Ukrainian troops near its eastern border with Russia. (Flickr)

On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the Kremlin would recognize two breakaway regions in the contentious Donbas area of Ukraine and swiftly moved Russian troops to occupy the region—the newest twist in a bated-breath lead-up to a projected Russian invasion of Ukraine. For the past several weeks, the media has been providing grim estimates of how long Ukraine could withstand a direct eastern assault, and news outlets have been producing editorial after thinkpiece after essay speculating about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s real aims. President Joe Biden has warned that Russia may invade Ukraine within the month, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is downplaying tensions, even as other leaders urge preparation for an apparently imminent war.

Meanwhile, NATO lies in crisis. A crushing and unexpectedly sudden defeat in Afghanistan has left the alliance’s morale low and curbed its appetite for conflict. Now, Putin seeks to deliver NATO—which Putin appears to view as an extension of U.S. influence in a perceived revival of the Cold War’s bipolarity—a crushing blow and send a message: Ukraine is not part of Europe.

If the Afghanistan War’s dismal conclusion left NATO reeling, an invasion of Ukraine will be even more devastating. NATO identified Ukraine as a candidate in 2008, although its border tiffs with Russia technically prevent its accession under the current status quo. NATO is not bound to come to Ukraine’s aid, but Biden has publicly considered amassing military force near the country.

NATO now stands at a precipice. How the alliance responds to a Russian invasion of Ukraine may well define its stance for decades to come. Without a clear, rational, and diplomatic approach, NATO faces grave consequences and conflict that may ultimately tear its allies, old and new, apart.

Inching Tension Toward the East

Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty conveys the core tension between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO member states; an attack against any one member of the alliance would be considered an attack against all. Russia has long considered NATO’s collective defense commitment a threat to its national security. Furthermore, Putin argues that the United States and other Western countries betrayed a promise at the end of the Cold War to not enter the ex-Soviet Bloc into NATO, a claim that U.S. officials label a myth.

NATO’s present-day member states. (Wikimedia Commons)

M. E. Sarotte, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, suggests a messier middle ground in Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. In 1990, several West German officials publicly considered negotiating the reunification of Germany, which required approval from the Soviet Union as one of the Allied victors, in exchange for a firm restriction on new NATO membership to the east. In a similar spirit, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker asked former USSR President Gorbachev in an early 1990 meeting whether he would prefer a NATO-independent Germany with no guarantees of NATO expansion into other countries or a reunified NATO-aligned Germany while the alliance does “not shift one inch eastward.”

Stronger assurances were repeated in numerous other memorandums and meetings between various Westerner foreign ministers and Gorbachev. However, President George H. W. Bush ultimately shut down the idea, and the U.S. and USSR eventually signed a 1990 treaty that placed virtually no restraints on NATO actions east of Germany. While there was no “promise” codified into any treaty against expanding NATO beyond Germany, both Sarotte and other archivists conclude that Western ministers intentionally led Gorbachev into believing that NATO would be incorporated within a new European military system unhostile to Russia. These factors likely encouraged Gorbachev to adopt a less vigilant negotiatory stance.

While former Russian President Boris Yeltsin expressed notable concern over NATO expansion in 1997, the Clinton Administration’s State Department reaffirmed that the 1990 Treaty only concerned NATO’s presence in Germany, not Eastern Europe. The West’s uncompromising stance on the issue, as well as Yeltsin’s economic and electoral troubles, eventually convinced him to effectively drop his concerns at the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997. However, tension over NATO reignited throughout the following decade under Yeltsin’s successor Putin, especially during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 after the country had sought closer ties with the European Union and NATO.

The tensions between Russia and the U.S. and NATO since the invasion and annexation of Crimea in early 2014, which have been exacerbated during the ongoing crisis at the Ukrainian-Russian border, represent the most recent iteration of this dynamic.

Recent NATO (In)Actions

In an attempt to preempt NATO support of Russia in the midst of growing tensions, Putin demanded that NATO promise to never admit Ukraine as a member and decrease its presence in Eastern Europe. Although Western officials were open to discussing other options, U.S. and NATO’s leaked responses show that both parties rejected Putin’s demands during failed negotiations.

Despite NATO’s rejection of Putin’s demands, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently emphasized that NATO will refuse to send troops in the event of an attack because Ukraine is not a member state of NATO, merely one of NATO’s allies. Neither is NATO banning Ukraine from ever joining or withdrawing NATO forces’ presence from Eastern Europe.

