In autumn 2021, as tens of thousands of Russian troops began massing close to the border with Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden was a little concerned. These didn’t look like regular military drills, he thought. Perhaps we ought to do something about this.
The President dispatched then CIA Director William Burns—himself a former ambassador to Russia—to Moscow with a message and a warning: “We’re watching your troop buildup—don’t do what we think you might be about to do.”
We all know how that turned out.
Read More on Analysis
Now, we must ask whether history is repeating itself. CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced trip of his own to the Russian capital this week, reportedly to warn the Kremlin against further escalation in the war in Ukraine and NATO members.
Of course, Vladimir Putin wasn’t there himself; Ratcliffe was met by various security officials who later briefed the Russian President on his warning. But it’s hard to imagine a face-to-face with Putin would have made any meaningful difference.
The fundamental dispute that led to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine remains wholly unresolved: NATO still regards Moscow as an aggressor and insists that European states can choose their own security arrangements. Moscow regards this as NATO expansion, and believes Western military integration with Russia’s neighbors is a threat to Russia itself.
So why assume another warning from another CIA director will resolve it this time around?
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
Less than three months before Putin sent Russian armor scything into Ukraine, then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg laid out the Western position bluntly: Ukraine was a sovereign country entitled to choose its own future and security arrangements. Whether it joined NATO was for Ukraine and NATO members to decide; Russia had “no veto.”
Putin’s position was almost the mirror image. Moscow published proposals demanding no further NATO enlargement, including Ukrainian membership, and an end to NATO military activity in Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe.
“There should be no further NATO movement to the east,” Putin declared, complaining that U.S. and Western weapons were already “on our doorstep.”
Nearly five years on, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham visited Kyiv this week and announced that Britain would offer Kyiv blueprints of the Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missile, helping Ukraine to launch production of the long-range strike package on home soil.
Meanwhile, the Coalition of the Willing—a conglomerate of nations led by France and the UK to support Ukraine—confirmed its preparations for a multinational peacekeeping force to deploy inside Ukraine following a ceasefire agreement.
From NATO’s perspective, these are necessary defensive measures: helping a sovereign European country survive Russian aggression, while reinforcing the bloc’s defensive posture along its eastern flank. Viewed from Moscow, the moves serve only as confirmation of NATO expansion to threaten Russia’s security.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Britain this week of “participating in this war” and “adding fuel to the fire.” He also declared that any deployment of troops from NATO countries inside Ukraine’s borders, even after the fighting stops, would be “completely unacceptable” for the Kremlin.
Former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, was even more explicit, casting NATO as a “hostile military-political bloc” and the prospect of further enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia as an “existential threat to Russia.”
But the crown for most outrageous statement goes to Lt. Gen. Viktor Sobolev, a former Russian army commander and current member of the State Duma Defense Committee.
Sobolev told Russian media this week that Russia must secure victory in Ukraine by 2030 before NATO countries are ready for conflict with Moscow.
“The fascist regime must be dealt with before Poland and other NATO countries are ready for war with Russia. The Poles, Germans, French, British, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Sweden; they all want to fight Russia, to inflict a strategic defeat,” he said.
He added that once Ukraine is defeated, it would be necessary to rapidly reconstitute Russia’s armed forces “so that they are ready to repel the aggression of any geopolitical adversary in any strategic direction and under any conditions.”
A tremendous amount has changed since February 2022. The war has caused millions of casualties, transformed European military doctrine, and hastened a global reorientation of political alliances.
The argument underneath it all has not changed a bit.
Bullish In The Baltic
One of the primary focuses of Ratcliffe’s talk with the Russians was to warn Moscow against escalating not in Ukraine, but against NATO states, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources briefed on the meeting.
Several reports claimed those concerns centered on the Baltics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with officials concerned about the prospect of cyberattacks, more hybrid warfare, or even a small military incursion on NATO soil.
Estonia itself is notably less alarmed.
Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said Thursday following Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow that the danger posed by Russia and possible provocations against NATO must be taken seriously, but stressed that “Estonia’s threat assessment has not changed.”
Speaking at a summit in Kyiv on August 23, Prime Minister Kristen Michal also said: “Russia’s assessment of NATO’s power and strength is at a level where they know it is not worth attacking. This means that NATO and European countries can feel confident; there is no direct threat.”
That is not complacency. Estonia’s defense expenditure is set at 5.4 percent of GDP this year; it is constructing a Baltic Defense Line that will eventually include up to 600 bunkers; and it hosts a UK-led NATO battlegroup, with a British brigade held at high readiness to reinforce the country if necessary.
But recent history supplies an uncomfortable warning about the dangers of assuming Moscow will share Western judgments about what is militarily rational.
As Washington and European intelligence agencies sounded increasingly urgent alarms in early 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly urged calm and publicly pushed back against the notion that a full invasion was imminent.
Former CIA Director Burns had flown to Kyiv in January to personally brief him on what U.S. intelligence feared was coming, but Zelensky declared: “There is no reason to panic,” telling Ukrainians that the situation was under control.
One month later, Russian tanks were making a beeline toward Kyiv.
There’s no suggestion that the same thing will happen to Estonia. But Putin does not necessarily need a large-scale conflict to weaken NATO.
“Putin knows he can’t do NATO militarily, but he can do it politically,” Ed Arnold of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute told Newsweek.
He argued that a small operation in a vulnerable area—for example, the tiny strip of NATO territory known as the Suwalki Gap that separates the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus—would test the limits of NATO’s Article 5.
If NATO is unwilling to invoke its collective defense clause and go to war with Russia when the stakes are deliberately kept low, the ensuing political infighting could steadily undermine the bloc and render it ineffective.
The question for officials and defense planners in Washington, Tallinn and Brussels should not be whether attacking NATO makes sense in Russia.
What they should be asking is this: How can Putin be convinced that even a limited test of the alliance would carry costs he is unwilling to bear?