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Context

Vladimir Putin, who annexed Crimea in 2014 has now mobilised some 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border.

How insecurity and history plays role in Russia’s actions

• Russia, the world’s largest country by land mass, lacks natural borders except the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Pacific in the far east.
• Its vast land borders stretch from northern Europe to Central and north east Asia.
• The country’s heartland that runs from St. Petersburg through Moscow to the Volga region lies on plains and is vulnerable to attacks.
• In the last two centuries, Russia saw two devastating invasions from the west — the 1812 attack by Napoleonic France and the 1941 attack by Nazi Germany. 
• After the Second World War, Russia re-established its control over the rim land in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which it hoped would protect its heartland.
• But the disintegration of the Soviet Union threw its security calculations into disarray, deepening its historical insecurity.

NATO’s expansion after disintegration of the Soviet Union

• When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia lost over three million square kilometres of sovereign territory.
•  In the last months of the Soviet Union, the West promised that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not “expand an inch to the east”.
• The United States and the United Kingdom repeated the pledge after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• But despite the promises, NATO continued expansion.
• In March 1999, in the first enlargement since the end of the Cold War, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (all were members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact) joined NATO.
• Five years later, seven more countries — including the three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which share borders with Russia — were taken into the alliance.
• Russia felt threatened but was not able to respond.
• But in 2008, when the U.S. promised membership to Georgia and Ukraine in the Bucharest summit, Russia, which was coming out of the post-Soviet retreat, responded forcefully.

How Russia see NATO expansion as threat to its dominance on Black Sea

• Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, all Black Sea basin countries, are NATO members.
• Ukraine and Georgia are the other countries that share the Black Sea coast, besides Russia.
• Russia was already feeling squeezed on the Black Sea front, its gateway to the Mediterranean Sea.
• If Ukraine and Georgia also join NATO, Russia fears that its dominance over the Black Sea would come to an end.
• So, in 2008, Mr. Putin sent troops to Georgia over the separatist conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
• In 2014, when the Kremlin-friendly regime of Ukraine was toppled by pro-western protesters, he moved to annex the Crimean peninsula, expanding Russia’s Black Sea coast, thereby protecting its fleet based in Sevastopol in Crimea.

Restoring the rim land

• In recent years, Mr. Putin has tried to turn every crisis in the former Soviet region into a geopolitical opportunity.
• South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the self-proclaimed republics that broke away from Georgia, are controlled by Russia-backed forces.
•  In 2020, when protests erupted in Belarus after a controversial presidential election, Mr. Putin sent assistance to the country to restore order.
• In the same year, Russia sent thousands of “peacekeepers” to end the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
• Earlier this year, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, with Mr. Putin’s backing, manufactured a migrant crisis on the Polish border of the European Union.
• This month, when violent unrest broke out in Kazakhstan, the largest and wealthiest country in Central Asia, its leader turned to Russia for help.

How do geopolitical circumstances favour Russia?

• The U.S.’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the Central Asian republics deeper in the Russian embrace.
• Europe is very much dependent on Russian gas, which limits its response.
• For years, the West, the winner of the Cold War, discounted Mr. Putin.
• Having failed to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, NATO is unlikely to pick a war with Russia over Ukraine.

Conclusion

By destabilising Georgia and Ukraine and re-establishing Russia’s hold in Belarus, Caucasus and Central Asia, Moscow has effectively stalled NATO’s further expansion into its backyard.

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