NATO-RUSSIA relations and Ukraine war after the cold war
Russia and NATO have not gotten along well since Ukraine asked for NATO membership. This has led to escalation of tensions between the two countries and on February 24, Russian troops began attacking Ukraine and made the world worried about a possible outbreak of World War III.
So far, impact from this crisis has adversely affected the people caught in the conflict areas such as loss of innocent life, their homes, and their families. Infrastructure has been destroyed. Everything is ruined. Ukrainian people are desperate, displaced and have become refugees fleeing from their hometown.
Why does this calamity occur? Why does Putin decide to invade Ukraine, ignoring the threat by Western sanctions, including the United States?
The tension between Russian and Ukraine
Russia was formerly called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which was formed in 1922, and collapsed in late 1991. They were replaced by 15 independent nations, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.
After Ukraine declared independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 5, 1994, Ukraine and Russia signed a Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances with three other signatories: Russia, United States and England. Through this memorandum, Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet era and transferred them to Russia in exchange for Russia, the United States and Britain’s pledge to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Since Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the two countries have never had conflict with each other. Until 2008, Ukraine, along with Georgia, applied for The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership at the April 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania and NATO welcomed the desire of Ukraine and Georgia to be members. In the face of strong opposition from Russia, France and Germany, NATO refused to launch a Membership Action Plan to accept Ukraine and Georgia as its members but did not shut it down and also allowed Ukraine to join later.
Following Ukraine’s request for NATO membership, tensions between Russia and Ukraine escalated from day to day and until December 2021, Russia deployed more troops near the Ukrainian border; the West countries said it was aimed at invading Ukraine, but Vladimir Putin denied it. He said Russia does not have any intention of invading Ukraine. But at the same time, he imposed certain conditions on the United States and its NATO allies, including demanding that NATO guarantee that Ukraine would not join and that NATO withdraw all military forces stationed in the Eastern Europe country, which joined NATO after 1997.
Joe Biden, President of United States warned that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies would impose the most severe sanctions on Russia, but at the same time the president also announced that the United States would not dispatch troops to help Ukraine, because that country is not a NATO member. From December 2021 to February 2022, a number of diplomatic efforts were made to avoid the war in Ukraine.
These diplomatic efforts had not yielded positive results. Biden and his allies in the NATO alliance refused to change their “Open door policy,” leaving it up to each country to decide whether to join NATO.
This means Ukraine itself has the right to decide whether or not to join NATO, while NATO has the right to decide whether to accept it as a member or not, depending on the terms of its membership, but they cannot close the doors for Ukraine in advance.
After Putin recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states on February 21, on February 24, Russian troops began attacking Ukraine.
Why does Putin not want Ukraine to join NATO?
Ukraine’s potential NATO membership has been a centre point of the war with Russia. Vladimir Putin vehemently opposed Ukraine joining the Western alliance, seeing it as a threat to Russia’s borders.
Although Ukraine has the support of all 30 NATO members against Russia’s invasion, it faces roadblocks in becoming a member.
In the past, NATO is a legacy left over from the Cold War after the end of the World War II and exists till today. It was formed on April 4, 1949 and came into force in 1951.
The fact that NATO continues to expand closer to Russian territory makes Russia even more concerned. This is something that Putin can’t accept, he said, it is a threat to Russia’s security. Allowing Ukraine to become a member of NATO would be a major danger for Russia.
Since the end of the Cold War II, Western Countries have promised but have not fulfilled their commitments which made it hard for Putin to accept. For example, in February 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev met with US Secretary of State James Baker to discuss about the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. To reassure President Gorbachev of the future geopolitical consequences, US Secretary of State James Baker declared: “Do not move an inch to East, NATO will not move an inch to East after German reunification.” The chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Helmut Kohl, also asserted that “NATO would not normally extend to East Germany.” In 1991, when Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov talked about NATO membership in Eastern Europe, the British prime minister stated, “This is not possible.”
This proves that it is the only way to reaffirm Russia’s commitment to NATO and West Countries that, Russia does not trust with what they have been promised. So Russia does not allow NATO’s threat to its borders.
In the world, no one wants war, because it destroys everything. Russia-Ukraine crisis became a war between European Union and Russia, which from the beginning it was between two countries: Russian and Ukraine. This is because countries in Europe and some countries in Asia have promised to dispatch the people, militaries, providing military assistance, weapons, as well as fighter pilots to help Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia should resume negotiations to seek a solution to end the war as soon as possible. If first, second, third round of negotiation between the two delegations from Kiev and Moscow have produced no results as expected yet, they should continue to talk until a solution is found.
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