It was something of a relief that the NATO head responded to this week’s Russian escalation with a calm and clear recitation of facts.
This has been a week of escalation in the Ukraine war. Russia’s phony referendums led this morning to the announcement of its annexing more Ukrainian territory, some not even occupied by its own military. This makes the war harder to end for obvious reasons. No self-respecting government in Kyiv could agree to this land grab. And it would require a large, visible humiliation for the Russian government to agree to give it back. The territory has no obviously defensible geographic border.
On the other side of the ledger, Ukraine applied for expedited membership in NATO. It’s perfectly understandable from Ukraine’s perspective to seek this, as it partly owes its survival to the support of NATO.
From the NATO perspective, it makes less sense. NATO is supposed to be an alliance for deterring and avoiding war with Russia. Even now, though I disagree with its strategy for doing so, deterrence is what Ukraine hawks in NATO intend to do with their fulsome support of the Ukrainian government. They say it constantly: If Russia is not stopped here, it could be emboldened to try something in the Baltics or on Poland. Granting expedited membership to Ukraine would convert the alliance’s logic from avoiding direct war with Russia, to joining one in progress.
And in the background there is the matter of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. I have no idea who blew it up. But whoever did was deliberately severing the brake lines on the war. Germany (and the EU) could always have made a move to cease supporting Ukraine, in order to get the taps turned back on. This would have been a humiliating surrender to coercive diplomacy, but there it is. But the brake lines run the other way too. While the pipeline still existed, it was possible for actors in the Russian state to prevail upon Putin, or a successor, to let the gas flow again, watch the revenue surge again, and reestablish more normal relations with Germany again. Now a climbdown means Russia sending gas through Poland, the NATO member that has been the largest thorn in Russia’s side after the United States and the United Kingdom. Severing the pipeline made it harder for either Germany or Russia to cry uncle.
Later, Vladimir Putin gave another tub-thumping speech. “I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that they remember this,” he said. “People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens. Forever.” He affirmed his view that the breakup of the USSR “dismembered our nation” — meaning it left Russian nationals and Russian speakers stranded in states that were now foreign to Russia: “There is no Soviet Union, the past cannot be brought back. And Russia today does not need it anymore. We are not striving for this,” he protested. Instead, he said Russia was in a battle for “great historical Russia.”
Putin spoke at times as if this were already a world war, with Ukraine just one theater of it. It was almost a campaign speech, in which Putin was appealing to the third world to let him lead an anti-American alliance of the rest against the West. He indicted the West going back to the Middle Ages — and invoked the African slave trade, and the opium wars. He then tied these to a Western attempt to suppress religion and impose gender ideology on allied or subject nations.
Therefore I was slightly relieved this afternoon, when NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg spoke up and spoke very clearly. He sidestepped the question of Ukraine’s expedited membership, affirming every European democracy’s right to apply for membership. Appropriately so. One wants neither to demoralize Ukraine nor to speak ahead of member states who have a vote, and likely will vote against it. And he stuck to the facts, that the annexations are illegal, that the nuclear saber-rattling is unacceptable, and that NATO would continue to support Ukraine. “It is in our interest to ensure President Putin doesn’t win,” he said. “Nuclear war cannot be won, and it must never be fought . . . This must be clearly conveyed to Russia.”