President Obama speaks in the Estonian capital of TallinnSAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty
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President Obama's speech on Wednesday in Estonia, a small eastern European country that reasonably fears it could be next on Russia's invasion list, was a huge step against Russian aggression. Obama promised that the US and the other members of NATO (a military alliance that includes most of Europe) would fight to defend any invaded
member state, including Estonia, as if it were "Berlin [or] Paris [or]
London." That is a big deal, meant to deter Russian aggression with the ultimate threat: war against the United States military.
But there was another message in Obama's speech, one that was in the
subtext but came through loud and clear, especially to Ukrainians: the
United States and NATO will not defend Ukraine from the ongoing Russian invasion pushing across its border. The US is not exactly abandoning Ukraine — it still wants to help — but it is not going to do anything that would force the Russian invasion to stop.
obama has drawn his red line for russia, and ukraine is on the outside of it
The Obama White House is no stranger to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, which Vice President Joe Biden visited in a show of support
in April, shortly after Russia had invaded and annexed Crimea. So Obama
clearly could have gone there for this speech, which he announced in
response to Russia's mid-August invasion of eastern Ukraine. But he
didn't, and that's significant.
Obama's choice to go to a NATO country and assert that the US will defend other NATO countries, at a moment when Russia is invading a non-NATO country,
made it pretty clear that the US is not going to turn back Russia's
tanks in Ukraine — or, perhaps, in any other non-NATO country, such as
Moldova, where Putin is supporting breakaway separatists, or Georgia,
where Russia fought a war in 2008.
Members of NATO in blue; the US and Canada are also members (Geneva Tribune)
This does not mean that the US and Europe are indifferent to Ukraine's plight. They have sanctioned Russia's economy repeatedly and heavily,
sending it to the precipice of recession. They have isolated Russia
politically, for example by booting it from the G8. But these sanctions
are about punishing Russia to deter it from future invasions, or at best
an attempt to convince Putin that invading Ukraine is not worthwhile.
But Putin's actions have demonstrated very clearly that he is willing to
bear Western economic sanctions for his Ukraine invasion, and the US is
not escalating further, so the invasion continues.
The US is taking some tougher steps in Ukraine, but they are not very much. Obama, in his speech, called for "concrete commitments"
to help Ukraine modernize its military, but it's not clear what he
meant, and even if Ukraine were armed to the teeth it would still lose
any open war with Russia, which has the second-largest military in the
world. So building up the Ukrainian military, while a nice symbolic
gesture, will not stop Putin.
The US is also sending 200 troops to participate in NATO military exercises
later this month that is taking place, very conspicuously, in western
Ukraine. It sounded at first like this was meant to deter Russia from
invading further: Putin wouldn't dare strike near the NATO forces and
risk war. But it turns out that the exercises are being held on the
complete other end of Ukraine from the fighting, 750 miles from the
front lines, along the border with Poland, where there is near zero
imminent risk of Russian invasion.
President Obama has set a big, bright, clear red line for Russia's
military adventurism: the member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. The country's inside of that line, he insisted, can count
on US military support, and that is a big deal. But the countries
outside of it, from eastern European states such as Ukraine and Georgia
to Central Asian former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, are largely
on their own. To learn more about the crisis in Ukraine, read the full explainer, and watch the two-minute video below:
Though
President Vladimir Putin insists that Russia is not invading eastern
Ukraine, Russian soldiers, tanks, and self-propelled artillery have been
crossing the border since mid-August in what can only be described as a hostile invasion.
There are two ways to think about why Putin is doing this: as a
rational, strategic effort to take something from Ukraine, or as a
less-rational action driven by domestic Russian politics.
Theory 1: Putin is trying to overturn to the rebels' losses because he wants something from Ukraine
On the surface, the Russian invasion looks like it is meant
to bolster the pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine, who began losing
ground in early August when the Ukrainian military began a renewed
offensive against them. In this thinking, Russian troops are there to
keep the rebels from being entirely overrun.
Putin has been backing the rebels for months and fomenting
violence in eastern Ukraine. He's doing this either because he wants to
maintain a perpetual separatist crisis (he did this in Georgia and
Moldova as well) so that he has leverage over the Ukrainian government
to keep it from crossing him, or because he wanted to give himself an
excuse to invade on the premise of saving eastern Ukrainians, then annex
that territory as he did in Crimea. Another possibility is that he
wants to force some concession from the Ukrainian government and/or from
the West. In any case, the thinking here is that Putin is after some
immediate strategic goal, and will stop once he feels he's achieved it.
Theory 2: Putin was sucked into an irrational invasion he didn't want by his own rhetoric and propaganda
Since taking power in 2000, Putin governed through an
implicit deal with the Russian people: he delivered high economic
growth, and Russians accepted curbs to political and individual rights.
But after the economy slowed and some Russians protested his sham
reelection in 2012, Putin shifted strategies, focusing on stirring up
old-school anti-Western paranoia and imperial-style Russian nationalism.
So when the Ukraine crisis started, Putin's state media spun up a
narrative that the Ukrainian protests were an American conspiracy to
isolate Russia and that the new Ukrainian government is run by secret
Nazis bent on expansion. Sponsoring the rebels and saving Ukraine —
which in the Russian nationalist view is really part of Russia — became a
matter of national pride, of asserting Russia's defiance of the West.
Sure enough, when Putin invaded and annexed Crimea in March,
his slouching approval rating skyrocketed. Putin, addicted, has played
up the nationalist cause in eastern Ukraine, the heroism of the rebels,
his own heroism in backing them, and the threat of Ukraine's "fascist"
government. Were he to sit idly by while the rebels were defeated, it
would show that his rhetoric was a lie and leave him without the
nationalist cause on which he now bases his political legitimacy. So, with no other way out, he invaded.
Putin is not crazy, but he may have created a crisis with an internal
momentum so great that it has broken beyond his control. That is a
truly scary possibility.
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