The geopolitical roots of the present crisis in Ukraine are deeply connected with Nato’s eastward expansion. Since the very inception of Nato’s eastward expansion project, fostered by the US and its European allies, the Russian governments in Moscow have been viewing the expansion as West’s aggressive design against Russia, threatening the geographical or the  geopolitical boundaries of Russia. The Russian policy makers also blame that the West , by expanding the Transatlantic Alliance, has orchestrated a volte face against what was promised , decided or understood– at the eve of the German unification, after the fall of curtain,  the end of the Cold War in 1989– between the then superpowers or the Cold War rivals- the US and the USSR.

And yet not surprisingly,it has been because of a prescience- lacking western political and military initiative of Nato’s eastward enlargement, that a new Cold War started to brew between the West and Russia.

NATO,  ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ is presently an intergovernmental military alliance of 28 Western nations. Member states in this alliance agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. In short, it means that any military aggression against one member state constitutes an immediate declaration of war against the entire NATO. This alliance was formed in 1949 in order to counter any possible threat from the then mighty Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union neared collapse in 1989, NATO struck a deal with former President Mikhail Gorbachev. In exchange for allowing a peaceful reunification of Germany, President Mikhail Gorbachev was rumored to have been promised that NATO would not expand ‘one inch to the east’.

With the advantage of hindsight, it is obvious that the West has not kept its end of the bargain.  NATO has steadily expanded eastward over the past decades, with three large expansions( that took plane in 1999,2004,2009) since the German reunification. As of the last expansion in 2009, NATO encompasses most of Eastern Europe, with countries such as Poland, Czech Republic and the Baltic now being members.

Washington viewed NATO’s expansion into the former Warsaw Pact region as a means of advancing its strategic interests, taking advantage of the liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening up of whole new areas to ‘capitalism’.

NATO’s eastward expansion has been a source of tension between Western Europe and Washington since it began.

In 2003, faced with European opposition to the US war against Iraq, one of the war’s chief architects, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed Germany and France as ‘old Europe’ and insisted that the ‘center of gravity’ was shifting eastward, where former eastern bloc countries were closely aligned with US policy. With the European Union, and Germany in particular, emerging as the preeminent economic power in the region, the US has sought to advance its own interests by asserting its military power and dominance over the NATO alliance, into which these former eastern bloc countries were recruited.

Some leading Western politicians were under the impression that the Kremlin leader and his foreign minister were ignoring reality and, as  James Baker,the former US secretary of state said, were ‘in denial’ about the demise of the Soviet Union as a major power.

On the other hand, the Baltic countries were still part of the Soviet Union, and NATO membership seemed light years away. And in some parts of Eastern Europe, peace-oriented dissidents were now in power, men like then-Czech President Vaclav Havel who, if he had had his way, would not only have dissolved the Warsaw Pact, but NATO along with it.

No Eastern European government was striving to join NATO in that early phase, and the Western alliance had absolutely no interest in taking on new members. It was too expensive, an unnecessary provocation of Moscow and, if worse came to worst, did the Western governments truly expect French, Italian or German soldiers to risk their lives for Poland and Hungary?

Then, in 1991, came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the war in Bosnia, with its hundred thousand dead, raised fears of a Balkanization of Eastern Europe. And in the United States President Bill Clinton, following his inauguration in 1993, was searching for a new mission for the Western alliance. Suddenly everyone wanted to join NATO, and soon NATO wanted to accept everyone.

The dispute over history was about to begin.

When the NATO enlargement debate started in earnest around 1993, due to mounting pressure from countries in Central and Eastern Europe, it did so with considerable controversy. Some academic observers in particular opposed admitting new members into NATO, as this would inevitably antagonise Russia and risk undermining the positive achievements since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, ever since the beginning of NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement process, the prime concern of the West was how to reconcile this process with Russian interests. Hence, NATO sought early on to create a cooperative environment that was conducive for enlargement while at the same time building special relations with Russia.

In 1994 the ‘Partnership for Peace’ programme established military cooperation with virtually all countries in the Euro-Atlantic area. The need to avoid antagonising Russia was also evident in the way NATO enlargement took place in the military realm. As early as 1996, Allies declared that in the current circumstances they had “no intention, no plan, and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members”. These statements were incorporated into the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, together with similar references regarding substantial combat forces and infrastructure. The NATO-Russia Founding Act established the ‘Permanent Joint Council’ as a dedicated framework for consultation and cooperation.In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were welcomed into the alliance.

In 2002, as Allies were preparing the next major round of NATO enlargement, the NATO-Russia Council was established, giving the relationship more focus and structure. These steps were in line with other attempts by the international community to grant Russia its rightful place: Russia was admitted to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G7 and the World Trade Organisation.

This ‘soft’ military approach to the enlargement process was supposed to signal to Russia that the goal of NATO enlargement was not Russia’s military ‘encirclement’, but the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into an Atlantic security space. In other words, the method was the message.

