A former Dutch ambassador argues that an ambiguous NATO promise shaped Moscow\u2019s calculations, while warning that imperial ambitions remained the deeper cause of war.<\/p>\n
Robert Serry, the first Ambassador of the Netherlands to Ukraine from 1992 to 1996, believes that NATO\u2019s decision at the 2008 Bucharest Summit left Ukraine in a \u201cgray zone\u201d between Russia and the Alliance. In his view, the West did not fully understand Putin\u2019s true intentions at the time.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s subsequent actions.<\/p>\n
We did not realize what Putin\u2019s intentions really were. Look at what happened in 2008. After the Munich Conference came the NATO Bucharest Summit, with its infamous \u201cnon-decision.\u201d 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 \u201cgray zone\u201d between Putin and NATO. And Putin decided that Ukraine was his \u201cbackyard.\u201d 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 \u2013 that is not true; all responsibility lies with Putin \u2013 NATO nevertheless played a certain role in this drama<\/p>\n
\u2013 Robert Serry<\/p>\n
The Role of the NATO Bucharest Summit in Relations with Ukraine<\/p>\n
Robert Serry stressed separately that Putin bears responsibility for Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine. At the same time, the diplomat suggested that a more concrete NATO response to Kyiv\u2019s aspirations to join the Alliance might have affected the course of events differently.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s internal difficulties, and its lack of readiness for such major steps at that time.<\/p>\n
If NATO had given a more concrete response in 2008 to Ukraine\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s internal problems. At that point, the country truly was not ready for such steps<\/p>\n
\u2013 Robert Serry<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s Imperial Ambitions and the War Against Ukraine<\/p>\n
The diplomat is convinced that the roots of Russian aggression run much deeper than Putin\u2019s 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\u2019s use of claims to the legacy of Kyivan Rus.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s desire to bring the country back under Moscow\u2019s control and restore an empire laid the groundwork for the full-scale war.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s leadership under Putin chose as its goal to return Ukraine to Moscow\u2019s 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<\/p>\n
\u2013 Robert Serry<\/p>\n
In conclusion, Robert Serry noted that Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion was the result of the Kremlin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former Dutch ambassador argues that an ambiguous NATO promise shaped Moscow\u2019s calculations, while warning that imperial ambitions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6634,6635,6633,444,54,6636,67,6637],"class_list":["post-10915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-bucharest-summit","tag-nato-2008-summit","tag-nato-2008-summit-ukraine-grey-zone-robert-serry-bucharest-summit-russia-ukraine-war-nato-membership","tag-nato-membership","tag-news","tag-robert-serry","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-ukraine-grey-zone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}