#readwise # What Putin Fears Most  ## Metadata - Author: [[Journal of Democracy]], [[Robert Person]] and [[Michael McFaul]] - Full Title: What Putin Fears Most - URL: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/what-putin-fears-most/ - Published on: 22 February 2022 ## Highlights [[Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault|Following John Mearsheimer’s provocative 2014 *Foreign Affairs* article]] arguing that “the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault,” **the narrative of Russian backlash against NATO expansion** has become a dominant framework for explaining—if not justifying—Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine. ... This argument **has two flaws, one about history and one about Putin’s thinking. First, NATO expansion has not been a *constant* source of tension between Russia and the West, but a *variable*. Over the last thirty years, the salience of the issue has risen and fallen not primarily because of the waves of NATO expansion, but due instead to waves of democratic expansion in Eurasia. In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs.** While the tragic invasions and occupations of Georgia and Ukraine have secured Putin a de facto veto over their NATO aspirations, since **the alliance would never admit a country under partial occupation by Russian forces, this fact undermines Putin’s claim that the current invasion is aimed at NATO membership. He has already blocked NATO expansion for all intents and purposes, thereby revealing that he wants something far more significant in Ukraine today: the end of democracy and the return of subjugation.** ^krp3xk ... This reality highlights **the second flaw: Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy, not NATO, that perceived threat would not magically disappear with a moratorium on NATO expansion.** Putin would not stop seeking to undermine democracy and sovereignty in Ukraine, Georgia, or the region as whole if NATO stopped expanding. **As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs.** --- During his **November 2001** visit to the United States, Putin struck a [realistic but cooperative note](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-11-16-0111160193-story.html): “we differ in the ways and means we perceive that are suitable for reaching the same objective… [But] one can rest assured that whatever final solution is found, it will not threaten … the interests of both our countries and of the world.” In an interview that month, **Putin declared, “Russia acknowledges the role of NATO in the world of today, Russia is prepared to expand its cooperation with this organization. And if we change the quality of the relationship, if we change the format of the relationship between Russia and NATO, then I think NATO enlargement will cease to be an issue—will no longer be a relevant issue.”** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9byy2e1sgxwe59g050ddg)) --- **When NATO announced in 2002 its plan for a major wave of expansion that would include three former Soviet republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—Putin barely reacted.** He certainly did not threaten to invade any of the countries to keep them out of NATO. **[Asked specifically](https://legacy.npr.org/news/specials/putin/nprinterview.html) in late 2001 whether he opposed the Baltic states’ membership in NATO, he stated, “We of course are not in a position to tell people what to do. We cannot forbid people to make certain choices if they want to increase the security of their nations in a particular way.”** Putin even maintained the same attitude when it was a question of Ukraine someday entering the Atlantic Alliance. In **May 2002**, when asked for his views on the future of Ukraine’s relations with NATO, **[Putin dispassionately replied](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598), “I am absolutely convinced that Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO; there is the Ukraine-NATO Council. At the end of the day, the decision is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”** A decade later, under President Medvedev, Russia and NATO were cooperating once again. **At the 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon, [Medvedev declared](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/9570), the “period of distance in our relations and claims against each other is over now. We view the future with optimism and will work on developing relations between Russia and NATO in all areas** … [as they progress toward] a full-fledged partnership.” At that summit, he even floated the possibility of Russia-NATO cooperation on missile defense. **Complaints about NATO expansion never arose**. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9fe7zeq7rg9c5jtyk13av)) --- **From the end of the Cold War until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, NATO in Europe was drawing down resources and forces, not building up. Even while expanding membership, NATO’s military capacity in Europe was much greater in the 1990s than in the 2000s. During this same period, Putin was spending significant resources to modernize and expand Russia’s conventional forces deployed in Europe. The balance of power between NATO and Russia was shifting in favor of Moscow.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9g34g0b2ahf1pvzvp8ggz)) --- These episodes of substantive Russia-NATO cooperation undermine the argument that NATO expansion has always and continuously been *the* driver of Russia’s confrontation with the West over the last thirty years. The historical record simply does not support the thesis that an expanding NATO bears sole blame for Russian antagonism with the West and Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9h1f0s2k39e088cw6snq0)) --- **The more serious cause of tensions has been a series of democratic breakthroughs and popular protests for freedom throughout the 2000s**, what many refer to as the “Color Revolutions.” Putin believes that **Russian national interests have been threatened by** what he portrays as **U.S.