“Was there enough body language from Washington DC, Kyiv and every European capital to provide some trading space if he wanted to? Yes. But he didn’t seem to understand,” Mr. Kupchan said.
“I think back in the early 1990s, the American foreign policy establishment was too easy to dismiss Russian objections to NATO expansion,” he added. “However, when I step back from the events of the past two months, the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO seems to me more like a smokescreen than the crux of the matter,” for Mr. Putin.
Understand Russia’s Attack on Ukraine
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What is at the heart of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine a part his natural sphere of influence, and is unnerved by Ukraine’s proximity to the West and the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO or the European Union. Although Ukraine is not part of either, it receives financial and military assistance from the US and Europe.
Are these frictions just beginning now? Antagonism between the two countries has simmered since 2014, when Russian troops crossed into Ukraine after an uprising in Ukraine replaced a Russian-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimea and inspired separatist movement in the east. A ceasefire was signed in 2015but fighting continued.
How did Ukraine react? February 23, Ukraine declared a state of emergency for 30 days. when cyberattacks took out state institutions. After the attacks began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky martial law declared. The foreign minister called the attacks a “full-scale invasion” and called on the world to “stop Putin.”
Andrew S. Weiss, head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia made impossible demands from the start, but the illusion of diplomacy sparked a political debate in the West that benefited Mr. Putin. Putin’s goals According to him, Moscow “quite deftly focused on the age-old complaints about Ukraine’s theoretical right to NATO membership, knowing full well that this issue worries many in the West.”
The United States is engaged in “an outdated and predictable academic debate with itself about whether the policies of past administrations have been unnecessarily provocative towards the Kremlin,” Mr. Weiss said. The discussion, he added, has played into the hands of “isolationists like former President Trump who argue that alliances with the US are an unnecessary burden and that it is better for Americans to defend the border with Mexico.”
“In Europe, where anti-Americanism and Ukraine fatigue are barely visible, the Kremlin’s Potemkin diplomatic gambit has also paid off,” Mr. Weiss said.
Cory Shake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said it’s hard to know if Mr. Putin ever took diplomacy seriously. But she said he may have expected extreme invasion pressure to split the West and win him some concessions. “Having underestimated the unity of the West, he may have felt trapped and could not back down without demonstrating anything,” she said.
Ms Shaik said Mr Putin may have been appalled by the quality of the Biden administration’s intelligence, including access to his war plans, “and pulled the trigger in rage.”