Tragedy, National Insecurity, and War in Ukraine

Americans have begun to witness a horrifying spectacle in the outskirts of Kyiv and throughout Ukraine. Russian troops, as they retreat in the face of counterattacks by Ukrainian infantry armed with NATO weaponry, are committing atrocities. Video and other documentation (here, here, and here) have emerged of them destroying buildings and infrastructure, laying waste to towns and villages, and executing civilians. No one knows how the Russian invasion will end, though most observers can now envision a terrible fate for Ukrainians living in the Donbas and near Odesa, where the Russian invasion has been more successful and is now being reinforced. Given Russian behavior thus far, mass flight is probably the best remaining option for the civilian population.

If an impartial observer with an appreciation of European geography and history were to fly high above the Ural Mountains to glance west toward Portugal, two competing strategic perspectives of the European peninsula would immediately become visible. From a Russian subjective point of view, the most important geographic feature depicted on the strategic map, "Europe as Viewed from the U.S.S.R.," is the North European Plain, a strip of land extending from Bordeaux to Nantes, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw. In Poland, the Plain is approximately 300 miles wide, reaching from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains; and once past the easternmost reaches of the Carpathians, the North European Plain broadens out to encompass St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the cultural and demographic core area of Russian settlement. Relatively few natural obstacles—rivers, forests, marshes, and some passable low mountain ranges—limit the movement of invading armies. To defend against European threats from the West, Russian policymakers and military planners have long sought to establish client states, particularly along the Northern European Plain, and possibly from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea, and failing that, to stand up neutral buffer states to absorb the hammer blows of invasion.

Two other geographic features would demand our observer's attention: the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Given the paucity of warm water ports historically available to Russia, these two seas, which flank Russian settlements, are both a geostrategic threat and an opportunity. Sea powers had utilized these bodies of water to attack Russia, for instance, when the United Kingdom, France, and Sardinia supported the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War (1853-1856.)  For Russia, conquering the coastline adjacent to Russian territories would provide access to maritime commerce and a measure of security. In favorable geostrategic circumstances, turning these seas into Russian lakes by conquering the entire coastline would enable Russia to create a springboard for supporting armies on the move and for becoming a significant naval power. If Russia secured the narrow straits to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea and/or those connecting the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, Russia could influence events occurring along the coastlines of the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, thereby threatening NATO’s northern and southern flanks and forcing NATO countries to protect their coasts from a possible naval attack. The leaders of Russia do not perceive NATO as a defensive alliance; they view it in the context of two historical invasions of the Russian homeland that occurred during moments of European unification under Napoleon and Hitler.

How far will Russia's sphere of influence extend? That is a crucial question. As Vice-President of the Russian Security Council and former President Dmitri Medvedev reportedly said of the Kremlin's objectives,"‘The goal is for the sake of the peace of future generations of Ukrainians themselves and the opportunity to finally build an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’”  A Russian geopolitical theorist who is often referred to as “Putin’s Brain,” Aleksandr Dugin, raised the possibility of an expansive, territorial Russian empire, one that stretches across all of Eurasia. Russian thinking appears to revolve around an imperative of expansion westward to forestall military threats to the Russian homeland.

Our impartial observer would also recognize that western and central European powers view this same terrain from a different point of view. After the Soviet victory in WWII, the armies of the USSR occupied the Baltic States; and Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania "joined" the Warsaw Pact—a territorial military alliance in name but a series of client buffer states in fact. The USSR ruthlessly suppressed later uprisings in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). Despite these military operations and occupations, the Soviet Union never destroyed the submerged nations in the Warsaw Pact and in the Soviet Union. 

From 1999 to 2009, these newly independent states responded to the collapse of the USSR by joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a maritime collective security arrangement. Their goal was enhanced security against the likelihood that Russia would someday reemerge as a regional great power and then attempt to reestablish the borders and buffers established in Europe by the USSSR or the Tsar’s Empire.

