Russia feels promises on NATO expansion belied
Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe, with a population of 43.8 million. With rolling plains and river valleys, the land is unequally divided by the 980-km course of the Dnieper river. It has a long coastline on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
Ukraine is rich in strategic minerals. It is in top position with Europe’s proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores; it has the second largest titanium ore reserves in Europe; it is second in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores and the second largest iron ore reserves in the world; and it has Europe’s second largest mercury ore reserves.
Agriculturally, Ukraine has Europe’s largest arable land area; it the world’s top exporter of sunflower and sunflower oil, second in the world in barley production; and the third largest producer of corn in the world.
Ukraine is an important industrialized country being the top European ammonia producer; having Europe’s second largest natural gas pipeline system and the third largest installed capacity of nuclear power plants in Europe.
Ukraine is a largely democratic nation of more than 40 million people, with a pro-Western president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who in 2019 won 73% of the vote in the election’s final round. Ukrainians want to live in a country that resembles the European nations to its west — and the U.S. — more than it resembles Russia.
In a bid to unshackle itself from Russia, Ukrainian has desired to be a member of the European Economic Union and NATO. Demography and geography, however, weigh against this. To the east of the Dnieper, large sections of the Russian minority are linked to Russia. Thus, Russia has the capability of bleeding Ukraine in an insurgency centred in the eastern Donbass region.
Political Milestones
Both Ukraine and Belarus were independent members of the UN. With 77.8% Ukrainians and 17.3% people of Russian origin, Ukraine was quick to declare autonomy on 16 July 1990, as well as independence on August 24, 1991, as the Soviet Union unravelled.
The present crisis must be viewed in the light of definitive protests of the Orange Revolution (2004-05) and the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv of 2014. The US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to oust the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. It was an invitation to a Russian military buildup along its frontier?
Why Ukraine’s Invasion is different?
There have been dozens of wars in the almost 80 years since World War II ended but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is different from almost all of them. The invasion involves one of the world’s largest militaries launching an unprovoked ground invasion of a neighboring country. The apparent goal is an expansion of regional dominance, either through annexation or the establishment of a puppet government.
Since World War II, such unprovoked aggression has been undertaken by the Soviets in Afghanistan (in the 1970s), Czechoslovakia (in the 1960s) and Hungary (in the 1950s) and Russia’s annexation of Crimea (2014). The U.S., for its part, sent troops into Vietnam (1961-73), the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Kuwait & Iraq (1991), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994), Kosovo (1999), Iraq (2003-2010), Libya (2011) and Syria (2011-).
Why Russia invaded Ukraine?
So, what is it about Ukraine that Russia was compelled to invade? The invasion is a spectacular gamble and a sign that the world might be changing.
Russia believes that liberal democracies are in decline, the U.S. and Europe are struggling to lift living standards for much of their populations, they are polarized by cultural conflicts between metropolitan areas and more rural ones and major political parties are weak. These problems have given Putin and his top aides confidence that “the American-led order is in deep crisis,” as Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in The Economist.
Gabuev explained: “A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China.”
Russia wants to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” Ukraine which Putin refuses to recognise as a “country” and firmly believes, as he asserted in his speech justifying the invasion, that Ukraine is “an inalienable part of our history, culture and spiritual space” for historical reasons. Putin’s claim in fact extends to all the “historic Russian lands” extending to Odessa on the Black Sea coast, the logic on which he had annexed Crimea in 2014.
Russia’s key demand is a halt to NATO expansion. Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked for guarantees that Ukraine will never be allowed to join the alliance, and demanded a withdrawal from eastern Europe. That, naturally, is a no-go for the allies. On the contrary, NATO wants to welcome Sweden and Finland, Ukraine and Georgia.
Why Ukraine Matters to NATO?
The US considers stability and security of Europe as vital to its interests.
Moscow wants to establish new rules of the international order or to weaken the current order. Its objectives include weakening NATO and the EU, which means that the United States has a vital interest in thwarting the Kremlin in Europe. Ukraine is at the very front of this war. If Ukraine cannot repel the Russians, they will go farther and try to gobble up additional European territory. Helping Ukraine defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty is the most economical way of defending our NATO.
