Opinion

NATO-Russia, the inevitable clash

photo_camera REUTERS/SERGEI KARPUKHIN - Pantalla que muestra al presidente de Rusia, Vladimir Putin, durante una sesión del Foro en San Petersburgo, Rusia, el 2 de junio de 2017

While it is heartbreaking for Ukrainians to see NATO and the EU only partially heeding their pleas for help in the face of the destruction of their country by Vladimir Putin's Russia, the almost desperate attempts by the two conglomerates to avoid a head-on collision that would "trigger World War III", in the words of US President Joe Biden, is commendable from a global perspective.

All the containment manoeuvres carried out so far - refusal to impose a no-fly zone, and refusal to provide fighter jets, among the most prominent - may prove useless in preventing a clash that will sooner or later come to pass. The key to this apocalypse is still in the hands of the Russian president, who has finally decided to provoke a catastrophe to avenge what he believes to be the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century: the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union.

Putin has internalised that collapse as the tragedy of an entire people, the Russian people, and he himself has cast himself as the messiah destined to re-establish not the USSR (communism as such does not interest him) but the empire of Peter the Great and the also great Empress Catherine.

His hagiographers tell us that Putin was still in the German Democratic Republic when in 1989 the jubilation erupted over the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the prelude to the toppling of the statues and symbols of Soviet power. A crowd of young Germans stood in front of the dreaded KGB building, not far from the headquarters of the no less feared Stasi. According to the story, a bare-chested Putin checked that the magazine of his pistol was fully loaded, went down to the door, opened it and faced the dozens of demonstrators with the piercing coldness of his gaze, the threatening pistol and a single warning phrase: "I will empty it on all of you if you try to storm the building, and the last bullet will be for me". As in the poem, the crowd choked the chapeau, demanded the sword, went and there was nothing.

Whether or not this is exactly the case, the dissemination of this story has a clear intention: to demonstrate that the Kremlin leader will not stop, and that before he runs out of ammunition he will sacrifice everything, the lives of others and his own, in pursuit of the mission he considers sacred.

The incubation of a long and painful frustration

Before President Yeltsin brought him into his first circle of power and then made him prime minister, Vladimir Putin had built into his own personal history the frustration of watching not only the collapse of the USSR but also the successive accession to NATO of the countries that Stalin made his security area at the Yalta Conference, a treaty that NATO never violated, not even when the Hungarian people revolted in 1956 or when Warsaw Pact tanks stormed Prague in 1968.

The Russian dictator has never ceased to accuse NATO of having "betrayed" promises not to incorporate the former countries behind the so-called Iron Curtain. There is no official document to prove this alleged promise. Putin himself seems to have recognised this when, in the long documentary made by Oliver Stone in 2015, he stated that it was a mistake by Mikhail Gorbachev not to have put in writing the promises made to him successively by James Baker (US Secretary of State), Helmut Kohl (Chancellor of the FRG), Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and the then President of the United States, George Bush. "In politics you have to write everything down, even if the guarantees signed in a document are often violated," he told Stone in the documentary.

But Putin had already seen from the front line of power how the Partnership for Peace, created in 1994 and joined by 34 countries including Russia itself, neither fulfilled Russia's expectations of remaining the superpower counterpart of the United States, nor those of the countries closest to the Russian Federation: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which, in the Visegrad Group, later joined by Slovakia, continued to demand NATO membership, even more insistently in the wake of the carnage and total destruction of the Chechen war and the split of Moldova from its easternmost region, Transnistria.

NATO enlargements and Russian warnings

The two major NATO enlargements of 1999 (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) and the larger 2004 enlargement (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Albania) were described by the then head of Russian diplomacy, Evgeny Primakov, as "the biggest mistake [made by the Atlantic Alliance] since the end of the Second World War".

In this view, the mistake would have been even greater if NATO had accepted President George W. Bush's recommendation at the 2008 Bucharest summit to formally invite Ukraine and Georgia to join - a decision opposed by France and Germany, the two European countries that received the most pressure on their mutual business from Moscow.

That debate was, however, the turning point in Putin's weariness, which was vehemently expressed at the following NATO-Russia Council meeting, where he literally stated: "Ukraine is not even a state. One part of its territory comes from the break-up of Central Europe, and the other, the most important part, is historically part of Russia, which ceded it to it".

Putin deliberately omitted in those admonitions to recall that, when the United Nations was formed, the Soviet Union pushed for the admission of Ukraine and Belarus as countries with their own seats, which was tantamount to admitting that they were supposedly independent nations.

Putin's exasperation was not assuaged by NATO members sending Ukraine's membership request "ad calendas graecas", but rather he began to regain the "lost territories" in 2014, namely the strategic Crimean peninsula and the Donbass region. How far does he intend to go now? The answer is, without a doubt, as far as possible, which is only if NATO and the EU prevent it from doing so.

Ukrainian President Volodimyr Zelensky has already offered to give up his demand for NATO membership. But Putin wants more: guarantees of the so-called "Finlandisation" of the country, and in the process the removal from NATO's protection of countries that were once under the boot of his empire. Absolutely unacceptable for Europe, for the United States and ultimately for Western civilisation, which will have no choice but to fight back. To do otherwise would be difficult to contemplate as anything other than capitulation.