By Andrew Stuttaford
Thursday, December 22, 2022
It’s probably not worth refighting this, but the promise
of NATO and EU expansion avoided turning much of Eastern Europe into a
potential Yugoslavia in the ’90s and did a lot to put the region on a
democratic path. Practical, not utopian.
I don’t think Putin thinks in any sense that Ukraine is a
military threat to Russia, but he does think that a reasonably democratic
Ukraine poses a “threat of example” to his regime.
That’s the problem, not NATO. He also wants Ukraine’s
resources, geography, and Slavic population; the last, of course, to deal with
Russia’s tricky demographics.
The reasons may vary, but this is hardly a new thing.
Yeltsin worried about it, and Solzhenitsyn talked about the need to
maintain/rebuild the Slavic core of the former USSR (which included northern
Kazakhstan, in Solzhenitsyn’s view) in the early ’90s, long before NATO
expansion.
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