The former states of the Warsaw Pact no longer want Russia on their borders, threatening them with becoming client states of a greater Russian empire, and they have reoriented their security arrangements, their internal politics and, to an extent, their economies toward the capitalism of the North Atlantic; and they have established military and security ties with the two modern, maritime-commercial, naval powers, the United Kingdom and the United States. 

The great geopolitical thinker, Halford John Mackinder, understood the geostrategic logic associated as applied to Western Europe. In his essay, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” written in 1944 for Foreign Affairs, Mackinder argued for a post-war alliance of the North Atlantic:

that there be effective and lasting coöperation between America, Britain and France, the first for depth of defense, the second as the moated forward stronghold -- a Malta on a grander scale -- and the third as the defensible bridgehead. The last is no less essential than the other two, because sea power must, in the final resort, be amphibious if it is to balance land power….

This proposal follows my second geographical concept, that of the Midland Ocean -- the North Atlantic -- and its dependent seas and river basins. Without laboring the details of that concept, let me picture it again in its three elements -- a bridgehead in France, a moated aerodrome in Britain, and a reserve of trained manpower, agriculture and industries in the eastern United States and Canada. As far as war potential goes, both the United States and Canada are Atlantic countries, and since instant land warfare is in view, both the bridgehead and the moated aerodrome are essential to amphibious power.

Mackinder was addressing a world in which the USSR and the Western allies would continue cooperating in keeping Germany from reemerging as a great power. That world is long past.

Mackinder anticipated the formation of NATO but did not appreciate that the North Atlantic alliance would be required to defend Europe against the Soviet Union. Then, as now against Russia, NATO policymakers believed that they must establish "bridgeheads" along the coastline of Europe's "dependent seas" to address the possibility of "instant land-warfare."  The North Atlantic maritime powers needed allies, especially along the European coast, to establish bridgeheads, to engage in amphibious expeditionary warfare, and to resupply their own and allied armies with military equipment by sea to contain the power of the Soviet Union. 

NATO expansion has, with some backfilling, inexorably spread eastward along the coast of the North Sea and over to the Black Sea. Given this geostrategic logic, the great temptation is to establish such forward positioned bridgeheads. Astute analysts have argued (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) that this expansionary tendency is a disastrously flawed policy that needlessly pokes the Russian bear near its den. Despite such warnings, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania entered NATO in 2004 and ambiguous promises were made to Ukraine (here, here, here, here, and here) regarding its possible or eventual membership. The maritime geostrategic logic seemingly supports such forward NATO expansion.

Furthermore, a second dynamic was at work. Given the history of Russian conquest and domination over their territories, the former Warsaw Pact states on the front line with Russia—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania—had an interest in pushing Russian military and political influence further away from their borders. From a Polish point of view, having the Baltic States join NATO made perfect strategic sense. From the Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, and Romanian points of view, welcoming Ukraine into NATO also pushed a potential Russian military threat further to the east. Should the border of NATO move further east, these formerly front-line countries, like France and Germany before them, would end up as territorial "free riders," with more freedom of policy choices as long as Article 5 of The North Atlantic Treaty is not invoked (calling on all member states to come to the aid of an attacked NATO member). 

Europe is contested terrain. Two competing geostrategic logics define Europe. A territorial logic undergirds Russia’s perceived territorial imperatives. The Northern European Plain defines Russia's geostrategic interest. To defend itself from an invasion from the West, Russia requires territorial buffers as far removed from its cultural and demographic core area as possible. In addition, the perceived honor and continuing loyalty of the detached Russian ethnic populations (i.e., irredentas) living in the former Soviet Republics prompt (or serve as an excuse for) Russian intervention on their behalf in those now independent states such as the Baltics and Ukraine. Finally, fear of a possible NATO invasion has repeatedly prompted Putin (here) to protest NATO expansion into what the Russian leadership considered their “Near Abroad,” Russia’s territorial sphere of influence.

With both the Baltic States and Ukraine in NATO, Putin and NATO policy planners could anticipate that Belarus, partially encircled by the Baltics to the north and Ukraine to the south, might also someday reform its polity in preparation for being welcomed into NATO. At that point, Russia and NATO would no longer have any buffer states, and as Randall Collins—a geopolitical theorist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union—suggested, the absence of buffer states between adversarial powers heightens the likelihood of “showdown” wars.

