could have increased the strength and cohesiveness of these encircling nations to bottle up Russia and the former Soviet republics as well, and Russia would have been helpless to stop the process.
Yet while the United States had plans to do exactly this, it did not move quickly enough. Only eastern Europe and the Baltic states were absorbed into NATO, a significant strategic shift that becomes more significant when you consider this fact: when the Soviet Union still controlled East Germany, the distance between NATO forces and St. Petersburg was about a thousand miles, but after the Baltics were admitted into NATO, the distance was about one hundred miles. This sense of being encircled, diminished, and encroached upon shapes Russian behavior going forward.
RUSSIAN FEARS
With NATO on its doorstep, the Russians understandably became alarmed. From their point of view, this alliance was first and foremost military, and however kindly its disposition might be at the moment, its future intentions were unpredictable. The Russians knew all too well how easily moods can swing, recalling painfully how Germany had gone from being a chaotic, poor, and barely armed country in 1932 to becoming the dominant military force in Europe six years later. Russia saw no reason for the West to expand NATO unless sooner or later the West wanted NATO to be in a position to strike. After all, the Russians argued, they were certainly not about to invade Europe.
There were those in NATO, particularly the Americans and the former satellites of the Soviet Union, who wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to expand for strategic reasons. But others, particularly the Europeans, had started thinking of NATO in a different way. Rather than seeing NATO as a military alliance focused on war, they saw it as a regional United Nations, designed to incorporate friendly, liberal democracies into an organization whose primary function was to maintain stability.
The inclusion of the Baltics was the high-water mark of NATO expansion, after which events began to intervene. Vladimir Putin’s rise to power created a very different Russia from the one that had existed under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the one institution that had never stopped functioning was the intelligence services. Having held Russia and its empire together for generations, they operated through the 1990s almost as an autonomous state or crime organization. Putin had been trained in the KGB, and as a result he saw the world geopolitically rather than ideologically. In his mind, a strong state was essential to Russian stability, so from the moment he took power in 2000, he started the process of restoring Russian muscle.
For more than a century, Russia had been trying to become an industrial power that could compete with the West. Seeing that Russia could never catch up, Putin shifted the nation’s economic strategy to focus on developing and exporting natural resources such as metals, grain, and particularly energy. The strategy was brilliant in that it created an economy that Russia could sustain and that would sustain Russia. It strengthened the Russian state by making Gazprom an arm of the Russian government with a monopoly on natural gas. And it created European dependence on Russian energy, thus making it less likely that the Europeans—particularly the Germans—would seek or support confrontation.
The turning point in relations between the United States and Russia came in 2004, when events in Ukraine convinced the Russians that the U.S. intended to destroy or at least tightly control them. A large nation, Ukraine covers the entire southwestern frontier of Russia, and from the Russian point of view, it is the key to Russian national security.
The Russian territory lying between Ukraine and Kazakhstan is only three hundred miles wide, and all of Russia’s influence in the Caucasus—along with a good deal of the oil in the pipelines to the south—flows through this gap. At the center of the gap is Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. During World War II, the Soviets sacrificed one million lives in the battle to keep that gap from being closed by the Germans.
The initial winner of the Ukrainian election in 2004, President Viktor Yanukovich, was accused of widespread electoral fraud, of which he was no doubt guilty, and demonstrations took place to demand that the election be annulled, that Yanukovich step down, and that new elections be held. This uproar, known as the Orange Revolution, was seen by Moscow as a pro-Western, anti-Russian uprising designed to take Ukraine into NATO. The Russians also charged that rather than being a popular uprising, it was a carefully orchestrated coup, sponsored by the CIA and the British MI6. According to the Russians, Western nongovernmental organizations and consulting groups had flooded Ukraine to stage the demonstrations, unseat a pro-Russian government, and directly threaten Russian national security.
Certainly the Americans and the British had supported these NGOs, and the consultants who were now managing the campaigns of some of the pro-Western candidates in Ukraine had formerly managed elections in the United States. Western money from multiple sources clearly was going into the country, but from the American point of view, there was nothing covert or menacing in any of this. The United States was simply doing what it had done since the fall of the Berlin Wall: working with democratic groups to build democracies.
This is where the United States and Russia profoundly parted company. Ukraine was divided between pro- Russian and anti-Russian factions, but the Americans merely saw themselves as supporting democrats. That the factions seen as democratic by the Americans were also the ones that were anti-Russian was, for the Americans, incidental.
For the Russians, it was not incidental. They had vivid memories of the containment policy the United States had long practiced vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, only now the container appeared smaller, tighter, and far more dangerous. They saw U.S. actions as a deliberate attempt to make Russia indefensible and as an encroachment on vital Russian interests in the Caucasus, a region in which the United States already had a bilateral agreement with Georgia.
Containment was indeed the American strategy, of course, however benignly it was expressed. The fundamental American interest is always the balance of power, and having refrained from trying to destroy the Russian Federation in the 1990s, the United States moved to create a regional balance in 2004, with Ukraine as its foundation and with the clear intent to include most of the former Soviet Union countries in this counterweight to Russian power.
Russian fears were compounded when they saw what the United States was doing in Central Asia. Even so, when the United States decided in the wake of September 11 to bring down the Taliban government in Afghanistan quickly, the Russians cooperated in two ways. First, they provided access to the Northern Alliance, a pro-Russian faction going back to the Russian occupation and the civil war that followed it. Second, Russia used its influence to obtain air and ground bases in the three countries bordering Afghanistan—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—from which the United States could support its invasion forces. Russia also granted flight privileges over its territory, which was extremely useful for travel from the West Coast or Europe.
It was Russia’s understanding that these bases in the bordering countries were temporary, but after three years, the Americans showed no signs of leaving anytime soon. In the interim the invasion of Iraq had taken place, over Russian objections, and the United States was now bogged down in what was clearly a long-term occupation. It was also heavily involved in Ukraine and Georgia and was building a major presence in Central Asia. Whereas these actions might not seem so harmful to Moscow’s interests when viewed individually, taken together they looked like a concerted effort to strangle Russia.
In particular, the U.S. presence in Georgia could be seen only as a deliberate provocation, because Georgia bordered on the Russian region of Chechnya. The Russians feared that if Chechnya seceded from the Russian Federation, the entire structure would disintegrate as others followed its lead. Chechnya is also located on the extreme northern slope of the Caucasus, and Russian power had already retreated hundreds of miles from its original frontiers deep in those mountains. If the Russians retreated any farther, they would be out of the Caucasus entirely, on flat ground that is hard to defend. Moreover, a significant oil pipeline went through Grozny, the Chechnyan capital, and its loss (although it is currently inoperative due to Chechnyan sabotage) would have a significant impact on the Russian energy export strategy.
Going back to the 1990s, the Russians believed that the Georgians were permitting a flow of weapons into Chechnya through what was called the Pankisi Gorge. They also believed that the United States, which had Special