On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m.,Hans-Dietrich Genscher,the German foreign minister spoke with Eduard Shevardnadze,the Russian foreign minister. According to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: “We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.” And because the conversion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: “As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.”

Shevardnadze replied that he believed “everything the minister (Genscher) said.”

“The Warsaw Pact still existed at the beginning of 1990,” Gorbachev said, “Merely the notion that NATO might expand to include the countries in this alliance sounded completely absurd at the time.”

In May 2008, the EU concurred, thus knowingly crossing Russia’s ‘red line’. By August of that year, there was war between Georgia and Russia. Obama failed to reset relations with Russia and the US continued to pursue its policy of pulling Ukraine from the Russian orbit and integrating it into the West.

Contrary to the verbal promise to Gorbachev, NATO expanded to the east.

James Bissett is a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. He wrote in the Ottawa Citizen , “The current crisis in Ukraine threatens global security and at worst has the potential for nuclear catastrophe. At best, it signals a continuation of the Cold War. Sadly, the crisis is completely unnecessary and the responsibility lies entirely in the hands of the United States-led NATO powers. The almost virulent propaganda onslaught blaming Russia for the instability and violence in Ukraine simply ignores reality and the facts.”

Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University says that simply blaming Vladimir Putin and Russia for the present stand-off in relations means “no negotiation” and that no negotiation leads to war. He toldDemocracy Now , “The false statement [Obama] made, and the premise on which American policy is being made, is that Putin attacked Ukraine and began this whole mess. Whatever you think about what the outcome should be, that is just factually untrue. All of this began when the United States and Europe asked Ukraine back last November to make a decision between Russia and the European Union.”

Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton, has strongly criticized NATO expansion. “Russia’s resentment toward the United States and the crisis that erupted in March 2014 with Russia’s occupation of Crimea were not unrelated to the Clinton administration’s insistence in the 1990s that NATO be expanded to Russia’s borders….It seemed like virtually everyone I knew from the world of academe, journalism, and foreign policy think-tanks was against enlargement’’.

George Kennan termed NATO enlargement a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions”. “[E]xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era,” he wrote.

“Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Russians note the double standard comparing Kosovo and Crimea. Kosovo, backed by NATO, seceded from Serbia in 2008 without any referendum and was recognized immediately by the United Nations. But when a large proportion of Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and re-join Russia, the UN strongly condemned Russia’s so-called aggression. Subsequent, reliable polls of Crimeans show a high rate of approval of absorption into Russia.

“Any political game concerning NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine is filled with the most serious, most profound geopolitical consequences for all of Europe,” Russia’s permanent representative to NATO, Alexander Grushko, told Life News television channel.

Understandably, Russia has felt increasingly threatened and boxed-in by NATO’s eastward trajectory. Currently, Ukraine is the last buffer between Russia and NATO and is therefore of vital importance to Moscow. If the Ukraine where to officially join the NATO alliance, it would be horrifying nightmare for the Kremlin. Firstly, it means that NATO would be in Moscow’s backyard. Russia would effectively be completely boxed in by NATO, which would effectively destroy the last shred of Russia’s strategic military influence in Eastern Europe. Secondly, Russia sees such a scenario as a threat to its very existence, as it would allow NATO to place military personnel and build strategic bases right across the border.

With this in mind, Russia is willing to go through great lengths to ensure that Ukraine does not become a member of the NATO alliance. With the ousting of the Pro-Russia Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych this year, Russia realized that, if they would not do anything, it would only be a matter of time before Ukraine becomes a NATO member. This, partly explains why Putin is so committed to retaining his influence in Ukraine- Russia’s geoeconomic, geopolitical, and geostrategic hub.

The geometry of this conflict  or the cause of the Russian reservations over the eastward expansion,can further be understood by viewing the geopolitical fact that people in the west with their maritime view of the world, perceive Russia’s neighbours as being formely the Soviet-dominated countries of eastern Europe, immobile secondary powers in Central Asia, an ambivalent communist China.

But this is not how the world looks from Moscow. To the east and over the north pole, the hostile USA itself is Russia ‘s contiguous neighbor. To the south-east of their periphery the men of Moscow see beyond a nuclear-armed China a US-oriented Japan. To the south they see a theatre of historical collusion between European and Russian influence, and a NATO member, Turkey. In the West, they see as their neighbor Russia’s historic foe and invader, Germany. To them, Eastern Europe has been a defensive ‘glacis against a hostile West’.

To maintain a glacis in front of fortress Russia, and to bring border areas under Russian control  has been the natural policy of the Kremlin on ‘geo political grounds’.

For the West, it is long past the point where it can argue that NATO expansion is no threat to Russia.

In the past decade—as NATO has been enlarged by adding Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia,Romania, Latvia,Lithuania,Estonia,Croatia and Albania, and has discussed admitting more Eastern European countries, including Georgia and Ukraine—Putin has repeatedly used the fear of encirclement to whip up nationalist passions inside Russia. Indeed, recent events bring to mind Warren Christopher’s 1994 warning that “swift expansion of NATO eastward could make a neo-imperialist Russia a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Recently, a seasoned political thinker and US former secretary of state Henry Kissinger accused the West of failing to recognize the historical context in which the fallout occurred between Moscow and Kiev.

