The Russo-Ukraine War and NATO

By Professor Emeritus Graeme Gill

This article was first published here by the Australian Institute of International Affairs on 6 September 2024 under a Creative Commons License. 

The persistent debate about NATO’s role in the Ukraine conflict centres on Russia’s longstanding objection to the alliance’s expansion, which Moscow views as a threat. This historical stance is a crucial part of understanding the dynamics of the ongoing conflict, as both sides acknowledge the centrality of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership in influencing the invasion and shaping the geopolitical landscape.  

Australian Outlook has recently published a number of pieces critical of the idea that the threat of NATO expansion was responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These pieces were prompted by an earlier article by Tom Switzer. The origins of the conflict clearly remain an issue of major debate. But in this debate, those who dispute the importance of NATO expansion rarely interrogate the evidence relating to the fear of Ukraine joining NATO. They usually simply reject the idea out of hand and assert a culturalist explanation (Russians are inherently expansionist) or say it was all due to Vladimir Putin who has a hatred of Ukrainians and always had a desire to eliminate the Ukrainian state. This is unsatisfactory. Those who dispute that NATO had any part in the Russian decision to invade need to address a number of questions:

Why, on the eve of the invasion, did Putin propose to the NATO powers a security arrangement that, inter alia, involved Ukrainian neutrality (ie. not becoming a member of NATO)? This was presented as an explicit condition for not invading and was immediately rebuffed by NATO without any discussion or negotiation.

Why, in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in March-April 2022, was there provisional agreement that Ukraine would not join NATO but would have its security underpinned by broad security guarantees? This was clearly the demand of the Russian side and was initially accepted by the Ukrainian side, but the agreement fell over when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western supporters came to the conclusion in the wake of the Russian retreat from Kyiv, and the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha, that Russia could be defeated militarily and therefore there was no need for an agreement.

Why has Ukrainian neutrality been a feature of all Russian statements since the war began regarding the conditions for peace?

Why did the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, say to European legislators in September 2023 that Putin went to war to prevent NATO expansion into Ukraine but instead he got a strengthening and expansion of the alliance through the adherence of Sweden and Finland?

Why, at almost every opportunity when jointly discussing the conflict, do President Zelensky and NATO leaders affirm that Ukraine will become a member of NATO if this was not important?

All of these suggest that all sides see Ukrainian membership of NATO as relevant to the invasion. Within the context of over three decades of Russian opposition to the expansion of NATO (moderated at times by a seemingly more benign approach, but this occurred when Moscow was under the mistaken impression that NATO might develop into a broader continental security arrangement), and the string of Putin speeches in 2021 in which he argued that the West was actively pressing on Russia’s borders, the Russian position regarding Ukrainian neutrality articulated at the time of the war is consistent with its long-standing position.

Critics of this view rarely address the above questions, usually dismissing the suggestion out of hand. When they do address this issue, they usually adopt one or more of three lines of argument.

First, they repeat the NATO mantra that NATO is a defensive alliance and therefore is not hostile to Russia. However, an alliance is, by its nature, neither offensive nor defensive; it can adopt a defensive or offensive posture, just as its weapons may be used offensively or defensively. NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, intervention leading to regime change in Libya in 2011 (intervention was UN approved, regime change was not), and involvement in Afghanistan from 2003-21 are all difficult to square with a purely defensive alliance. And if the use of NATO troops outside its own borders, as in these cases, can be classed as defensive, why could not the use of force with regard to Russia be similarly classed as defensive? This is linked to the second point.

Second, Russia should not fear an attack from NATO because the alliance would never attack it. This is an easy argument to make by someone sitting in a Western Think Tank, but with NATO missiles recently placed near the Russian border in Poland and in Romania, and with NATO weapons currently killing Russians, people sitting in Moscow are likely to be less sanguine.

Third, they argue that the Russian demands for Ukrainian neutrality listed above were insincere and were not serious. Of course, it is true that we do not know how serious they were because they were never followed up. However we do know with regard to the March-April 2022 negotiations that the Ukrainians (at the time), the Turks (who hosted the talks), NATO, the Europeans, and the Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett (who brokered the talks) all seem to have believed that Putin genuinely wanted a resolution to the war and that the prohibition on NATO expansion was central to this.

So, we have both sides saying that NATO expansion was a direct cause of the war, and the prevention of such expansion being presented as a means of stopping the war in the discussions that took place around its beginning, yet people still say it was irrelevant. When the principal actors say it was important and proximate developments point in the same direction, it is hard to fathom how it can be argued that this had no role. The geopolitical argument may not explain all aspects of the Russian invasion, but it must be a central component of that explanation. Those who say it had no role need to explain why it was such a prominent feature in events surrounding the war’s outbreak and why major principals in the conflict agree that it was central.

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and a long-time student of Soviet and Russian history and politics. He is the author of 25 books on these subjects.