The gravest threat to Putin is Ukrainian self-determination
A fake democracy is trying to destroy a real one in Ukraine
Russia held its latest sham election over the weekend, which resulted in a “victory” for President Vladimir Putin with nearly 88 percent of the vote. If Putin completes his six-year term, he will surpass Josef Stalin to become the longest-serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great. Putin presented the results of the election as an endorsement of his war on Ukraine, declaring that Moscow wouldn’t be “intimidated” by outside forces and warning that a direct conflict between NATO and Russia would be “one step away from a full-scale World War III.”
While Putin trumpeted his phony victory, he said the “whole world is laughing” at American democracy, which he described as a “catastrophe.” He claimed that democracy “does not exist” in the United States, where “you can buy a vote for ten dollars” and where the criminal cases against Donald Trump expose an anti-democratic plot against the former president. Putin has made no secret of his preference for Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and says his political opponents are greater threats to the United States than Russia or China.
Of course, Putin’s attack on American democracy is a self-serving farce. The runner-up in Russia’s fake election, the Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov, received less than 4 percent of the vote and even praised Putin for his tireless efforts to “consolidate the nation for victory in all areas.” In Putin’s Russia, candidates are systematically prevented from running, voter intimidation is rife, independent election monitors are marginalized, the state-run media is a gigantic pro-Putin propaganda machine, anti-war speech is criminalized, and the Kremlin exercises near-complete control over the electoral process.
As Russia once again reminds the world that it’s a corrupt dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, Moscow continues to wage war on the actual democracy next door. Just as Putin believes the illusion of Russian democracy is necessary to maintain legitimacy, he must pretend like Ukrainian democracy doesn’t exist. He says the “forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014 have seized power” and describes Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency as the product of “ornamental election procedures.” Putin stated that one of the central aims of the war is to “denazify Ukraine.” As he put it in his address announcing the invasion: “Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine.”
The idea that Zelensky, who is Jewish, is actually a neo-Nazi who seized power in a coup is even more absurd than the idea that Putin is a defender of Russian democracy. But just as Putin had to figure out some way to justify a pointless imperial land grab that has turned into the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II, he must now distract the Russian people from the thousands of soldiers dying every month in Ukraine. The only way to do this is by presenting the war as an act of self-defense against an imaginary existential threat posed by Ukraine and its Western allies; threatening, imprisoning, or killing anyone who says otherwise; and creating an artificial sense of national cohesion and solidarity around all the above.
Putin has inverted reality in Ukraine. The dictatorship calls itself a democracy, the democracy is described as a Nazi dictatorship, and the aggressor presents itself as a victim. The true origins of the war aren’t mysterious — Putin has made his imperial ambitions clear in dozens of speeches, essays, and interviews over the years. He believes the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century — not because he’s nostalgic for Communism, but because he laments the loss of “historical Russia.” In other words, a Russian Empire which extends beyond the country’s present borders. Putin regards Ukraine as an integral part of historical Russia, so he invaded to abolish its sovereignty as an independent state and bring it back into a reconstituted modern version of this empire.
While many in the West claim to support Ukrainian sovereignty and independence, there’s an asterisk next to this support: unless Russia has a problem with it.1 In a column published several days before the Russian invasion, Thomas Friedman declared that “America and NATO are not just innocent bystanders” in the crisis. Friedman argued that the “ill-considered decision by the U.S. in the 1990s to expand NATO” was a major cause of the war, as it allegedly humiliated and threatened Russia. He cited George Kennan, the architect of “containment” during the Cold War, who described NATO expansion as a “tragic mistake.”
Friedman writes that “Putin views Ukraine’s ambition to leave his sphere of influence as both a strategic loss and a personal and national humiliation.” The only way to avoid humiliating Putin would have been to leave Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence indefinitely, regardless of what the Ukrainians want. The same would apply to every other Eastern European democracy that was once part of the former Soviet Union. While Friedman and Kennan purported to be voices of prudence calling upon the United States and NATO to coexist peacefully with Moscow, they were actually demanding permanent Russian control over Eastern Europe.
