The Russian war on Ukraine has broken the post-Soviet order

Mary Sarotte

The Financial Times published an essay by historian Mary Elise Sarotte (Professor, Johns Hopkins University) about how we got to the Russia-Ukraine war, some of what was probably on Putin’s mind, and what it all means. 

Pre-war history

Sarotte starts by asserting that the Ukraine war broke the post-cold-war order. That will be followed soon by redrawing the same line of division between Moscow-centric and Washington-centric countries that existed before 1989. She asserts that it is beyond question that Vladimir Putin’s insistence on eliminating Ukraine’s independence is the cause. Putin sees Ukraine independence as forcing nations and people to choose between Russia and the West. That is the core reason why Putin started the war. 

Sarotte argues that Putin became unwilling to tolerate Ukraine’s sovereignty due to its significant role in the the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin considers that as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. Thirty years ago, Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union and that made the break-up of the USSR irreversible. Putin’s decision to start his war ended the post-cold-war peace that  was already fading. The Ukraine war proved false the prevailing belief that a major land war would not happen again in Europe.

Sarotte's analysis of the current situation did not rely on long past history or current Russian and Ukrainian identity. Instead, she relied on declassified and other relevant materials dating back to the 1990s. The goal of Western leaders was to help create an independent Ukraine as part of a goal to insure long-term peace in Europe. Their efforts failed.

The GHW Bush administration was deeply divided about what to do. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a radical right hawk and ideologue, wanted to help foment the breakup of the USSR. Secretary of State James Baker strongly disagreed and argued the US needed to try to keep the USSR intact as a means to keep its arsenal of ~35,000 nuclear weapons under professional control.

While the Bush administration bickered itself into gridlock, Ukraine mooted the debate by holding a referendum on independence in 1991. The people overwhelmingly voted to become an independent country. Turnout was 84% and the overall vote for independence was 90%. Clearly, the Ukrainian people wanted to get away from the USSR. In the Russia sympathetic Eastern districts of Donetsk, Luhansk, the vote for independence was more than 80%. The vote for independence was only 54% in Crimea, which Russia under Putin annexed by force in 2014.

The 1991 Ukraine vote was psychologically catastrophic for Moscow. Most Russians believed that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia. Rejection by Ukraine was unthinkable until the shock happened. As an independent nation, Ukraine would be the world's third-largest nuclear power. Baker fought hard to make sure that Russia would inherit all the nukes. The thought of a nuclear armed, unstable new nation terrified Baker. Baker's efforts ended with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Clinton wanted NATO to expand to all the subjugated USSR colonies such as Poland and Lithuania. He hoped to make Ukraine feel secure enough to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. The Clinton administration established the Partnership for Peace (PfP), where potential NATO countries gained experience in peacekeeping and joint military operations with the West. The idea of PfP was that over time new nations could become full NATO member states. This incremental approach did not require Washington to (i) draw a new line through post-cold-war Europe, or (ii) leave most post-Soviet republics to their own devices. Although the PfP was not very appealing, the idea of joining NATO was. The old Soviet vassal states wanted to get away from the Russians. NATO looked like a good way out, so most of them grudgingly supported PfP. Importantly, both Russia and Ukraine supported PfP. For Russia, PfP was minimally acceptable but better than redrawing lines when NATO expanded. PfP thus provided a place for Ukraine, and was (barely) tolerable to Russia.

That nice plan blew up in 1994 when Yeltsin attacked Chechnya and Clinton's political priorities started to change his policy preferences. The Russian war terrified central and eastern Europeans. They saw the old Soviet tactics in the Chechen war. They reasonably feared they might be attacked next. Tensions between the US and Russia intensified, in part by the Republican party’s win in the 1994 midterm congressional elections. That landslide win was significantly based on the Republican vaporware document called the “Contract with America.” It called for faster NATO enlargement. That vote showed Clinton the NATO expansion issue was popular, especially in states that he needed to win in 1996 to get a second term in office. 

In addition, Ukraine was finally convinced to give up its nuclear weapons in return for assurances its on territorial integrity that were codified in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the Memorandum, Kyiv agreed either to destroy its nuclear weapons or to relocate them to Russia. That made Kyiv less important to the west. Russia, the UK and the US signed the agreement. Thus, Russia guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity in writing in 1994.

All of that convinced Clinton to redraw a line across Europe that was closer to Russia. Instead of a large number of nations in the PfP, a small number of nations would be added as full members to NATO. One practical effect of this was that created some former USSR states who were in NATO and protected by it, while others were not, including Ukraine. The other effect of this was to foreclose the flexibility that had PfP afforded. NATO became a matter of all or nothing.

At this time when Western options for dealing with the former Soviet states by way of NATO became limited, Putin was rising through the ranks in Russia. He started working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, one of Putin’s former college professors. There, Putin managed relations between elected authorities, local crime bosses and what was left of the KGB. He distinguished himself through unwavering loyalty. That loyalty trait caught the eye of Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, Alexei Kudrin. Putin joined the Yeltsin administration, where he displayed unquestioning loyalty to president Yeltsin. 

By August of 1999, Putin became Russia’s prime minister, and in March of 2000, he was elected president. Past experiences had hardened Putin. In 2000, he said “only one thing works in such circumstances [when there is a threat and help may not come] — to go on the offensive. You must hit first, and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet. .... we would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from eastern Europe.” 

Putin also opposed the idea of self-declared nationhood for former Soviet republics. In 2014 he commented that self-declaration of independence and separation from Russia meant that “millions of people [ethnic Russians] went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities.” In Putin’s mind, ethnic Russians were the largest minority in most of the former Soviet Republics and independence meant that those Russians were “the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders”. At this point, Sarotte wryly comments that “left out of his account was the role of Joseph Stalin’s forced deportations and resettlements in creating that reality.” 

One can guess that the progeny of some of those exiled from Russia by Stalin might not feel all that sympathetic to Russia or being Russian. 

Recent war history: The last year

That background leads up to the last year. Sarotte argues that Putin recently decided to attack the Ukraine claiming, among other things, that he was defending ethnic Russians from Nazis and other kinds of genocidal non-Russian people. His goal in this war is to permanently stop Ukraine’s capacity to move toward the West in its sympathies and alliances. In making this decision, she asserts that Putin (i) correctly understood that the West left Ukraine out of the post-cold-war security order, and (ii) because of that, it would have few options if Russia were to invade. She speculates that in addition to that analysis, Putin probably also took into account deep political and social discord in the US (the toxic politics I keep complaining about), Britain entangled with Boris and Brexit, France in elections and Germany without Angela Merkel. Sarotte notes this about Merkel, “who, having grown up in East Germany and speaking fluent Russian, had far too good an understanding of Putin for his own comfort.”

Sarotte cites as mistakes of the West, (i) rejoicing over the people who escaped Russia’s iron grip, while mostly ignoring all the people who had lost out, especially including Putin himself, (ii) downplaying or ignoring how seriously Putin was taking the Ukraine conflict with the West, and (iii) misunderstanding the intensity of Putin’s desire to recreate Moscow’s Soviet empire and control.

Sarotte ends her essay with these comments:

The outbreak of war in Ukraine means, among many other consequences, that we need to view the cold war’s end through a new lens. Its most lasting consequence, tragically, may not be the optimism that it inspired in the many, but the damage that it did to the one: Vladimir Putin. To assuage his grievance about the loss of Soviet status and above all Ukraine, he has commenced a major land war in Europe — and written the requiem for the post-Soviet peace.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this fascinating article to my attention.