By Park Jung-won
The current confrontation between Russia and the West is causing the most dangerous European security crisis since the Cold War era. However, the root causes of this conflict are the distorted perception of history and domestic political calculations of Russian President Vladimir Putin. At first glance, those who are unaware of the complex nature of this conflict might think that Russia is the innocent victim of serious security threats coming from the West triggered by greedy geopolitical ambitions.
During his four-hour year-end press conference on Dec. 23, 2021, Putin claimed the West, and NATO in particular, have reneged on promises made in the 1990s not to expand eastward. However, his terse statements were in many instances inaccurate and contained exaggerated historical facts. Whether NATO and the West made such a promise in the past is a much-debated issue among historians.
In February 1990, James Baker, secretary of state under the administration of U.S. President George Bush, said in a meeting in Moscow with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if Germany were reunified, it would be better to put it under NATO's political and military structure. Gorbachev did not explicitly object. This was because NATO's eastward enlargement was not a major issue at the time.
NATO's Bucharest Summit Declaration in 2008 mentioned that Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO in the future, yet even then this was not a prominent part of the NATO agenda. For instance, the citizens of Ukraine at that time were ambivalent and hesitant about such a possibility. As NATO is essentially a defense-oriented intergovernmental military alliance, whether a particular country pursues membership is the choice of that country, irrespective of whether it meets NATO's membership qualifications.
A more fundamental question for properly understanding the current crisis should be why countries such as Ukraine, which had been part of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, might want to join NATO. An obvious reason is because of its fear of Russian aggression under Putin. Ukraine witnessed that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, in which Ukraine's territorial integrity and political independence were guaranteed, was only a useless piece of paper.
Most of all, the devastating impact of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, a clear violation of international law, was enormous. Putin's regime claimed that the residents living in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea exercised their right to self-determination, but this claim is absolutely false under contemporary international legal standards.
For a particular region to secede from its existing territorial state to become an independent sovereign state in the context of self-determination of its people, it is only permissible to do so in the very extreme situation in which gross violations of human rights occur to the extent of genocide and ethnic cleansing targeted at particular ethnic minority groups. There were no such evidentiary grounds in Crimea. In other words, the situation in Crimea under Ukraine in 2014 was totally different from that of Kosovo under Serbia in 2008.
Putin has enjoyed invoking the concept of a "Russian World" ― the idea that Russian civilization extends to everywhere that ethnic Russians reside ― but only anti-democratic dictatorial countries such as Kazakhstan and Belarus have responded to it. He says Russians and Ukrainians are one people ― a single whole. However, this is a ridiculous oversimplification.
When Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the majority of its ethnic Russian population supported its newly gained autonomy. In contrast to Putin's wishful thinking, since the end of the Cold War many former Soviet states and satellites have been evolving into democracies, even if they cannot be considered model democracies on every measure.
They have been generally influenced by the principles of the rule of law, democracy and human rights, interacting with the Council of Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Many ethnic Russian minority groups live in those countries as a result of historic Soviet industrialization and emigration policies, yet most of them consider themselves to be citizens of their states of residence rather than Russians (a view which has been boosted by the implementation of ethnic minority protection policies).
It is no coincidence that the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which suffered harshly under Soviet rule, joined NATO swiftly in 2004 and have actively defended Ukraine's position in the current Russia-West/NATO crisis.
The crux of the problem is thus the contradictory nature of Putin's regime in terms of its domestic and external ramifications. Recently, Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Memorial International, the country's best-known human-rights group, be shut down, marking the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on human rights activists, independent media and opposition supporters.
The group had recorded and denounced brutal human rights abuses during the Stalin era. The anti-historical and despotic character of Putin's regime will provoke external reactions that will eventually affect the Russian people more than anyone else, and will likely act as a catalyst to hasten the regime's downfall.
As the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant once argued, the real threat to regional peace has always come from countries under tyranny and dictatorship. What Putin fears is not NATO and the West, but rather former Soviet states and satellites developing into more advanced democracies. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's warning in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" that Ukraine is a prerequisite for Russia's revival, and that it must be stopped, resonates even more clearly today.
Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a professor of international law at Dankook University.
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During his four-hour year-end press conference on Dec. 23, 2021, Putin claimed the West, and NATO in particular, have reneged on promises made in the 1990s not to expand eastward. However, his terse statements were in many instances inaccurate and contained exaggerated historical facts. Whether NATO and the West made such a promise in the past is a much-debated issue among historians.
In February 1990, James Baker, secretary of state under the administration of U.S. President George Bush, said in a meeting in Moscow with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if Germany were reunified, it would be better to put it under NATO's political and military structure. Gorbachev did not explicitly object. This was because NATO's eastward enlargement was not a major issue at the time.
NATO's Bucharest Summit Declaration in 2008 mentioned that Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO in the future, yet even then this was not a prominent part of the NATO agenda. For instance, the citizens of Ukraine at that time were ambivalent and hesitant about such a possibility. As NATO is essentially a defense-oriented intergovernmental military alliance, whether a particular country pursues membership is the choice of that country, irrespective of whether it meets NATO's membership qualifications.
A more fundamental question for properly understanding the current crisis should be why countries such as Ukraine, which had been part of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, might want to join NATO. An obvious reason is because of its fear of Russian aggression under Putin. Ukraine witnessed that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, in which Ukraine's territorial integrity and political independence were guaranteed, was only a useless piece of paper.
Most of all, the devastating impact of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, a clear violation of international law, was enormous. Putin's regime claimed that the residents living in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea exercised their right to self-determination, but this claim is absolutely false under contemporary international legal standards.
For a particular region to secede from its existing territorial state to become an independent sovereign state in the context of self-determination of its people, it is only permissible to do so in the very extreme situation in which gross violations of human rights occur to the extent of genocide and ethnic cleansing targeted at particular ethnic minority groups. There were no such evidentiary grounds in Crimea. In other words, the situation in Crimea under Ukraine in 2014 was totally different from that of Kosovo under Serbia in 2008.
Putin has enjoyed invoking the concept of a "Russian World" ― the idea that Russian civilization extends to everywhere that ethnic Russians reside ― but only anti-democratic dictatorial countries such as Kazakhstan and Belarus have responded to it. He says Russians and Ukrainians are one people ― a single whole. However, this is a ridiculous oversimplification.
When Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the majority of its ethnic Russian population supported its newly gained autonomy. In contrast to Putin's wishful thinking, since the end of the Cold War many former Soviet states and satellites have been evolving into democracies, even if they cannot be considered model democracies on every measure.
They have been generally influenced by the principles of the rule of law, democracy and human rights, interacting with the Council of Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Many ethnic Russian minority groups live in those countries as a result of historic Soviet industrialization and emigration policies, yet most of them consider themselves to be citizens of their states of residence rather than Russians (a view which has been boosted by the implementation of ethnic minority protection policies).
It is no coincidence that the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which suffered harshly under Soviet rule, joined NATO swiftly in 2004 and have actively defended Ukraine's position in the current Russia-West/NATO crisis.
The crux of the problem is thus the contradictory nature of Putin's regime in terms of its domestic and external ramifications. Recently, Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Memorial International, the country's best-known human-rights group, be shut down, marking the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on human rights activists, independent media and opposition supporters.
The group had recorded and denounced brutal human rights abuses during the Stalin era. The anti-historical and despotic character of Putin's regime will provoke external reactions that will eventually affect the Russian people more than anyone else, and will likely act as a catalyst to hasten the regime's downfall.
As the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant once argued, the real threat to regional peace has always come from countries under tyranny and dictatorship. What Putin fears is not NATO and the West, but rather former Soviet states and satellites developing into more advanced democracies. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's warning in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" that Ukraine is a prerequisite for Russia's revival, and that it must be stopped, resonates even more clearly today.
Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a professor of international law at Dankook University.
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