As tensions escalate in Ukraine, there is an intense debate on reading President Putin's mind. We can set aside the Russian claim that they are responding to Ukrainian intentions to invade the eastern Donbas region controlled by Russian backed separatists or Ukrainian plans to conduct an ethnic genocide on Russians in the country.
Instead, the questions are whether Putin is a global expansionist who wants to exercise control over the entire Europe, or is he trying to reassert Russian supremacy in its Slavic (or at least Eastern Slavic) near-abroad? I am inclined to think it's the latter. While it's cold comfort that it's only the latter, it should be an important consideration while responding to Russian actions.
The likes of John Mearsheimer and even the late George Keenan claimed that it's the latter. What Mearsheimer wrote in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea is just as relevant now,
The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004— were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
They point to the consistent misreading in the west of the intentions of Soviet era leaders starting from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. They have therefore argued that the NATO expansion deep into Eastern Europe in the nineties was a fatal mistake. It convinced the Russians about the intention of the West to encircle and contain Russia. This expansion was probably inevitable given the capture of the US foreign policy establishment by the Cold War generation, who have long believed that the Russians had aspirations of global conquest. The Times has an article which captures many of the elements of this line of thinking,
Russian foreign policy experts generally see the standoff over Ukraine as the latest stage in Mr. Putin’s years long effort to compel the West to accept what he sees as fundamental Russian security concerns. In the 1990s, that thinking goes, the West forced a new European order upon a weak Russia that disregarded its historical need for a geopolitical buffer zone to its west. And now that Russia is stronger, these experts say, it would be reasonable for any Kremlin leader to try to redraw that map... Since Mr. Putin’s past attempts to negotiate with the West over arms control and NATO expansion failed, they say, the Kremlin chose to raise the stakes to a point at which its interests became impossible to ignore.
The Eastern European countries may have reasons to be genuinely concerned with what are President Putin's intentions. The FT has an interview of the Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas where she captures these concerns,
That memory of the terror and deprivations of Soviet rule, and an intense desire never to return to those days, explains why Estonia has consistently warned the west about the dangers of a revanchist Russia, especially after Putin’s first aggression in Georgia in 2008 and even more so after its 2014 annexation of Crimea... one of the dividing lines between western and eastern Europe is their differing views of the second world war. In the west, Nazi Germany tends to be seen as the sole aggressor. But in the east, there are long memories too of the crimes and abuses by the Soviet Union... Wages have grown 45-fold, pensions 60-fold, and its income per capita, which was once 40 per cent of the EU average, is now 86 per cent and bigger than that of Greece, Portugal or Poland... She underscores: “Our development has been quite rapid, but for me it’s very important to understand that it’s not for granted. We could lose it all again.”
FT has an article that explains the concerns among the three Baltic republics.
Are Putin's ambitions confined to the Eastern Slavic neighbourhood or the entire Slavic region? Or is there a belief that the Eastern Slavic areas should be part of Russia and the rest a strategic buffer to the west? Given that the USSR has dissolved and the Slavic region is now full of independent countries, a reality that cannot be reversed, what can be done to assuage Russian fears? Or can they be assuaged at all? What should be the western strategy to address these scenarios?
As the crisis deepens, the Americans have joined the Russians on a high-stakes public brinkmanship. Putin has proved adept at mounting pressure on neighbours and getting them to back down and to tow the Russian line. In realisation, the Americans have sought to put pressure on the Russians through an unprecedented information disclosure campaign. President Biden has repeatedly raised the ante by releasing information to back claims that a Russian invasion is imminent. The Americans clearly don't want to be caught on the backfoot as happened with the Russian invasions of Crimea in 2014 and Syria in 2015. However, on the flip side, this approach also reduces the space available for diplomacy and negotiations.
But an invasion of Ukraine could end up achieving the exact opposite of what Putin is hoping in so far as it would consolidate the now fragmented opposition in the West against Russia. It would also increase the pressure on NATO to strengthen its forces deployment along the Eastern frontier. The containment could end up tightening.
The only big winner here is China. On the one hand, the crisis has provided a convenient digression for the US policy establishment away from the more important task of managing the emergence of China. On the other, it has driven Russia deeply into the Chinese side and cemented an alliance among them, and that too at Chinese terms. The two Presidents recently met and issued a joint statement which committed to a partnership with "no limits", opposed NATO expansion, Washington's Indo-Pacific strategy, and affirmed Taiwan as an inalienable part of China.
Update 1 (28.02.2022)
Map which captures the graphic detail of the NATO-EU encirclement which has been a major concern of the Russians.
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