During the Cold War, Western Germany served as another buffer to the rest of Europe, and it also allowed NATO states to help influence the country’s military development. Ukraine could very well serve a similar purpose that West Germany did.
Promise Belied
In the early 1990s, US President George HW Bush verbally promised not to expand NATO into former Soviet bloc countries. The promise was ditched and the Russians lost trust in the West. US leaders assert that Russia is a expansionist state, but they are blind to NATO expansion against Russian terrain since 1991.
The issue of Ukraine’s exclusion from NATO has been a long-standing obsession for Putin, who bitterly remembers the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s as “a decade of humiliation” in which Bill Clinton’s US “imposed its vision of order on Europe (including in Kosovo in 1999) while the Russians could do nothing but stand by and watch”, according to diplomatic relations expert James Goldgeier.
To address Russian anxieties, the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed in 1997, a political agreement explicitly stating that: “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.” The formation of the NATO-Russia Council followed in 2002.
Putin is nevertheless said to begrudge what he regards as the alliance’s gradual extension eastwards, which saw ex-Soviet satellites Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004.
He chooses to interpret the recruitment of these nations as the US breaking a promise allegedly made by its then-secretary of state James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev during a visit to Moscow in February 1990 to discuss German reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall. “There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” Baker is supposed to have pledged to Gorbachev, according to Russian officials, although the quote is heavily disputed and the latter denied the topic was ever discussed in an October 2014 interview with the Kommersant newspaper.
Europe’s Dependence on Russia
Europe imports approximately 40% of its gas from Russia. Russia also has the ability to disrupt global oil markets. It has already directly hit Americans.
A year after the “Orange Revolution” in end-2004 which led to the ouster of a pro-Kremlin leader, replacing him with one who sought closer ties with the West, Gazprom demanded Ukraine pay full market rates for its gas. Ukraine refused and Russia restricted the flow of gas through the pipelines. It was also later used as the basis for claims that Ukraine was an unreliable gas transit country, which helped build support for a new pipeline named Nord Stream that directly channeled gas from Russia to Germany. That pipeline opened up in 2011 and resulted in the annual loss to Ukraine of US$720 million in transit fees.
The U.S. had led efforts to thwart the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline running from Russia to Germany. While the US has succeded it is a disaster for Germany. Nord Stream had significantly increased German energy dependence on Russia, which by 2020 was supplying an estimated 50 to 75 per cent of its natural gas, up from 35 per cent in 2015. Natural gas is used not only to power industry but also for heating and to generate electricity in Germany. That pipeline grew to supply a third of all Russian gas exports to Europe. As a result, Russian gas exports to Europe reached a record level in 2021 – despite U.S. efforts to ramp up exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe.
Why Ukraine Matters
Ukraine is the second largest country by area in Europe by area and has a population of over 40 million – more than Poland.
Ukraine ranks:
• 1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores;
• 2nd in Europe and 10th in the world in titanium ore reserves;
• 2nd in the world in explored reserves of manganese ores;
• 2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons);
• 2nd in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves;
• 3rd in Europe (13th in the world) in shale gas reserves;
• 4th in the world by the total value of natural resources;
• 7th in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)
Ukraine is an important agricultural country:
• 1st in Europe in terms of arable land area;
• 3rd in the world by the area of black soil;
• 1st in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil;
• 2nd in the world in barley production;
• 3rd largest world producer and 4th largest exporter of corn;
• 4th largest producer of potatoes in the world;
• 5th largest rye producer in the world;
• 5th in the world in bee production (75,000 tons);
• 8th in the world in wheat exports;
Ukraine is an important industrialized country:
• 1st in Europe in ammonia production;
• Europe’s 2nd’s and world’s 4th largest natural gas pipeline system;
• 3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants;
• 3rd largest iron exporter in the world
• 4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world;
• 4th world’s largest manufacturer of rocket launchers;