The three Baltic States and Ukraine have emerged as geopolitical flashpoints, caught geographically between these two divergent geostrategic imperatives, one territorial and the other maritime. Retrospective assessments of NATO enlargement do not address the current crisis. For better or worse, the Baltic States are now members of NATO, and the United States and the other NATO allies are pledged to their defense. Abandoning that commitment is not an option in a world where the trust of allies depends on the credibility of great powers.

With the collapse of the USSR at the end of the Cold War, Ukraine secured its independence. Several years later, in 1994, Ukraine gave up the 5000 nuclear weapons left on its territory in exchange for a security guarantee that ensured its territorial integrity. In the Budapest Memorandum, the parties agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine" and to "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence…” of that country. The United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine were signatories. However, the Budapest Memorandum was not a formal treaty between Ukraine and the United States. At that time, nuclear weapon nonproliferation was a US priority. The United States and the United Kingdom secured nonproliferation; Russia, however, made an empty promise. Since 1994 Ukraine twice has been invaded by Russia. Ukraine, on both occasions, no longer had the nuclear weapons to deter threats to its territorial integrity and sovereignty, and the US and the UK did not react with sufficient vigor to maintain their credibility by enforcing this Memorandum—a major policy error.

In this case, strategic ambiguity produced the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, had the United States and NATO issued an unambiguous statement, "NO! Ukraine will not enter NATO," perhaps the Russians would not have been incentivized to invade. On the other hand, had the United States and the United Kingdom unambiguously committed to the defense of Ukraine under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum, or had NATO welcomed Ukrainian membership when Russia was still in a thoroughly weakened state, Russia might have considered the risk of military intervention too high, and the Ukraine wars might have been averted. With unambiguous NATO support, training, and a modernized military, it seems unlikely that Putin would have seen Ukraine as an easy target. Raising such historical counterfactuals suggests alternative paths not taken. What is clear is that the half-hearted US and NATO flirtation with a Ukrainian membership denied Ukraine the actual treaty guarantees, and/or the military support needed to deter Russia, while inviting a Russian response. Furthermore, to the extent that the Ukrainians relied on the security guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum as a deterrent to Russian aggression, these guarantees may have given them a false sense of security. Ukraine did not develop a comprehensive Israeli-style defense, which might have been a rational move given the false security provided under the Budapest Memorandum.

Ukrainian efforts to join NATO may have been the proximate cause of the Russian invasion—or simply an excuse offered by Russian leadership— but Russia's actions against Ukraine have had unintended consequences. Suddenly, NATO's disparate members have found common cause to resist Russian aggression. NATO hasn't been so unified since the Article 5 response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Furthermore, Finland and Sweden, two traditional enemies of Russia that border the maritime extensions of the Baltic Sea are now acutely aware of their national insecurity. Both have reportedly expressed a desire to apply for NATO membership in the coming weeks, and, in response, Medvedev reportedly threatened that Russia would deploy nuclear and hypersonic weaponry to its Baltic Sea enclave, Kaliningrad, to protect the integrity of Russia's borders. Finally, it seems most unlikely that Putin and his advisors anticipated a protracted conflict when they launched the attack on Ukraine. Policies, flawed and otherwise, chosen in the context of these divergent geostrategic imperatives, reveal the geopolitical tragedy of our time.

Will Putin, driven to desperation over a failure to deliver a quick victory in Ukraine, turn to tactical nuclear weapons or other WMDs? No one can know for certain, though recent remarks by Russian spokesmen have suggested that NATO and Russia are on the brink of a world war. What sparked this rhetorical escalation? On April 14, 2022, the Moskva, the Russian flagship of the Black Sea fleet, sank. The causes are disputed. Russia claims that a fire aboard the ship caused an explosion, an accident that could be interpreted as incompetence. Ukrainians insist that they struck the ship with two of their Neptune missiles. 