The United States and its allies rightly rejected a world in which large powers are free to bully and dominate their neighbors. Unlike the Warsaw Pact or Russia’s sphere of influence today, NATO membership wasn’t imposed on anyone. During the 1997 Madrid summit, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were invited to join the alliance, and they became the first former Soviet NATO members in March 1999. The largest wave of NATO expansion began with accession talks for Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2002, all of which officially joined two years later. Four countries would follow before the invasion of Ukraine: Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), and North Macedonia (2020). The invasion convinced Finland and Sweden to become members as well.
While Putin has cited NATO expansion as one of his reasons for invading Ukraine, Friedman was right when he observed that Putin “cynically exploited NATO’s expansion closer to Russia’s borders to rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of leadership.” Putin had to present NATO as an existential threat to convince the Russian people that the war was necessary. But it’s difficult to imagine that Putin genuinely thought NATO (a defensive alliance) was preparing to launch an attack on Russia.2 And even though Ukraine had every right to join NATO, it wasn’t poised to do so before the invasion.
At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO leaders declared that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance. However, Ukraine adopted a policy of non-alignment between 2010 and 2014 — a policy it only abandoned after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Despite the annexation and Russia’s ongoing war in the Donbas — and as Kyiv became increasingly anxious to join NATO — there was no telling when (or even if) Ukraine would be allowed into the alliance. In 2017, the Ukrainian Parliament determined that NATO membership was a core strategic priority, and a Constitutional amendment to that effect was adopted in 2019.
By the time Russia invaded in February 2022, nearly a decade and a half had passed since NATO declared its support for Ukrainian membership, and it seemed unlikely that the process would ever be completed. There certainly weren’t any discussions about the imminent accession of Ukraine in early 2022 — the country didn’t even have a Membership Action Plan (MAP) — when Putin suddenly declared that the “threat” of Ukraine in NATO was an emergency that had to be addressed immediately and at gunpoint. And Zelensky was prepared to offer neutrality in exchange for a ceasefire early in the war, but Russia refused.
The war changed everything. When it was clear that Putin had no intention of negotiating, Kyiv made NATO membership an overriding priority. In September 2022, Ukraine requested “accelerated accession” to the alliance, and NATO leaders agreed that its membership should be fast-tracked at the 2023 Vilnius summit (which means its accession could proceed without a MAP). Last month, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Ukraine’s membership is “inevitable.”
If Putin was actually concerned about NATO expansion, invading Ukraine was a disastrous error. Not only has he convinced Finland and Sweden — countries with formidable militaries, one of which shares an 830-mile border with Russia — to join the alliance, but he has also made Ukraine’s membership far more likely. Putin didn’t invade Ukraine as a final desperate effort to prevent Kyiv from joining NATO — he was willing to risk further NATO expansion in the vain hope that he could win a quick victory. He miscalculated, and the catastrophe we’re witnessing today is the direct result of his hubris and stupidity.
A stubborn myth has long distorted discussions about the West’s relationship with Russia after the Cold War — the idea that NATO violated an agreement with Russia that the alliance wouldn’t move “one inch eastward” in exchange for the reunification of Germany. This canard has been repeated by Putin and top Russian officials for many years, and it has become the go-to excuse for intellectuals who present the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as an expression of Moscow’s “legitimate security concerns.”
On February 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker hypothetically suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO might agree not to expand eastward in exchange for Moscow giving up its claim to East Germany. There was no formal agreement, other NATO members weren’t on board, and President George H.W. Bush later told Baker that he believed the alliance should continue to expand. For one thing, the eastern half of a newly unified Germany would need to be included in NATO. For another, the Warsaw Pact still existed at the time, so it wasn’t possible to discuss the security architecture of a Europe that hadn’t yet emerged.
