Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War, Part 5 of 5: Was NATO membership for Ukraine really the motivation for their invasion?

In her own view of the motivations behind Russia’s foreign policy toward Ukraine, McGlynn seems to split the difference between the realist notion that Russian leaders were making some kind of rational calculation about how eastward expansion of NATO to Ukraine endangered their security, and the preferred Western hawkish view that Russia is just inherently expansive and that’s just how they are.

Part of how she does this is by making the argument that:

[I]f NATO membership was the immediate threat, then Russia behaved entirely counterintuitively, since its occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 had put an effective stop to any formal entry of Ukraine into NATO because it would have required the politically unacceptable act of Kyiv giving up its claim to these territories.

That’s technically true. Under the current practice of NATO, signing Ukraine on as a full NATO member would require the NATO partners to defend Ukrainian territory including Russian-held territory in the Donbas and Crimea. Accepting Ukraine as a NATO member would in that case be equivalent to the US declaring war on Russia. So if those rules of the game held, Russian occupation of any part of Ukrainian territory would have eliminated the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO.

But there are other considerations. Large-scale US military aid to Ukraine began during the Trump Administration with Democratic support. And the US and other NATO countries were actively cooperating with Ukraine on military preparations. So it was not unreasonable for Russian strategists to view that as Ukraine becoming a de facto member of NATO. After all, NATO famously announced in 2008 that both Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members at some unspecified time in the future.

And NATO could also change the rules by admitting Ukraine with the stipulation that it would not require the other allies to militarily contest Russian-occupied areas but rather draw the defensive line at the Ukrainian-hold areas at the moment of entry. The status of West Germany and East Germany prior to unification in 1990 can’t really be easily compared to that hypothetical Ukraine scenario because the final status of those two countries still depended on the approval of the wartime Allies. But West Germany did become a NATO member. But that decision was controversial, not least because defining West Germany as the boundaries that NATO would defend implied a permanent status for those borders, though the West German government always considered national unification as a goal.

McGlynn suggests that Russia’s real concern is “not about NATO so much as what NATO represents, even civilisationally, [which] explains why Russia meekly accepted Sweden and Finland joining NATO.” And it’s true that Russia hasn't shown such alarm about Finland’s NATO membership or the earlier addition of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to NATO.

But she’s not so much splitting the difference as emphasizing that it’s not NATO expansion as such that disturbs the Russian leadership as it is the US and NATO challenging its influence in particular countries it considers high priority and the broader inclination to go to war in various places. She recalls one of the many wars that American voters tend to forget, but Russian strategists definitely remember, the Kosovo War of 1998-99 in which NATO went to war against Yugoslavia/Serbia to support the secessionist aims of Kosovo province:

The West's support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, whom they had previously classified as terrorists, at least until they were fighting against Yugoslav forces, led even democratically minded Russian opposition MPs to vehemently criticize Western actions in the Balkans. This sentiment grew stronger after NATO'·s bombing campaign against rump Yugoslavia in 1999, which forced Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate. The resulting Kosovar autonomy led many Serb civilians to flee the province and facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Although Russia contributed to an international effort to send peacekeepers to Kosovo, they openly supported the Yugoslav forces there and even stormed Pristina airport, preventing NATO planes from landing. Tactically pointless, this act was rich in symbolism, conveying both Russia's disagreement with NATO policy and a renewed desire to assert its interests. (p. 120)

And she describes how Russian leaders and pro-government media have used this as a lesson for the public on the claimed perfidy of the West over Ukraine:

Before 2022, there were four main ways in which Russian media and politicians told the story of the Yugoslav wars: Yugoslavia as the first colour revolution; Western exploitation of Russian weakness; the need for multipolarity to prevent Western dominance; and Western disregard for international law. During the Revolution of Dignity in 2013/2014, Russian elites invoked the wars in Yugoslavia as a precursor to State Department-backed colour revolutions. By contrast, in response to Western criticism of the annexation of Crimea, Russian politicians and media would bring up Western disregard for international law when they bombed Belgrade and/or recognised Kosovo. 7 As ever, Russia's leaders shifted their perspectives on the past to meet the political demands of the present. (p. 121)

She notes that in the lead-up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian commentary reflected these themes from the Kosovo War but also emphasized two further aspects: attacks on civilians and what she calls the “Russia becomes the West” theme.

In Russia's 2022 retellings of the Yugoslav wars, it was demonstrating (to itself most of all) not only a return to great power status, which it had assured after its intervention in Syria, but an explicit undoing of the post-Cold War security architecture, crossing the threshold into a different world order, rather than simply straining or revising the current rules. This mirroring could be seen in the justification for Russian ground forces' invasion of Donbas to 'avert the risk of genocide'. The message [to the West] was: Russia is back. You defined the order before but now we do. You thought you were exceptional but you weren't – we are. [my emphasis] (p. 123)

In this connections, she mentions a quirky theme that appears in Russian political discussion, the particular role of the “Anglo-Saxons,” i.e., Britain. She quotes one of her interlocutors, Fedor Lukyanov, editor of the academic journal Russia in Global Affairs and “a foreign-policy analyst close to the Kremlin,” who quipped, “when Russia goes, so will the last country who still thinks Britain is a major power.” She also notes, “There is a common view among [Russian] nationalists and Eurasianists that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is a British agent.”

McGlynn’s book provides a very helpful look at the various ways in which the Russian people themselves are processing the Ukraine War and the various kinds of historical and ideological narratives that are characteristic of their information environment. 

[Lightly edited for clarity]