However, several of NATO’s individual member states are taking action in an attempt to curb Putin’s forays into Ukraine. The U.S. plans to move approximately 3,000 troops to Poland, Romania, and Germany, a move that, according to Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, will show U.S. commitment to NATO and its allies. Kirby added that “our commitment to NATO Article Five and collective defense remains ironclad.” The U.S. also recently permitted Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to send U.S. anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia.

French President Emmanuel Macron recently met with Putin for diplomatic talks concerning the situation, still hoping to find a peaceful resolution to escalating tensions. Macron expressed optimism, saying that the two leaders were able to find “points of convergence.” Putin, in addition, somewhat echoed these sentiments, saying, “A number of his proposals and ideas, about which it is too early to speak, I consider quite possible in order to lay a foundation for our further steps.”

The U.K., Poland, Ukraine are also in the process of creating a trilateral security pact. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki promised to send artillery ammunition, mortars, drones, and a mobile air-defense system to Ukraine. Morawiecki also advised Germany not to proceed with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline plans, a pipeline that would supply power to Germany from Russia, citing that it would pose a major security concern.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline would transport natural gas from Russia to the European Union. (Wikipedia)

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and Germany’s refusal to commit to ending the pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine, constitute a weakness in NATO members’ otherwise mostly united actions against Russia. Although Biden has firmly stated that the pipeline will not go forward if Russia invades Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not even address the issue of the pipeline.

Sanctionable Behavior

A cartoon from 2014 argues that sanctions ultimately hurt the users—in that case, the EU. (Markuzzsy)

In December, Biden declared to Putin that Russia will face “economic consequences like none he’s ever seen or ever have been seen” if Russian troops invade Ukrainian territory. True to his promise, U.S. policymakers began working hard to craft a package of “sanctions from hell” to deter Russian aggression.

The proposed sanctions would likely blacklist Russia’s largest state-owned banks and industrial conglomerates, ban banks with dollar accounts from trading in new issues of Russian sovereign debt, and apply stringent export controls on a range of high-tech products that U.S. policymakers don’t want Moscow to access.

But European metal and energy dependence on Russia, even outside Nord Stream 2, complicates U.S. plans to sever Russia from the global financial system. Some U.S. officials worry that “Putin is counting on Germany and other EU leaders to block measures that would have financial repercussions for Europe.” Internal German documents confirm that “any unwanted consequences beyond the targeted institutions is [sic] a red line for Germany.” In line with that guideline, Chancellor Scholz postponed Nord Stream 2 on Tuesday. If the invasion continues, Western leaders could agree to sanction Russia out of the global financial system completely.

The sanctions, if fully implemented, will be severe. One U.S. official believes that “the export control options we’re considering alongside our allies and partners would hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard, and it would impair areas that are of importance to him.” Considering that those same export controls shattered Huawei’s smartphone production capabilities in 2019, it’s possible they could wreck the sectors of Russia’s economy that depend on the West.

The Russian government has been preparing for this economic disaster for some time. Since 2014, when the U.S. placed sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Crimea, it has taken significant steps to insulate its economy: foreign ownership of Russian government bonds and foreign corporate loans to Russian companies are at record lows, while Russia’s stock of foreign reserve assets is at an all-time high. These measures, write Max Seddon and Polina Ivanova in the Financial Times, “have reduced foreign investment but also make the country less vulnerable to future external shocks,” including most of the above sanctions threats.

But some analysts, observing how Western sanctions threats have shocked Russian markets, are not so sure that Russia is all that insulated. Sergei Guriev argues in the Financial Times that high capital outflow and a weak ruble indicate that “markets believe the worst is yet to come” if Russia invades Ukraine. Sure enough, on the day of the invasion, Russian markets tumbled.

But Putin’s invasion, for now, seems confined to the two separatist Ukrainian territories. Recognizing the limited nature of the invasion thus far (which is a large caveat), Biden authorized trade and investment sanctions blocking transactions with and into those two territories. “To be clear: these measures are separate from and would be in addition to the swift and severe economic measures we have been preparing,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki clarified. The “sanctions from hell” are waiting in the wings.

A Path Forward

U.S. officials have treated the imposition of sanctions as a catch-all response to international issues, operating under the assumption that they would not escalate situations the way military action undoubtedly would. However, how effective are sanctions at actually deescalating potential conflict and creating stability, and are they the best response to Russia’s current actions?