Gorbachev never secured a written promise on eastward expansion, but he accepted German unification in exchange for economic aid and other security guarantees from the West German government. For example, while the deployment of nuclear weapons in East Germany is forbidden by the final unification agreement, the expansion of NATO as an institution is not. Boris Yeltsin later argued that NATO expansion violated the “spirit” of the treaty, which he said only authorized expansion within East Germany. This wasn’t true — the treaty didn’t prohibit NATO expansion outside Germany. When the alliance considered including the first post-Soviet states in 1997 (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland), Yeltsin falsely claimed to have secured a veto over eastward NATO expansion. This is one of the reasons the “not one inch” myth persists to this day.3
Beyond bad history, there’s a more fundamental problem with the belief that NATO violated some unwritten pact with Russia by expanding NATO. Many Western intellectuals apparently believe that a brief chat between Baker and Gorbachev three and a half decades ago should have permanently determined the fate of Eastern Europe — a view which expresses contempt for the idea of sovereignty and democracy in all post-Soviet states. Putin doesn’t have the right to tell tens of millions of people that they must remain permanently shackled to Russia, despite their clear desire to move toward the democratic West.
When Friedman asked Kennan what he thought of the decision to expand NATO, he said, “There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.” But the subtext of Kennan’s argument that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” wasn’t difficult to decipher: Russia would eventually retaliate against its neighbors for making their own security arrangements. This threat was implicit when Kennan decried NATO expansion, and Putin merely made it explicit. “Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia,” Kennan predicted, at which point those in favor of NATO expansion would say “we always told you that is how the Russians are.” Friedman marveled: “It’s EXACTLY what has happened.”
Alternatively, you could say the governments of Eastern Europe worried that Russia would regain its power and menace its neighbors once again — which is EXACTLY what has happened.
Friedman expressed his bewilderment that the West “would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.” One explanation may have been: because it was weak. Neither Friedman nor Kennan appear to have considered the possibility in 1997 that Russia might one day exploit NATO’s absence to threaten and attack its neighbors. It made sense for vulnerable countries in Eastern Europe to join NATO when they still could. After all, there were plenty of aggrieved nationalists in post-Soviet Russia who were bitter about the collapse of the USSR and desperate to see the country return to something like its former glory. One of them was an ex-KGB officer who would become president of Russia two years after Friedman interviewed Kennan.
Why did Friedman and Kennan think former Soviet states were lining up to join NATO in the first place? Here’s another way to ask that question: how many NATO countries has Putin invaded? Two of the countries in line to join the alliance today are Ukraine and Georgia — both of which have been invaded by Russia. The countries that joined NATO in the 1990s and 2000s did so because they recognized that aggressive Russian imperialism could return, as it has many times throughout history. Kennan said he was “particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.” Note that he didn’t say Eastern Europe.
Post-Soviet countries were right to be concerned that a stronger Russia wouldn’t be content to remain within its own borders. There was always a risk that joining NATO would be viewed as a provocation in Moscow, but this came nowhere close to the risk these countries were running if they remained outside the alliance. Just ask Ukraine — a country that signed the Budapest Memorandum with Russia in 1994, which offered assurances that Moscow would respect Ukrainian sovereignty if Kyiv agreed to give up its nuclear weapons. Russia shredded this agreement and ignored Ukraine’s neutral status when it invaded Crimea in 2014 and launched the long proxy war in eastern Ukraine that preceded the full invasion. Ukraine tried it Kennan’s way, and the result has been the most destructive conflict since World War II.
All this talk about the power dynamics in Europe and who said what 35 years ago obscures a simple fact: the war in Ukraine is a war over democracy. When Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, it didn’t do so because Ukraine was on the cusp on joining NATO — it did so because Ukraine wanted a closer economic and political relationship with Europe. Putin wasn’t worried that Ukraine was preparing to invade Russia — he was terrified of the threat that a prosperous, integrated, and democratic Ukraine would pose to his own rule.
When Putin refers to the “coup” which ultimately brought Zelensky to power, he’s talking about the Euromaidan protests in 2013-2014 (also known as the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine). The protests began in November 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an association agreement with the EU which would have opened up trade, reduced travel restrictions, and strengthened economic and political ties with Europe. On November 30, 10,000 protesters flooded into Independence Square in opposition to Yanukovych’s capitulation to Moscow and chanted “Ukraine is Europe.” Russia pressured Yanukovych not to sign the agreement, prompting European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso to declare that the “times of limited sovereignty are over in Europe.”
