Russia demands NATO stop expansion

Russia has published the draft security pacts that it had shared with the United States and its allies with the demand that security talks should start in Vienna which point to the clear and hard positions that the two sides are taking. The stances reflect a throwback to the old Cold War positions of the 1950s and 1960s before détente talks unfolded in the 1970s. The US and its allies, and here US allies are members of the old Cold War military formation, the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation).

The US and NATO have been warning that there would be consequences if Russia attacks Ukraine. Russia has now offered a rational solution: that NATO should not admit the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe into the military alliance. But NATO has already planned to accept Ukraine and Georgia as members. It means that the NATO will be at the doorstep of Russia. Earlier, there was a buffer zone between NATO and Russia.

Moscow is now asking that the buffer zone be maintained by not extending NATO membership to Russia’s immediate neighbours. The rational retort of the US and NATO is that Russia cannot dictate terms of NATO’s membership. It seems that what is staring both sides in the face is a deadlock. The Russian demand is justified, and NATO’s refusal makes sense. But there can be no dialogue and no agreement if each side sticks to its position. They must find a way out.

A possible solution would be for the US and NATO to demand that Russia would not extend its sphere of influence to countries like Ukraine and Georgia, and that it would on the whole guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of these countries, and that Russia would not do in these countries what it did in Crimea. At the same time, the US and NATO must assure the neutrality of Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and others so that Russia is assured of the buffer zone. Right now, the US and NATO are not willing to assure the neutrality of the countries at Russia’s doorstep.

When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the end of communist rule in east European countries from Romania to Bulgaria to Yugoslavia to Hungary to Czechoslovakia to East Germany, NATO should have been dissolved because the raison d’etre of the military formation was the threat posed by communism. With the death of communism, the threat did not exist. But Western security analysts will argue that the threat was not so much from communism as it was from Russia, and that at the end of the Second World War, Russia used communism as a cloak to expand its own influence and power, and the end of the communism did not mark the end of the danger posed by Russia.

It is true that Russia has been flexing its muscle and it has been trying to regain its influence in places like Ukraine and Georgia if not in Poland and Hungary. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the expansion of NATO as a pretext to move into Crimea.

Russia, in some ways like Turkey, is both an insider and outsider in Europe. Greater part of Russia is on the other side of Urals, and it spreads from Russian Siberia to Vladivostok on the shores of north-east Asia.

Russia’s Orthodox Church is vastly different from the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches of Europe. Yet, Russia right from the early 19th century aspired to be a Western power, and the western European countries like Germany, France and England did not relish the idea.