Russia saber rattling gets the West talking. Is a deal with NATO next?

NATO’s ongoing expansion into Eastern Europe and former Soviet lands has been a bitter issue for Moscow for almost 30 years.

The Kremlin has watched all the former Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact allies and three former Soviet republics join NATO, while the front line between NATO and Russia has moved about 600 miles to the east. The Russians claim, with considerable evidence, that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was given strong verbal assurances that NATO would move “not one inch” eastward.

Now, Vladimir Putin seems to believe that it’s finally time to get that in writing.

No one in Moscow seems able to explain why Mr. Putin has chosen the current moment to issue an ultimatum over NATO’s oft-restated intention to eventually bring Ukraine into the alliance. But most analysts agree that the Kremlin initiated suspicious troop movements along the Ukrainian border, in Russia’s Western Military District, late last month in order to force exactly that conversation to happen.

Few believe that Russia actually intends to invade Ukraine – a war that would be intensely unpopular at home. Nevertheless, the Kremlin keeps reiterating that military options are on the table if its concerns aren’t satisfactorily addressed.

“What Russia wants is a dialogue with leading NATO powers that would move the discussion away from the standard Western view that Europe’s security order is fine but just has a Russia problem, to an examination of the dangerous flaws in Europe’s security system and the need to address Russia’s concerns,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “It is not yet clear whether that is going to happen in any acceptable form or not. So the crisis continues.”

Russia’s red lines

The White House readout on last week’s video summit between Mr. Putin and President Joe Biden insists that Mr. Putin was sternly warned of serious consequences for any attack on Ukraine, including devastating sanctions and “other measures,” presumably supplies of arms and support to Kyiv.

The Kremlin version acknowledged that, but added Russian grievances over the growing penetration of NATO into Ukraine and Kyiv’s foot-dragging on implementing the Minsk-2 peace deal, which requires direct talks with the two Russian-backed rebel republics in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Biden appears to have told Mr. Putin that talks could take place around Russian demands in order to see whether “we can work out any accommodation as it relates to bringing down the eastern front,” perhaps involving a few top NATO allies, while Mr. Putin said that a document outlining the Russian position going into those talks would be sent to Washington very soon.

In a subsequent phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mr. Biden offered strong support for Ukraine and insisted that Russia would have no say in its bid to join NATO, but also pressed the Ukrainian leader on the need to implement the Minsk peace deal.

Amid all this ambiguity, Russia appears to have received the message that the United States may be prepared to offer some concessions, if not outright guarantees about future NATO enlargement.

“The way things stand right now is that Biden gave no promises concerning Ukraine’s membership in NATO, and Putin did not clarify anything about Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine,” says Vladimir Yevseyev, a security expert at the official Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. “Russia has three red lines about Ukraine: no NATO membership, no U.S. military bases on Ukrainian soil, and no offensive armaments stationed near Russia’s borders.”

Experts suggest that the Kremlin’s vision is to create a system of neutral states between NATO and Russia, perhaps something like Finland or Austria during the Cold War – no one uses the sensitive word “Finlandization,” but that seems close to what they mean. The system would be secured by international agreement, with guarantees for the independence, sovereignty, and democratic choice of those former Soviet countries, especially Ukraine and Georgia.

Chances of the U.S. and its allies accepting that idea seem vanishingly slim, say experts. Even Mr. Biden’s offer to hold talks with Russia and a few key NATO allies has run into a firestorm of objections from Eastern European allies who oppose any dialogue with Russia.

“For Russia, everything depends on whether Biden is serious about getting a group of leading NATO allies together to discuss specific concerns Russia has about NATO,” says Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. “It’s an important gesture Biden made, and any positive development will be appreciated by the Kremlin.”

Balancing tensions

Short of a grand bargain about NATO enlargement, trust-building deals could be cut about positioning of weapons in Eastern Europe, limiting of missile defense systems in Europe, and other stabilizing measures that might mollify the Kremlin.

“Biden needs to balance his support for Ukraine with his desire for better relations with Russia,” says Mr. Kortunov. “All the talk in Washington these days is about concentrating on the Chinese threat, but that will be much harder if tensions are spiking with Russia in the West.”

Mr. Biden’s pledge that he would nudge Ukraine to implement the Minsk-2 accords presents another political minefield. The agreements, signed at a moment of Ukrainian weakness in 2015, require Kyiv to talk directly to rebel leaders and would reintegrate the Russian-speaking regions in Ukraine’s Donbass back into the whole, but with permanent autonomy. That’s political poison for Ukrainian nationalists, who foresee building a unitary Ukrainian state from the complicated territorial patchwork that Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union.

“Zelenskyy can move to implement the accords, as Biden suggests, but once he begins he will face a serious political crisis,” says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kyiv. “People will say he caved in to American pressure, and his chances of getting reelected will diminish. It’s an unfortunate paradox, but the less tension there is between the West and Russia, the greater are the chances for internal discord in Ukraine.”

The consensus of analysts is that the crisis may be in abeyance for the moment, but is far from over.

“Vladimir Putin is totally unwilling to accept the old status quo anymore,” says Alexander Baunov, an expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He’s drawn a line. Russia will never agree to the prospect of a Ukraine in NATO, or any U.S. military base there, or even the future possibility of millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians being Ukrainianized. It’s not clear what he plans to do if there is no constructive communication with big Western powers – which is what he wants – but he is definitely not going to let it go.”