Sanctions can have counterproductive consequences. The U.S. froze $9.5 billion of Afghan state assets and halted foreign aid to Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, but these sanctions exacerbated Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis and left millions of people at risk of starvation and acute poverty. Furthermore, the interconnectedness of today’s world means that sanctions rarely just affect the targeted country; as mentioned above, Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and oil would need to be lessened in order for sanctions targeting those exports to not cause ripple effects. And the overuse of sanctions can lead to diminishing returns—countries’ resolve often increases rather than decreases as the severity of sanctions and the length of their imposition increases. Affected countries may even band together in united opposition to the country that imposed the sanctions.

U.S. belief that sanctions will not escalate conflict is not always true. Nicholas Mulder, a history professor at Cornell University, argues that “sanctions were created as an antidote to war. Today, they have become an alternative way of fighting wars, perpetuating conflicts but not defusing them.”

The Kremlin’s response to Biden’s threat of “sanctions from hell” seems to verify Mulder’s claim—Putin warned in a phone call that new sanctions could lead to a “complete rupture of relations” between the U.S. and Russia, and Russian foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov emphasized that “our descendants will later appreciate [new U.S. sanctions] as a huge [mistake].” If sanctions could have unwelcome side effects and could escalate a conflict, perhaps the United States should consider other potential courses of action.

Punitive sanctions and military action are not the United States’s only options. Sanctions can play a role in Washington’s response to Moscow, but they should be wielded thoughtfully in combination with other tools in the U.S. diplomatic toolkit. Targeted sanctions on Russian oligarchs can be more productive, and less harmful to average Russian citizens, than the current plans for financial system cutoffs. However, the U.S. can’t just throw sanctions at a situation and call it a day—that’s what the U.S. did to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine in 2014, and while they helped to stop the immediate situation, the impact of those sanctions faded over time and did not prevent the current situation. According to analysts and intelligence officials, any U.S. response should be proactive, multifaceted, and involve a long-term strategy (because Putin definitely has one).

U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan presents his credentials to President Putin. (US Embassy and Consulates in Russia)

The Gun on the Table

“If I put a gun on the table and say that I come in peace, that’s threatening,” U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan said in a media briefing on January 28. In order to paint this metaphor of the diplomatic gun, he pointed out the extraordinary amassing of troops—numbers that go well beyond those used for typical military exercises—along with the simultaneous insistence from officials in Moscow that Russia is not seeking war. It remains unclear whether this current crisis is a case of extraordinary brinkmanship testing NATO loyalties to Ukraine or a bid at reclaiming territory Russia historically considers its own, and it may continue to remain so.

Many interpretations of the Ukraine crisis have been proposed in the past weeks—that this is Russia’s underscoring of its red line regarding Ukraine joining NATO, that this is a gamble gone wrong, that Putin has bigger plans. However, given the context of a destabilizing global pandemic, a volatile financial situation, and a diplomatic community unsettled by four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the most convincing argument may be that this is an opportunity for various actors to try and seize control of the future of security and diplomacy in Europe. For Russia, that may mean creating boundaries protecting it from NATO states, with buffer zones somewhat reminiscent of Warsaw Pact alliances. For Macron, this may represent an opportunity to become an architect of a new security system with France as a diplomatic leader. For the United States, it may exemplify Biden’s sentiment that “America is back.”

On an overall NATO level, NATO should create some kind of alliance to send weapons and aid to Ukraine. However, an important facet of the problem is that Ukraine is not a part of NATO, and is unlikely to join in the near future—not only has Russia threatened a violent response if Ukraine joined, but Ukraine must show a commitment to democracy, individual liberty, and support for the rule of law to join NATO. A unified NATO response in support of Ukraine would show Putin that even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO, its member states are still willing to offer military support to a threatened sovereign nation. However, the unified NATO response does not necessarily have to include a welcoming of Ukraine into the security pact—instead, more creative solutions that divest from Cold War security bloc-style pacts could benefit the political situation in the long run, ensuring Ukrainian sovereignty while capitulating only somewhat to Russia’s obvious fear of NATO incursion on Russian borders.

All countries involved in the current crisis in any diplomatic or military capacity must find a solution that does not involve an all-out war, which citizens living in affected countries would feel almost exclusively, nor should the solution involve sanctions that ineffectively target problematic institutions and elites while leaving the rest of the country in the lurch. The question of Ukraine should not just be whether or not to allow its entrance into NATO, but how to create long-term regional peace within a balanced geopolitical system. By isolating global powers such as Russia and exclusively relying on NATO strength to maintain peace, the problem of stability in eastern Europe is not addressed in any substantial way; instead, the status quo remains a constant threat of violence. It’s time for everyone to take their guns off the table and find a better path toward lasting security.

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