-supported coups**. **After each of them**—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011–12, and Ukraine in 2013–14—**Putin has pivoted to more hostile policies toward the United States**, and then invoked the NATO threat as justification for doing so. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9jjwg2nbhba0d4cmeeptc)) --- The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to stop ethnic cleaning in Kosovo severely tested that strategy but survived in part because Clinton gave Yeltsin and Russia a role in the negotiated solution. **When the first post-communist color revolution overthrew Slobodan Milosevic a year later, Russia’s new president, Putin, deplored the act** but did not overreact. At that time, he still entertained the possibility of cooperation with the West, including NATO. However, **the next round of democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, escalated U.S.-Russian tensions significantly.** Putin blamed the United States directly for assisting in this democratic breakthrough and helping to install what he saw as a pro-American puppet, President Mikheil Saakashvili. **Immediately after the Rose Revolution, Putin sought to undermine Georgian democracy, ultimately invading in 2008** and recognizing two Georgian regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—as independent states. U.S.-Russian relations reached a new low point in 2008. **A year after the Rose Revolution, the most consequential democratic expansion in the post-Soviet world erupted in Ukraine in 2004**, the [Orange Revolution](https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Orange-Ukraines-Democratic-Breakthrough/dp/0870032216). In the years prior to that momentous event, Ukraine’s foreign-policy orientation under President Leonid Kuchma was [relatively balanced between east and west](https://www.csis.org/analysis/ponars-policy-memo-291-paradoxes-kuchmas-russian-policy), but with gradually improving ties between Kyiv and Moscow. That changed when a [falsified presidential election](https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/McFaul-16-3.pdf) in late 2004 brought hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets, eventually sweeping away Kuchma’s—and Putin’s—handpicked successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Instead, the prodemocratic and pro-western Orange Coalition led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko took power. **Compared to Serbia in 2000 or Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 was a much larger threat to Putin. First, the Orange Revolution occurred suddenly and in a much bigger and more strategic country on Russia’s border**. The abrupt pivot to the West by Yushchenko and his allies left Putin facing the prospect that he had “lost” a country on which he placed tremendous symbolic and strategic importance. **To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his [grand strategy](https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/four-myths-about-russian-grand-strategy): to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9sa7dpw2f3mdtbv8jnxth)) --- **Second, those Ukrainians who rose up in defense of their freedom were, in Putin’s own assessment, Slavic brethren with close historical, religious, and cultural ties to Russia. If it could happen in Kyiv, [why not in Moscow](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480974)?** Several years later, it almost did happen in Russia when [a series of mass protests](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480973) erupted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the wake of fraudulent parliamentary elections in December 2011. They were the largest protests in Russia since 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time in his decade-plus in power, ordinary Russians showed themselves to have both the will and the capability to threaten Putin’s grip on power. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hbngfqdcnrxkd7k324q2g1ah)) --- U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated ever further in 2014, again because of new democratic expansion. The next democratic mobilization to threaten Putin happened a second time in Ukraine in 2013–14. After the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin did not invade Ukraine, but wielded other instruments of influence to help his protégé, Viktor Yanukovych, [narrowly win the Ukrainian presidency](https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/understanding-ukraines-presidential-shift/) six years later. Yanukovych, however, turned out not to be a loyal Kremlin servant, but tried to cultivate ties with both Russia and the West. Putin finally compelled Yanukovych to make a choice, and the Ukrainian president chose Russia in the fall of 2013 when he reneged on signing [an EU association agreement](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-under-pressure-from-russia-puts-brakes-on-eu-deal/2013/11/21/46c50796-52c9-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html) in favor of membership in Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9xm2xpmb26f54h66kfd2d)) --- **Ukraine’s relationship with NATO and the United States is just a symptom of what Putin believes is the underlying disease: a sovereign, democratic Ukraine.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvx9zn83m696an1y8dwasky1)) --- **Putin is threatened by a successful democracy in Ukraine.** He cannot tolerate a successful, flourishing, and democratic Ukraine on his borders, especially if the Ukrainian people also begin to prosper economically. That undermines the Kremlin’s own regime stability and proposed rationale for autocratic state leadership. **Just as Putin cannot allow the will of the Russian people to guide Russia’s future, he cannot allow the people of Ukraine, who have a shared culture and history, to choose the prosperous, independent, and free future that they have voted for and fought for.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvxa4bk5x5jrgv2f8njcxdqn)) ---