Putin has reasons, but he is not right

Russia's fear that Ukraine will either join NATO or, even less so, become a kind of aircraft carrier full of Western weapons pointed at Moscow is the reason for the current warlike tension around Ukraine. Putin sees this as an existential risk that Russia will never allow. But that being true, the reality is that Russia's appetite for Ukraine is older than that.

First, the history of Russia and Ukraine, Russia's traditional breadbasket and the birthplace of the Cossacks, have been closely linked since the ninth century, with Russians claiming heir to the federation of Slavic tribes known as the Kievan Rus. These are very old ties.

Second, it is no secret that Putin considers the demise of the USSR in 1991 to be "the greatest tragedy" of the 20th century because it deprived Moscow of control over 2 million square kilometres, and Russia was no longer a superpower but what Barack Obama disparagingly called "a regional power". John McCain was even harsher when he said it was "a gas station pretending to be a country", and Joe Biden has since said something similar. Many Russians today still do not understand that Belarus, or Ukraine, or Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are independent countries and do not tolerate the loss of the port of Riga, which was Russia's natural outlet to the Baltic Sea.

Thirdly, we in the West made a serious mistake in 1991. It is true that a bloodbath like the one in Yugoslavia was avoided, but we treated Russia as a defeated country when it was communism that was defeated with the demise of the USSR. As a result, we isolated Russia and did not integrate it into the European political game and the new geopolitics that followed the end of bipolarity and the Cold War. This was a very serious mistake on our part.

Fourth, Moscow claims that when the USSR collapsed and with it the Warsaw Pact, it received assurances that NATO would not approach its borders. No one remembers this "commitment", which is not written down anywhere and which would violate the sovereignty of independent countries by curtailing their right to decide their future freely, enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act to which the USSR itself was also a signatory.

Fifthly, in 1997 NATO undertook a major eastward enlargement to include no less than twelve countries that had previously been in the Soviet orbit, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, etc. This caused great displeasure in the USSR. This caused great displeasure in the Kremlin, which has since felt the NATO noose tightening around its neck. And it does not like this feeling of suffocation.

Sixth, not content with this, in 2008 NATO also offered membership to Georgia and Ukraine. It was a bit frivolous on its part, because it had no real intention of admitting these two countries - as it still has none today - but it sent another shiver down Russia's already scalded back, which seized the moment to intervene in the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

And when Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, vetoed a trade deal with the EU, people got fed up, took to the streets and overthrew him in the Euromaidan uprisings, in which the Kremlin always saw Europe's long hand. Russia realised that another red line had been violated and reacted by invading Crimea with unmarked soldiers, then annexing it without further ado. Moscow does not believe it did wrong because Crimea was conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Catherine the Great and Potemkin. It was Russian from then on and only came under Ukrainian sovereignty when Khrushchev gave it to Kiev, certainly without being able to imagine that Ukraine would one day be an independent country. Moscow feels that all it has done is to put things back on track. It was a decision applauded by the Russian people, who have accepted the sanctions imposed on them by the international community, which they consider unjust.

Moscow believes that if Serbia can be broken up, as the Americans did in 2008 to create the republic of Kosovo - even though the International Court of Justice has endorsed it -, or if Israel is allowed to annex the Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank, and Morocco to annex Western Sahara, there is no reason to prevent Russia from doing the same in Crimea, or now perhaps in Donbass, as Araceli Mangas explained in a recent article. And even more so when it considers its security to be at risk.

Putin's imperial foreign policy is no different in this respect from what Tsarist imperial Russia or communist imperial Russia would have done, because all three would have agreed today on the vital need to redesign Europe's security architecture to turn back the clock to 1997, demand the reversal of NATO's eastward enlargement or at least its effects, create a security glacis around its borders, and in effect re-divide Europe to secure for Russia a zone of influence like the USSR once had. And if it has to pay a price for that, it is willing to do so, and that is a big difference with us, because Moscow seems willing to put death on the table to achieve its goals and we are not; we are talking about responding with economic sanctions, because Ukraine is not a member of the Atlantic Alliance and, consequently, Article V of automatic defence in the event of an attack does not apply to it. Putin knows this and Biden also made it very clear a few days ago. The soldiers that the US has now put on alert are not intended to defend Ukraine, but to reassure the Baltic states and Poland.

One wonders why Putin has chosen this moment to harass Ukraine's borders, and I suppose it is because he perceives weakness in the West. The US is focused on infighting to try to push through Biden's economic programmes, they have just pulled out of Afghanistan badly, they have Mid-Term elections this year that may cost Biden the House and Senate, and their foreign concern is the rise of China rather than Russia. Germany has just held elections and its coalition government is still settling in, with internal differences over such important issues as the future of the Nord Stream pipeline that is to carry Russian gas under the Baltic Sea. France has elections this year and Macron is far from guaranteed re-election. And in the UK Boris Johnson is being hounded and may fall for his frivolity in throwing frequent parties at his official residence while the rest of the country was confined by the pandemic. The rest - and I include the EU as a bloc - do not count. Perhaps Putin has also thought that the 30th anniversary of the demise of the USSR was the appropriate symbolic moment to put things back on track from his point of view.

But if Putin has such reasons, he is wrong because what he is doing is against international law. In 2022 it is not acceptable to use blackmail and threats to try to bend the sovereign will of a country. Even less is it acceptable to use force to alter the borders of Europe, and even less to establish a new division of the continent and a new zone of influence subject to Moscow's dictates. Ever since Stephen Hawking we have known that the arrow of time only moves in one direction and never goes backwards. It cannot go back to 1997. International law protects the weak and cannot be ignored or applied on a whim. It is the security of the whole of Europe that is at stake, because looking the other way now is likely to encourage future aggression elsewhere and with other excuses.

The problem is that we have all gone too far here and giving in is not easy. Putin cannot send the 100,000 troops deployed along Ukraine's borders back to the barracks and return home empty-handed; we must not forget that he is an alpha male who is always very concerned about his image. And the United States - and Europe - cannot give in either, because they have international law on their side, because it is the security of our continent that is at stake, and because they know that China is watching what is happening on the European stage very closely and will draw consequences that it can put into practice with its own claim on Taiwan. In this way, a show of weakness will ensure future problems on the other side of the world.

The absence of the European Union in a crisis at the heart of Europe that affects our security and our future is pathetic.

What has happened is a serious wake-up call. It is imperative that we take note and take appropriate action to have an influential voice in the geopolitical issues that touch us so closely. For if we fail to do so, we will then have to put up with agreements reached by others that may not be in our interests. It is our future and our standard of living that are at stake.

Does this mean that there is no more hope? Not at all. There is still time for diplomacy. Next week, Germans, French, Ukrainians and Russians will meet in the so-called "Minsk format", and the Americans must also respond to Russia's memorandum of demands. And even if there is no room for compromise on the substance, other issues can be included in the dialogue basket where there is room for negotiation. Let us hope that common sense prevails because if Russia now makes a mistake and invades - even partially - Ukraine, we will impose very strong economic sanctions that will do it a lot of harm, that will probably excite more nationalism among a population that will feel unfairly treated - remember Kosovo, the Sahara, etc. - and that will contribute to pushing Russia into the arms of China, which is not in our interest either. What Europe is interested in is a good relationship with Russia, but we missed the boat in 1991 and now we cannot build it under the blackmail of bayonets. Imagination is needed.

Jorge Dezcallar, Ambassador of Spain