A former Dutch ambassador argues that an ambiguous NATO promise shaped Moscow’s calculations, while warning that imperial ambitions remained the deeper cause of war.

Robert Serry, the first Ambassador of the Netherlands to Ukraine from 1992 to 1996, believes that NATO’s decision at the 2008 Bucharest Summit left Ukraine in a “gray zone” between Russia and the Alliance. In his view, the West did not fully understand Putin’s true intentions at the time.

In an interview in The Hague, the diplomat recalled that NATO acknowledged the possibility of Ukraine joining in the future but did not grant it a Membership Action Plan or set out a clear procedure for moving toward the Alliance. According to Serry, this very uncertainty influenced the Kremlin’s subsequent actions.

We did not realize what Putin’s intentions really were. Look at what happened in 2008. After the Munich Conference came the NATO Bucharest Summit, with its infamous “non-decision.” Ukraine did not receive a Membership Action Plan. NATO said at the time that Ukraine might one day become a member of the Alliance, but it offered no concrete path to membership. In reality, this meant that Ukraine was left in a kind of “gray zone” between Putin and NATO. And Putin decided that Ukraine was his “backyard.” After that, as you know, he went into Georgia and then decided to move into Ukraine. So while I categorically reject the claim that NATO is responsible for this war – that is not true; all responsibility lies with Putin – NATO nevertheless played a certain role in this drama

– Robert Serry

The Role of the NATO Bucharest Summit in Relations with Ukraine

Robert Serry stressed separately that Putin bears responsibility for Russia’s war against Ukraine. At the same time, the diplomat suggested that a more concrete NATO response to Kyiv’s aspirations to join the Alliance might have affected the course of events differently.

In his assessment, in 2008 Western partners did not see Ukraine as a sufficiently clear and prepared candidate for membership in the EU and NATO. Among the reasons, he cited corruption, the country’s internal difficulties, and its lack of readiness for such major steps at that time.

If NATO had given a more concrete response in 2008 to Ukraine’s aspiration to become a member of the Alliance, I think this war might not have happened. But Western thinking was different at the time. Ukraine remained, to some extent, a terra incognita – a country that no one knew what to do with. Ukraine was asking for EU membership and NATO membership, but it was not taken seriously enough. There were partly objective reasons for this: corruption and the state’s internal problems. At that point, the country truly was not ready for such steps

– Robert Serry

Russia’s Imperial Ambitions and the War Against Ukraine

The diplomat is convinced that the roots of Russian aggression run much deeper than Putin’s personal decisions. He drew attention to the widespread belief in Russia that Moscow has lost territories it considers its own, as well as to the Kremlin’s use of claims to the legacy of Kyivan Rus.

Serry described such historical claims as problematic, especially when they are turned into justification for encroaching on independent Ukraine. In his view, the Russian leadership’s desire to bring the country back under Moscow’s control and restore an empire laid the groundwork for the full-scale war.

This goes much deeper. In Russia, there is a sense that it has lost something that supposedly belongs to it. This is also connected to claims to the legacy of Kyivan Rus, which I consider absurd. When someone claims to be the sole legitimate heir to events that took place in such a distant past, it always seems highly problematic to me, especially when Russia uses this as an argument to revive its claims to Ukraine. This is precisely what Putin did, but he is not the only one. If you look at many people in Russia, this feeling truly exists there. So, in a sense, this war may have been inevitable if Russia’s leadership under Putin chose as its goal to return Ukraine to Moscow’s control and restore the empire. In that case, a full-scale invasion seems like a logical consequence of that policy. But I never viewed this crisis in that way. As someone who later worked with NATO and the UN, I very much hoped that such a major war could be avoided

– Robert Serry

In conclusion, Robert Serry noted that Russia’s full-scale invasion was the result of the Kremlin’s imperial course. At the same time, he believes that a more decisive and clear Western stance on Ukraine in 2008 might have reduced the risk of such a development.