraine or near Russia’s borders capable of striking deep into Russian territory?

As to the Ukrainian nationalist premise: can Kyiv renounce building Ukrainian statehood on an anti-Russian basis both at home and abroad? That is, can it renounce an exclusively “Euro-Atlantic” international vocation and make a convincing demonstration that its Russians, too, are an integral part of post-Soviet Ukrainian nationhood?

Just to state the proposition is to make the case that we are dealing with a political and diplomatic “Rubik’s pyramid,” at the least. As complicated as each change may be, the task is magnified by the reality that change along each side of the pyramid also depends on change along the other two.