Russia - West Confrontation: Could It Have Gone Any Different?

In early 2022 Russia & the West faced a fatal choice between a limited war & a full-scale war. Moscow opted for the former in a hope to avoid the latter. Russia was - and remains - of a firm belief that the Special Military Operation was, to put it in American political parlance, "a war of necessity". The West has made every effort to convince its own population and the rest of the world that this was "a war of choice". Whichever narrative one supports, two and a half years into the confrontation, the prospects for a full-scale war are very real.

Things could have been different. Back in the day I penned a piece that unpacked the Russian thinking on the issue and laid out Moscow's aspirations.

Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 symbolically ended the 1990s era of Russian-Western relations. It was Putin’s first notable call to set the framework for “security guarantees” for Russia. Agitated by what Russia called “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Putin’s complaints about “unilateral dominance of the United States in international relations” were a howl of frustration after failed attempts to establish a more favorable relationship with the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush. In the West, his remarks were seen as a signal of Russia’s own revisionist ambitions. The five-day war with Georgia in August of 2008, although triggered by then-President Mikheil Saakashvili’s adventurous offensive in South Ossetia, was, in Moscow’s view, part and parcel of the greater American and European failure to take the red lines seriously.

Putin’s second call for “joint undivided security” came during another period of turbulence: the Arab uprisings, NATO’s intervention in Libya, and what Moscow perceived as the Obama administration’s support for the Bolotnaya protests in Russia. These spurred Putin to raise the issue of Russia’s “security guarantees” in one of the articles he penned as an aspiring presidential candidate in the spring of 2012. Titled “Got to Be Strong: Security Guarantees for Russia,” the article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta argued that Russia’s own security can be guaranteed only by means of “developing military potential in the framework of containment strategy and at the level of defense sufficiency.”

Putin’s current “ultimatum” is thus a third attempt to coerce the U.S. and its European allies to review the entire European security architecture as well as alter the Western approach towards the post-Soviet space. Putin’s threat to sever diplomatic ties with the West if Washington opts to impose new sanctions on Russia over Ukraine suggests the Kremlin feels it may reach a certain point after which talking to the West makes no sense. After that, Russia would have to activate an option of “providing its own security” that would probably imply greater costs for its own economy but also an uncomfortable security reality for others.

Moscow. January 7, 2022.