Vladimir Putin’s deepest fear is the freedom of Russia’s neighbours

The creator is president of the Chicago Council on International Affairs and served as US ambassador to Nato from 2009 to 2013

After a full week of diplomacy with Russia, and with rumblings of struggle in Ukraine, the central query of the disaster stays: what does President Vladimir Putin actually need? Even Russian diplomats who met US, Nato and European officers in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna final week steered they didn’t know Putin’s backside line. However all of them had the identical speaking factors: settle for our calls for or face “catastrophic penalties”.

To make sure, Moscow’s calls for are clear. It desires to finish Nato’s jap enlargement, above all to Ukraine. It desires to ban offensive weapons close to Russia’s borders — once more, particularly in Ukraine. And it desires Nato to withdraw all navy forces and infrastructure it deployed to the 14 new members which have joined since 1999.

The issue with these calls for is that Moscow is aware of they’re non-starters for Nato. The potential of including new members is foreseen in Nato’s founding treaty and is a observe that dates to 1952. And the choice on the way to present safety for all its members is Nato’s, not Russia’s.

On the identical time, attacking Ukraine is hardly the easiest way to attain Moscow’s calls for. It will strengthen Ukrainian public help to align with the west, as when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. It will result in extra materials help for Ukraine to defend itself. It will enhance the US and Nato navy presence on Russia’s borders.

For all Russia’s give attention to Nato and its previous actions, the reply to what Putin desires doesn’t lie in Brussels or Washington. It lies in Moscow. Whereas Putin absolutely would have most popular it if Nato had not expanded, his actual concern is with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, which he as soon as described as “the best geopolitical disaster of the century”. This “disaster” left Russia surrounded by unbiased international locations, every in a position to chart its personal future.

Russia stays probably the most highly effective post-Soviet state. It has a seat on the UN Safety Council, the strongest navy and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Even so, what Putin fears most is the independence of Russia’s neighbours — not as a result of they pose a navy risk to the nation’s safety, however as a result of they pose a political risk to his rule.

Putin worries that if any of those states turns into a profitable and affluent democracy, not to mention totally integrates with the west, the Russian folks will demand the identical. To forestall that, Putin has tried to make sure the neighbouring states are run by strongmen depending on Russia to remain in energy.

Putin was spooked by the so-called color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine within the early 2000s. He reacted fiercely to standard discontent at dwelling in 2011-2012 by ordering a crackdown on widespread public protests.

In 2014, when the Maidan protests triggered Viktor Yanukovich, the Russian-backed president, to flee Ukraine, Putin annexed Crimea and sponsored an insurgency within the Donbas area that continues to this present day. In 2020, Putin backed Alexander Lukashenko’s suppression of peaceable demonstrators protesting towards fraudulent elections in Belarus. This month, the Russian president despatched troops into Kazakhstan to halt one other rebellion.

As he propped up strongmen overseas, Putin sought to strengthen himself at dwelling by altering the structure to let him keep in energy till at the least 2036, assassinating and jailing his opponents, closing unbiased media retailers and branding these in civil society “international brokers”. Putin has justified these actions as essential to defend Russia from a hostile west — exemplified, in his view, by foreigners instigating color revolutions in its neighbours and Nato transferring nearer to its borders.

The newest disaster should be seen from this bigger perspective. Ukraine isn’t threatening Russia, and neither is Nato, which has to date deployed just a few battalions east which might be no match for the Russian forces amassed round Ukraine. Quite, Putin has manufactured this disaster to retake management of Ukraine — both straight, or not directly by destabilising the federal government by means of sabotage, cyber assaults and different types of hybrid warfare.

Putin should not succeed. Ukraine’s independence and its dedication to democracy, nevertheless precarious at occasions, are what stand between safety and stability in Europe and the revival of Russian expansionism.

Promising an finish to Nato enlargement or withdrawing forces from the east is not going to cease Putin. Solely full help of Ukraine can try this, which is why the US and Nato should provide Kyiv with all of the weapons and capabilities it must defend itself.