Whatever the truth of their respective claims, in the aftermath of the sinking of the Moskva, Russian media personalities have begun interpreting the conflict for Russian viewers in an incendiary fashion: “Military commentator Dmitry Drozdenko said … ‘In actual fact, a full-scale multi-level war is underway with the collective West. And the West has long been preparing for the war.’” And “Olga Skabeyeva told [Russian television] viewers that ‘what it's escalated into can safely be called World War Three’ and insisted ‘that's entirely for sure.’”  She added, “‘Now we're definitely fighting against Nato (sic.) infrastructure, if not Nato (sic.) itself. We need to recognize that.’”  Finally, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, reportedly stated that Russia's military forces would seek to extend the land bridge beyond Crimea to Odesa and beyond to Moldova's province of Transnistria, where another concentration of a Russian ethnic minority lives. Such commentaries reveal how Russians articulate the territorial geostrategic logic as an ideologically imperative.

NATO and Russia operate under the directives of two divergent geostrategic logics, one maritime and the other territorial. For NATO, the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea are extensions of the North Atlantic Ocean. For Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States are part of its "near abroad," states that, at the least, fall within its "natural" sphere of influence or, ideally, should be reincorporated into a revived Russian empire. Two key geopolitically inspired questions that policymakers should have been asked are these: How far from Moscow and the Russian cultural and demographic core must Russia's sphere of influence extend for Russia to feel secure? And, how far from the water's edge should NATO expansion occur before it ceases to be a maritime alliance? Such theoretical questions, however, do not address practical policy concerns.

There may be some hard geopolitical facts that reinforce how these two geostrategic logics have informed policymaking. The US had allegedly begun (here) taking first steps as of November 2018 to contest the Black Sea by upgrading Ukrainian naval facilities “at the Ochakiv Naval Base and the military facility at Mykolaiv—40 miles east of Odesa and less than 100 northwest of Crimea.”  Russian leadership likely interprets such actions as a provocation and as an opportunity for the US to extend its naval presence in the Black Sea. Both Russia and the US as the leading power in NATO, are trapped by their respective geostrategic imperatives and their wider geopolitical implications. 

Meanwhile, Putin regards the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO as an anathema. The presence of Russians, allegedly as a threatened minority in Ukraine (and in the Baltic States and Transnistria), violates his perception of Russian national honor. Russian policymakers seek to restore Russia's status as a great power by securing control over Ukrainian iron ore, coal deposits, industrial activity, agricultural productivity, and other economic assets too numerous to list here. Insofar as Ukraine exports grain and other bulky commodities by sea to the wider world, cutting Ukraine off from the Baltic Sea would render its economy dependent on Russia. On the other hand, should Ukraine ultimately join NATO, Russians believe they would be presented with another significant military threat, with the Baltic States and Ukraine presenting possible launching sites for an invasion. An independent Ukraine is no doubt perceived by Putin as a military threat, a revanchist state that will eventually attempt to seize control over its lost provinces and as a potential ally of a future enemy. No matter that NATO declares itself to be a defensive alliance, Russian military planners prepare for worst-case scenarios. Horrifyingly, Russian perceptions of honor, interest, and fear all drive Putin toward controlling, incorporating, or destroying Ukraine.

Neither NATO nor Russia can now turn aside from the conflict over Ukraine. Perhaps if NATO and the US had stated unambiguously that Ukraine could not join, President Zelensky would have been inclined to reach a diplomatic agreement capitulating to Russian demands. Perhaps if Ukraine had joined NATO when Russia was weakened in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Baltic States did, the Ukraine war might have been averted. Such counterfactuals are a source of historical conjuring revelatory of profound regret.

As autocratic, territorial states—China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea—and democratic, maritime states—United States, United Kingdom, the NATO states, Australia, and Japan—find their economies decoupling from one another, perhaps President Putin has come to recognize that a zero-sum game for strategic resources is emerging. Ukraine is too strategically important to Russia and to NATO (and the EU) for it to fall into the ambit of one side or the other. With a new Cold War in the offing, Ukraine is caught in the crosshairs.