NATO: Russia sets ‘red lines’ for the alliance
Russia is asking NATO to renounce its core principles and abandon its commitments—in effect, “to scuttle itself,” said Piotr Smolar and Benoît Vitkine in Le Monde (France). The Kremlin last week sent the U.S. and its allies a draft security treaty that, if signed, would bar NATO from offering membership to Ukraine or any former Soviet republic and prohibit the alliance from conducting any military activities in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, or Central Asia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long regarded the 1991 breakup of the USSR as a historic catastrophe, and now he’s trying “to go back in time” for a do-over. Under his proposal, all NATO troops and weaponry would have to be withdrawn from countries that joined the alliance after the collapse of communism, including former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland and the former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Given that Russia currently has some 100,000 troops massed on its border with Ukraine, the draft document can be read as Putin’s red line: Sign or say goodbye to an independent Ukraine. Of course, America and NATO will never agree to these “impossible demands.” But U.S. President Joe Biden has wisely not given Russia “the satisfaction of a refusal” and is instead calling for joint talks with allies.
Putin is insisting on total capitulation from the West without offering the tiniest concession in return, said Oleksandr Demchenko in LB.ua (Ukraine). He wants NATO to remove missiles and personnel from Poland, yet clearly intends to keep Russian forces in Crimea—which he annexed from Ukraine in 2014—and in Kaliningrad,
Russia’s heavily armed exclave between Poland and Lithuania. But Putin has only harmed himself with his wild public demands. Had he negotiated quietly, Washington might have sacrificed Ukraine. With the whole world watching, Biden can’t back down. Maybe he should, said Jacques Schuster in Die Welt (Germany). The U.S. used to recognize the necessity of spheres of influence: During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. told the Soviet Union it could not station nukes in Cuba, Cuba’s wishes be damned.
Yet the wishes of Ukraine—once an integral part of the USSR—are treated as sacrosanct. Surely Biden can see that Ukraine entering NATO would be just as threatening to Moscow as nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida were to the U.S. He must accept the limitations of what is possible and “strive for a settlement that will secure Ukraine’s independence and yet not act as an eternal provocation against Moscow.”
This isn’t just about Ukraine, said Stefan Scholl in Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany). Putin is also insisting that NATO members halt all cooperation with former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia. That affects Georgia, which wants to join the alliance, and Uzbekistan, which hosted U.S. troops during the Afghan conflict. Even if Moscow can be persuaded to dial back some of its demands, further provocations by the Kremlin are inevitable. Prominent Russian analysts now openly predict war in Ukraine, and Moscow may well be willing to fight over other exSoviet states too. “Russian diplomacy is in attack mode.”