“The relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe.”

From the Russian point of view, the other important reason for Russia’s commitment towards retaining influence in Ukraine is of ‘geopolitical nature’.

Ukraine’s security can only be guaranteed by the ‘cooperation of the West and Russia’. Accomplishing this will be difficult, but necessary. In geopolitics, as in the world of finance, the solution to a crisis so deep and so long in the making cannot be easy. As for Russia, the eastward expansion,a lese majeste, has had transformed the basic concept of Nato’s ‘partnership for peace’ insofar as the enlargement towards east has largely compromised Russia’s geopolitical and geostrategic clout. And yet for the west , the eastward expansion, as viewed extrinsically, it may be a ‘cordon sanitaire’; yet seen intrinsically the expansion project seems to have been nothing but  a western ‘trojan horse’ stationed at the eastern shelf of Europe-the ‘New Europe’.

West’s big problem to this point has been its proclivity to ‘substitute’ the reading of the threats to Russians’ national security. West presumed NATO expansion could be no threat to Russia because it knew that was not a threat to Russia. West presumed that Russia would perceive NATO expansion as it did, not as the Poles or the Baltic States did. Russia, however, viewed NATO expansion exactly as the Poles did, as a bulwark against them.

Given the fundamentally conflicting perceptions over NATO expansion, a prudent policy would have used EU expansion to obtain the benefits for the new democratic states, without causing the Russians to feel threatened.

Nonetheless,giving a pragmatic thought to Henry Kissinger’s concept of the New World Order-hemmed in by two big challenges, ‘legitimacy and balance of power’ system in the world, it becomes glaringly clear that Nato’s eastward expansion has disturbed the ‘status quo’ of  ‘balance of power’ between the West and Russia.

To deter the security challenges posed to Russia by the west, the Putin’s administration has orchestrated a new security  doctrine. It reflects Russia’s views on the changing geo-political order. It perceives key military risks as emanating primarily from the ‘West’ and dwells on measures to counter them. The document’s underlying tone suggests that Moscow expects this confrontation to intensify in the near future.

The new US National Security Strategy, which Russians believe is virulently anti-Kremlin, would have further strengthened this perception. Therefore, one is likely to see a renewed purpose in Russia attempting to build ties with countries that follow an ‘independent’ foreign policy. But at the same time, the doctrine stands out for its comparatively defensive posture by identifying military action only as the last resort. It also leaves the door open for joint missile defence development and collaboration with EU and NATO on European security – but on equal terms.

But the Russian proposal of a joint missile defence system has been rejected by both the EU and the US.To counter the Russian aggression in Europe, Nato’s  Response Force(NRF) or the First German-Netherlands Corps has been revitalized and geared up with a new ‘spearhead rapid reaction force’, Very High Readiness Joint Task Force(VJTF).

The Ukraine crisis,which seems to have been more complex because of the ongoing US’s agenda of breaking Russia via ‘corporate politics’ and centrifugal designs, offers no military solution to the conflict.It only offers to have a political or diplomatic solution,a truth or reality that Angela Merkel of Germany has truly realised.  Mr Kissinger is right when he suggests that ‘not breaking, but integrating Russia’ ,must be the strategy of the West.

The German-Russian led spirit of ‘diplomatic discourse’ initiated by the Minsk-II agreement( signed in Belarus, Feb-2015), has been positively endorsed by the currently signed agreement in East Ukraine — among the four Foreign ministers: Russia Sergey Lavrov; Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin; Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and France, Laurent Fabius–  giving new steps to appease eastern Ukraine with a commitment to advance the ‘removal of weapons and mines of the separatist regions’.

The West should pragmatically avoid to sign Nato’s ‘Stoltenberg doctrine’ with Ukraine since the draft psyche of the doctrine reflects that Russia is an aggressor and consequently,in present circumstances, this western initiative will wane the hopes of ‘confidence building measures’ between the West and Russia.

Some pacifist thinkers argue that to save the present and future generations from the risks and miseries of war, the M.V.  Molotov’s doctrine– of European collective security, once proposed by the former Russian Foreign minister in 1954– must be a given a rethought with new orientations,  by both Angela Merkel and Putin to end the half century old conflict between Europe and Russia. The proponents of this argument say that the Europeans should not forget the historic role that Russian forces rendered in saving the lives of many many Europeans during WWII.

Yet any western or the Russian path– to strike militarily–will lead to a suicidal end.  Some strategists are of the view that the Ukraine conflict reserves the potential of a nuclear war, which may cause a lasting human catastrophe, as Harvard academic Elaine Scarry writes, “Current scientific research shows that even a smaller nuclear arsenal, if used in a major exchange, will still produce nuclear winter, causing a drop in the average temperature across earth larger than what occurred in the Ice Age 18,000 years ago, reducing rainfall by 45 percent’’.