"For much of his 22 years in high
office, Vladimir V. Putin has worked to carefully balance Russia’s position in
Europe. He ingratiated himself
with some capitals as he bullied others,
and sought economic integration as he lambasted European values.
Even after Russia’s annexation of
Crimea in 2014 sent relations plunging, and Moscow harried some European
countries with mass-scale disinformation and near-miss military fly-bys, it
reached out to others — if not exactly winning them over, then at least keeping
diplomacy open.
But, with this winter’s crisis over
Ukraine, Mr. Putin is overtly embracing something he had long avoided:
hostility with Europe as a whole.
The more that Europe meets Moscow’s threats with
eastward military reinforcements and pledges of economic punishments, papering
over its otherwise deep internal disagreements, the more that Mr. Putin
escalates right back. And rather than emphasizing diplomacy across European
capitals, he has largely gone over them to Washington.
The shift reflects Moscow’s
perception of European governments as American puppets to be shunted aside, as
well as its assertion of itself as a great power standing astride Europe rather
than an unusually powerful neighbor. It also shows Russia’s ambition to no
longer simply manage but outright remake the European security order.
But in seeking to domineer Europe,
even if only over the question of relations to Ukraine, “There’s a risk of
pushing Europe together, of amplifying more hawkish voices and capitals,” said
Emma Ashford, who studies European security issues at The Atlantic Council
research group.
“And there’s the risk of pulling
America back in, even as it’s trying to push America out of Europe,” Ms.
Ashford added of Moscow’s approach.
Mr. Putin has not given up on Europe
completely. He did have a call with Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, on
Friday. And he may still pull back from the crisis in time to recover European
relations, or seek to do so once the dust settles.
But, if he persists, analysts warn
that his approach could leave Europe more militarized and more divided, though
with a Moscow-allied East far smaller and weaker than that in the Cold War.
A
Moscow-Washington Axis
The Kremlin has repeatedly signaled
that, while its concerns with Ukraine may have brought it to this point, it
seeks something broader: a return to days when Europe’s security order was not
negotiated across dozens of capitals but decided between two great powers.
“As in the late 1960s, direct
interaction between Moscow and Washington could give a political framework to a
future détente,” Vladimir Frolov, a Russian political analyst, wrote of Moscow’s ambitions.
This is not entirely a matter of
hubris or great power ambition. It also reflects a growing belief in Moscow
that this arrangement is, in effect, already so.
After Russia annexed Crimea and
invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, which Western governments punished with
economic sanctions, the crisis was meant to be resolved with negotiations
between Moscow and Kyiv, Paris and Berlin.
Though Washington applied pressure,
it urged that the matter be settled among Europeans, hoping for a stable
balance on the continent.
But while the letter of the so-called Minsk agreements
nominally satisfied Russian demands, the Kremlin came away believing that
Ukraine had reneged.
The conclusion in Moscow, by 2019 or so, Ms. Ashford said,
was that “European states are either unwilling or unable, probably unable, to
compel Kyiv to follow through.”
This also reinforced long-held views
in Moscow that Germany’s economic might or France’s diplomatic capital were in
a world shaped by hard military power.
“They’re insignificant, they’re
irrelevant, so there’s this framing in Moscow that we have to talk to the U.S.
because they’re the only ones that really matter,” Ms. Ashford added.
Military power among the member
states of the European Union, which has tried to assert itself as Moscow’s
interlocutor on Ukraine, has substantially declined relative to both the United
States and Russia in recent years. This was exacerbated by the departure of
Britain.
At the same time, sharp divisions within
Europe over how to deal with Russia have left the continent struggling for a
coherent approach. The departure of Angela Merkel, Germany’s longtime leader,
and Mr. Macron’s failed bids at unofficial European leadership have left Europe
often adrift between an American-led status quo.
“Outside of Paris and Brussels,
everyone is pretty desperate for U.S. leadership on this crisis,” Jeremy
Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations,
told a Brookings Institution conference this
week.
“All of this means that Russia is somewhat verified in its
view that Europe is a U.S. puppet and doesn’t really need to be engaged
separately,” he added.
Resetting
Europe
Though Mr. Putin’s exact plan for
Ukraine remains, by seeming design, a mystery, he has emphasized that
his agenda extends to Europe as a whole.
In past crises over Ukraine,
Russia’s aim has focused narrowly on that country, largely toward a goal of
keeping it from aligning with the West. It sought to avoid triggering too much
European opposition, and even tried to win European help in protecting its
interests in Ukraine.
Now, perhaps as a result of its Ukraine-focused coercion
having failed to achieve its objectives, Moscow is demanding an overhaul to the
security architecture of Europe itself, by ending or even rolling back NATO’s
eastward expansion.
Such a change, however it came about, would mean altering
the rules that have governed the continent since the Cold War’s end. And it
would mean formalizing a line between West and East, with Moscow granted
dominance in the latter.
Rather than seeking to manage the post-Cold
War order in Europe, in other words, Moscow wants to overturn it. And that has
meant attempting to coerce not just Ukraine, but Europe as a whole, making a
standoff with the continent not only tolerable but also a means to an end.
“The most militarily powerful state
on the continent does not see itself as a stakeholder in Europe’s security
architecture,” Michael Kofman, a Russia scholar at C.N.A., a research center,
wrote in an essay this week
for the site War on the Rocks.
Rather, as a result of Moscow
rattling that infrastructure or even seeking to pull it down, Mr. Kofman added,
“European security remains much more unsettled than it appears.”
A
Divided Future
Mr. Putin’s willingness to accept
broad hostilities with Europe could strengthen his hand in Ukraine, by
demonstrating that he is willing to risk even the continent’s collective wrath
to pursue his interests there.
But regardless of what happens in
Ukraine itself, entrenching a hostile relationship between Russia and Europe
sets them down a path that carries uncertainty and risk for them both.
Cycles of “sanctions, diplomatic
expulsions, and various forms of retaliation,” Mr. Kofman wrote, can easily
take on a logic of their own, escalating in ways that hurt both sides. Both
Russia and Europe are economically vulnerable to one another and already face
unstable domestic politics.
Relations between Moscow and European capitals have rarely
been warm. But they have, for the most part, plodded along, overseeing, among
many other shared concerns, a Russia-to-Europe energy trade on which virtually
the entire continent relies.
There is also a risk for the United States: being pulled
deeper into a part of the world it had hoped to de-emphasize so it might focus
instead on Asia.
Shorter-term, a divided Europe would
seem to risk exactly what Moscow has long sought to avoid: more American power
in Europe’s east, and greater European unity, however grudging, against Russia.
“The approach that the Kremlin is
taking toward Europe right now, on the surface, to me at least, seems quite
shortsighted,” Ms. Ashford said.
The most concerning possibility,
some analysts say, is not that Mr. Putin is bluffing or that he does not see
these downsides — though either could be true — but rather that this is a
choice, of dividing Europe against him for the sake of his interests in
Ukraine, that he is making willingly."
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