The NATO Excuse: Understanding Putin’s Rationale For Aggression

A self-fulfilling prophecy? NATO expansion is again on the table as the Kremlin pushes to include it in any process to end the war in Ukraine. This, even as it conducts a massive hybrid war of sabotage, cyberattacks, and drone incursions across Europe.

Is NATO enlargement the root cause of Russian aggression, or is it something deeper? Is Russia naturally aggressive?

After talks with China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin, Russia’s Vladimir Putin said the issue of NATO’s eastward enlargement will have to be addressed for there to be a sustainable peace in Ukraine.

And, in an answer to a question posed by the BBC during a four-and-a-half-hour televised event, Putin says talk of Russia planning to attack Europe with another “special military operation,” as the Kremlin calls the Ukraine invasion, is “nonsense,” if the West treated Russia with respect.

“There won’t be any operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we’ve always tried to respect yours,” he asserted. Putin added, “… if you don’t cheat us like you cheated us with NATO’s eastward expansion.”

Putin and his apologists have long accused the U.S. and NATO of going back on an alleged 1990 promise to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — related to German unification before the complete fall of the Soviet Union — to not enlarge NATO further.

Gorbachev later denied that the promise had ever been made. And it certainly was not included in any treaty, official documents, or statements.

Founded in 1949 by 12 nations as a safeguard against further conquest from the Soviet Union, which had already brutally absorbed numerous Eastern European countries at the end of WWII, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has expanded eastward considerably since then.

It has added new members 11 times since, most recently in 2024 when Sweden was accepted into the alliance, and Finland the year before in 2023. Ukraine, Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are currently on the waiting list to join NATO.

However, the more NATO did to stabilize the situation in central and Eastern Europe by bringing worried former conquests of the U.S.S.R. into the West, the more it antagonized Russia.

In 1997, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin renewed the issue when he tried to secure a guarantee from President Bill Clinton that NATO would not add any former Soviet republics. Clinton refused. But Russia was too weak to do much about it.

Then, during the early 2000s, President George W. Bush pushed for Ukraine, the largest former Soviet republic, previously known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, to become a NATO member.

France and Germany opposed it, fearing escalation with Russia.

As James Goldgeiger, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., noted:

The Russians were always concerned about how far NATO enlargement was going to go. It’s one thing for Poland to come in, or the Czech Republic to come in. That’s not such a big deal. But there was always a concern about Ukraine.

That’s why NATO’s move toward possibly incorporating Ukraine into the alliance crossed a big red line for Putin.

The former KGB officer has long said that he believes Ukrainians and Russians to be a single people, unified by language, culture, and religion. In July 2021, he wrote a long essay about the “historical unity” between the two nations.

To ensure Ukraine remained in the Russian orbit and outside NATO, Putin aggressively promoted pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine and interfered in its internal politics for years. But this only pushed Ukrainians themselves to look West. 

And the West obliged with its own influence and interference campaign.

Finally, Russia’s hybrid warfare annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 – a violation of the Budapest Memorandum between the U.S., U.K., and Russia, which committed Russia to respecting the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up its large Soviet-era nuclear weapons — turned Ukrainians even more against Russia.

After that, popular support for joining NATO rose among Ukrainians, who had once been more ambivalent about the alliance. Russia’s invasion in February 2022 was intended to end that possibility permanently.

And, despite Putin’s apparent inability to conquer Ukraine, his invasion may have succeeded in stopping Ukrainian hopes for joining NATO. Kyiv has now stated it is willing to forego membership to achieve a lasting peace with Russia.

And there isn’t unanimous consent among NATO’s current members to incorporate Ukraine anyway.

More broadly, though, for Russia, instead of deterring further NATO expansion, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has seemingly hardened Europe’s political will and even pushed longtime neutrals — but NATO “partners” — Finland and Sweden to seek full membership.

So, yes, NATO expansion and alleged or perceived “betrayal” played a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. But just as important a factor, or more so, was Putin’s traditional imperial Russian mindset, which in turn makes Europe justifiably wary.

As the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) noted:

According to Stephen Kotkin, a professor of Russian history at Princeton University, Putin believes that Russia rightfully deserves a sphere of influence in its “near abroad.” To Putin, Ukraine is not a state because it is not sovereign. Small or weak states are only instruments in the hands of the great powers. Where we see Moscow’s aggression, Putin sees defense. If Russia cannot control Ukraine, then the West will. Thus, countries like Ukraine become platforms for invasion. And then the West will dismember Russia as the USSR was dismembered.

This way of thinking in Russia goes back to the tsars. Russia has no natural borders on its periphery. Stalin believed that without hegemony in Eastern Europe he would be subject to infiltration and subversion. But the peoples of Eastern Europe did not want to be forced to live under communism, and thus arose the very hostility Stalin feared.

In any case, this putative betrayal does not carry the weight of a violation of a formal agreement, a violation of which Putin himself is guilty [by violating the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994].

But this is why I continue to argue that even if the Ukraine war is ended and Kyiv commits to never joining NATO, and there is no further NATO enlargement, Putin will continue his push to expand Russia’s sphere of influence into Ukraine and other European and even NATO countries bordering Russia using hybrid warfare and other means. 

Most likely against the three tiny Baltic nations (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia), he also sees as historically tied to Mother Russia. And this can obviously lead to a direct major war with NATO.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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