Can Biden and Nato offer any concessions to Putin?

On April 4, 2008, President Vladimir Putin strode into the huge conference hall inside the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest to confront the world’s media on the last day of a Nato summit and put down his marker for future relations with the Western alliance. The Russian leader was there as an invited guest to attend the post-summit meeting of the Nato-Russia Council, an organisation set up after the Cold War to generate and motivate good relations between the former Soviet Union and its old perceived adversary. Putin was in an ebullient mood. “So let’s be friends, guys, let’s be frank and open,” he quipped. Some of the reporters present had clapped him when he entered the hall. However, behind the smiles and the bravura performance, Putin had a message for the West. One of the items on the Nato summit agenda had been a proposal to hand to Ukraine and Georgia the greatest gift the alliance could offer, a membership action plan which would lead to both countries joining the organisation in due course. Any such move to expand eastwards to embrace Ukraine and Georgia would not “contribute to trust and predictability in our relations” and would be treated as “a direct threat to the security of our country”, Putin warned. From that moment, more than 13 years ago, the Ukraine issue became the standard bearer for both Nato which wanted its open door policy to include any nation which wished to adopt its values and defensive commitments, as well as for Putin who had decried the loss of the Soviet empire and still regarded Russia’s former Warsaw Pact ally as a Moscow satellite. The Nato summit held in the old Romanian dictator President Nicolae Ceausescu’s 1,000-room palace, had been an ill-conceived affair. President George W Bush had pushed hard for the membership plan to be handed to Ukraine and Georgia but wiser counsel, principally from France, Germany and Italy, softened what would have been viewed as a highly provocative move by the Russian president. With British negotiators at the heart of the struggle to avoid a slap in Putin’s face, a fudge was designed. The formal invitation for Nato membership was postponed. But it remained on the table. Thirteen years later Ukraine is getting impatient and is wondering why it has had to wait so long. Having watched as Nato expanded rapidly across eastern Europe, absorbing the eager and anxious Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, and the Baltics, plus Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, the sense of encroachment reached paranoia level inside the Kremlin. Putin struck back in 2014 with the annexing of Crimea and the long war in eastern Ukraine. Now Putin is trying to turn the tables on the West by effectively blackmailing Washington and other Nato capitals to reverse much of what was decided in Bucharest and previous Nato summits by threatening an invasion of Ukraine and other military retaliatory steps. The US and Russia will be holding talks to discuss these issues on January 10, and Putin and President Biden are talking on the phone today for the second time in less than a month. Looking ahead from the Kremlin’s point of view, Putin has always insisted that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, then Russian president, was given a promise that Nato wouldn’t expand eastwards. No such pledge was given. Indeed, Nato expansion eastwards was not an issue in 1990 although Gorbachev did raise Moscow’s concerns about the potential reunification of Germany and the possibility of Nato troops taking up positions closer to Russia. Since taking power, Putin has demonstrated his antipathy towards Nato. But does the alliance owe him some form of concession as a result of the expansion to Russia’s borders? Putin has posed his red lines, including scrapping all talk of Nato membership for Ukraine and a pull-back of troops and weapons from eastern Europe. Could or should Biden offer flexibility as a means of dissuading Putin from ordering an invasion of Ukraine? Withdrawing troops or weapons from Poland or the Baltics, or reneging on Nato’s acceptance of Ukraine’s right to apply for alliance membership are surely steps too far. However, could Biden, with Nato approval, offer extended talks with Moscow on the whole issue of alliance expansion in return for a stand-down of Russian forces on Ukraine’s border; or suggest confidence-building military exchanges and even some minor combined exercises to demonstrate good will? “If Biden/Nato offers to abandon the Ukrainians and the Poles and the Baltic states by agreeing to forego placing troops there it would be an attractive deal for Putin, giving him vastly increased geostrategic positional advantage and an enhanced ability for Moscow to engage in coercion against these states, “ said Andrew Krepinevich, a Washington-based security analyst who served on the personal staff of three US secretaries of defence. “Were I Biden I would tell Putin that if he attacks Ukraine Nato would do a great deal, short of introducing troops to aid Kyiv, such as providing intelligence equipment, perhaps engaging in cyber activities as well as imposing severe economic measures. But also to look to offer Putin a way out without losing face,” he said. Eric Edelman, undersecretary of defence for policy in the George W Bush administration, said all of the Russian complaints were based on a false premise, “which is that Nato is somehow threatening Russia”. It’s the same false premise that kept the Cold War alive for so long. “I don’t think Putin has grievances that he wants the West to assuage,” he said. “I think he just wants to be aggrieved to justify his aggressive policies to an increasingly restive Russian public that is sick of the economic stagnation and utter corruption of Putin’s kleptocratic regime,” he said. Whatever is in Putin’s mind right now, he will be seeking in the January 10 talks some counter-proposal from the US that will either meet his red-lines ultimatum which he must realise is unrealistic or will provide him with sufficient incentive to call back his troops from the Ukraine border. Any significant concession to appease Putin’s security concerns will be seen in Moscow as a sign of Washington’s weakness, something to be exploited in the future. Biden and his national security team, and fellow Nato leaders, have to find a formula that will sound concessionary without actually offering anything of real substance: an acknowledgment of Putin’s concerns and a commitment to improved relations and communications, but only if the threat to Ukraine’s borders is lifted.