NATO’s Hopes for Russia Have Turned to Dismay
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014
LONDON — The NATO summit meeting last week in Wales was dominated byRussia’s military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
The rift with President Vladimir V. Putinof Russia was an extraordinary contrast to the last NATO summit in Britain, in 1990. A year after the Berlin Wall fell, NATO issued the London Declaration, asserting that “Europe has entered a new, promising era.” Eastern Europe is liberating itself, the declaration said. “The Soviet Union has embarked on the long journey toward a free society. The walls that once confined people and ideas are collapsing,” and those people “are choosing a Europe whole and free.”
The hopes expressed in that declaration 24 years ago seem so much dust today, and among many Russia watchers, there is considerable sadness.
The rift with President Vladimir V. Putinof Russia was an extraordinary contrast to the last NATO summit in Britain, in 1990. A year after the Berlin Wall fell, NATO issued the London Declaration, asserting that “Europe has entered a new, promising era.” Eastern Europe is liberating itself, the declaration said. “The Soviet Union has embarked on the long journey toward a free society. The walls that once confined people and ideas are collapsing,” and those people “are choosing a Europe whole and free.”
The hopes expressed in that declaration 24 years ago seem so much dust today, and among many Russia watchers, there is considerable sadness.
“I could weep for the hopes that we had in the early 1990s,” said Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia, now at the Center for European Reform. “The walls that divided us were collapsing, and Putin is building them up again.”
Rather than moving toward democracy and individual liberties, Mr. Bond said, the Russian government obsesses about public uprisings like those in Ukraine in 2004 and this year. “Putin wants to show that you can’t have a real democracy in a former Soviet state,” Mr. Bond said. “He’s scared witless by the idea of people power.”
For Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, there is sorrow, too. “We Balts are the first who would like to have good, predictable relations with Russia,” he said. “But to have a strategic partnership with Russia,” as NATO has tried to establish for 20 years, “is not possible now.”
Diplomatic dialogue with Moscow remains vital, he said. “But it’s important to have dialogue based on rules, and now people are opening their eyes, realizing something serious is happening.”
There is plenty of blame to go around, said Kadri Liik, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Boris N. Yeltsin, independent Russia’s first leader, failed “in defining Russia’s new place in the world and its engagement with the West,” she said. “He was adept at destroying the system but not at building a new one.”
Russian democrats were too busy with domestic change to worry much about foreign policy. Asked about NATO, Boris Y. Nemtsov, once deputy prime minister, said simply, “I was responsible for Gazprom,” the huge company created from a Soviet ministry.
Mr. Yeltsin presided over the chaotic privatization of Soviet industry, which led to oligarchic theft of public assets. “Yeltsin became delegitimized over privatization, and liberal views toward the West became delegitimized as well,” Ms. Liik said.
Some wonder whether Russia’s break with the West was almost accidental, set off by unforeseen events in Ukraine.
But James Sherr, author of “Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad,” believes that Mr. Putin was heading toward rupture regardless. “Putin has had clear strategic objectives, even fixations, from the start, but he has pursued them by tactical improvisation,” Mr. Sherr said.
Mr. Putin is not just aiming to restore Russian primacy in the former Soviet Union, he said. “One of his fixations is Ukraine,” whose independence Mr. Putin regards as a crime.
At the same time, Mr. Sherr said, “we in the West had a very specific, hopeful, illusory idea about the end of the Soviet Union and the kind of Russia we’d be dealing with.” But even by 1994, Russian democrats were being called “romantics,” if not yet traitors. “I think Putin or something like Putin was almost preordained from this whole period of romanticism and illusions,” Mr. Sherr said. “That was fueled by the equally naïve projection of a Western liberal model of economic and political change on Russia.”
Mr. Putin has miscalculated in Ukraine because he failed to understand how much Ukrainians had changed, Ms. Liik said. But the West has its own blindness, Mr. Sherr said. Ukraine “is a crisis for us because of the things we knew and pretended not to know.”
Rather than moving toward democracy and individual liberties, Mr. Bond said, the Russian government obsesses about public uprisings like those in Ukraine in 2004 and this year. “Putin wants to show that you can’t have a real democracy in a former Soviet state,” Mr. Bond said. “He’s scared witless by the idea of people power.”
For Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, there is sorrow, too. “We Balts are the first who would like to have good, predictable relations with Russia,” he said. “But to have a strategic partnership with Russia,” as NATO has tried to establish for 20 years, “is not possible now.”
Diplomatic dialogue with Moscow remains vital, he said. “But it’s important to have dialogue based on rules, and now people are opening their eyes, realizing something serious is happening.”
There is plenty of blame to go around, said Kadri Liik, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Boris N. Yeltsin, independent Russia’s first leader, failed “in defining Russia’s new place in the world and its engagement with the West,” she said. “He was adept at destroying the system but not at building a new one.”
Russian democrats were too busy with domestic change to worry much about foreign policy. Asked about NATO, Boris Y. Nemtsov, once deputy prime minister, said simply, “I was responsible for Gazprom,” the huge company created from a Soviet ministry.
Mr. Yeltsin presided over the chaotic privatization of Soviet industry, which led to oligarchic theft of public assets. “Yeltsin became delegitimized over privatization, and liberal views toward the West became delegitimized as well,” Ms. Liik said.
Some wonder whether Russia’s break with the West was almost accidental, set off by unforeseen events in Ukraine.
But James Sherr, author of “Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad,” believes that Mr. Putin was heading toward rupture regardless. “Putin has had clear strategic objectives, even fixations, from the start, but he has pursued them by tactical improvisation,” Mr. Sherr said.
Mr. Putin is not just aiming to restore Russian primacy in the former Soviet Union, he said. “One of his fixations is Ukraine,” whose independence Mr. Putin regards as a crime.
At the same time, Mr. Sherr said, “we in the West had a very specific, hopeful, illusory idea about the end of the Soviet Union and the kind of Russia we’d be dealing with.” But even by 1994, Russian democrats were being called “romantics,” if not yet traitors. “I think Putin or something like Putin was almost preordained from this whole period of romanticism and illusions,” Mr. Sherr said. “That was fueled by the equally naïve projection of a Western liberal model of economic and political change on Russia.”
Mr. Putin has miscalculated in Ukraine because he failed to understand how much Ukrainians had changed, Ms. Liik said. But the West has its own blindness, Mr. Sherr said. Ukraine “is a crisis for us because of the things we knew and pretended not to know.”
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