In January and February 2014, protesters who occupied Independence Square in Kyiv confronted riot police and other security services in increasingly violent clashes that left over a hundred people dead. By late February, the Ukrainian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove Yanukovych from office. Yanukovych described his ouster as a “coup,” compared it to the rise of the Nazis, and fled to Russia. Since then, Putin has repeatedly decried what he calls a Nazi takeover in Ukraine fomented by the United States and other Western powers.4
Putin has to insist that Western puppet masters and “Nazis” are responsible for a “coup” in Kyiv because he can’t accept Ukrainian self-determination. As he wrote in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” he believes there’s “no historical basis” for the “idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians.” This delusion has caused Putin to underestimate the power of Ukrainian national solidarity over and over again — from his belief that the Ukrainians would passively accept the annexation of Crimea to his conviction that Russian soldiers would be welcomed as liberators shortly after invading in early 2022 (officers were told to bring dress uniforms and medals for victory parades in Kyiv).
Well before the invasion in 2022, 78 percent of Ukrainians expressed no confidence in Putin — a proportion which surged after the annexation of Crimea. It turns out that Ukrainians don’t care to be told that they’re vassals of the imperialist dictatorship next door. Like so many other former Soviet states, Ukraine wants to be free of Russian domination. Ukrainians want to work and travel in Europe, choose their own leaders, and make their own political, economic, and military arrangements. They want sovereignty, and as Putin has discovered in the grisliest way imaginable, they’re prepared to fight for it.
“Russia’s democracy is as far advanced,” Kennan said in 1997, “if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia.” Say what you want about Polish, Czech, or even Hungarian democracy today, this statement hasn’t aged well. In the year 2024, Russian democracy is an oxymoron — as its recent fake election (which international correspondent Paul Sonne more accurately described as an “authoritarian Potemkin plebiscite”) made clear.
As Russia has gone further down the path of dictatorship, many former Soviet countries have moved in the opposite direction — toward the democratic West. If Putin was trying to reverse this trend, he did the opposite by invading Ukraine. NATO has continued to expand — 86 percent of Ukrainians want to join the alliance, while 92 percent want to be a part of the EU — and defense spending among NATO allies will hit an unprecedented level this year. There are now 32 members of NATO encompassing one billion people.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a desperate attempt to pull an independent democracy back into Russia’s orbit. While Ukraine faces a long struggle ahead, its defiance of the Russian war machine — with support from NATO — has shown Putin that the democratic world is more resilient than he thought. More importantly, Ukraine’s ferocious resistance has demonstrated that Putin’s dream of recreating the Russian empire is just a fevered delusion. The post-Soviet democracies have chosen freedom, prosperity, and integration over the bleak and oppressive future offered by the decaying petro-dictatorship that used to control them. No matter how badly Putin wants to turn back the clock, the world has moved on.
There are also those who have been opposed to defending Ukraine from the start. The war in Ukraine has revealed the depth (and shallowness) of the commitment to democracy in the United States. Many American politicians and pundits purported to care about principles like freedom and democracy in the abstract, but they immediately became queasy when the defense of these principles required them to take some risks in the real world. So they describe Zelensky as a dictator, argue that the war in Ukraine is a waste of taxpayer dollars, and blame NATO for Russian aggression.
Putin regarded NATO’s involvement in the Balkans throughout the 1990s and an act of aggression, and he’s still furious about it today. Never mind that NATO belatedly intervened in Bosnia after years of atrocities perpetrated Slobodan Milošević’s forces and attempted to prevent an ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
This entire story is told in M. E. Sarotte’s book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate.
The idea that Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself from imminent NATO-backed aggression is absurd enough, but Putin’s insistence that Russia is “denazifying” Ukraine is nothing short of delusional. Putin doesn’t have “legitimate security concerns” — he has paranoid fantasies about invading NATO armies and the resurrection of Hitler in Kyiv. How would Friedman and Kennan suggest negotiating with such an adversary?
This is a great essay. It summarizes the Ukrainian-Russian conflict and debunks the George Kennen -> John Measheimer -> Tom Friedman trail of bad history.