Thread by @nataliabugayova

1/ Putin didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO. He invaded because he believed that NATO was weak, that his efforts to regain control of Ukraine by other means had failed, and that installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv would be safe and easy. The primary goal of the Kremlin’s anti-NATO rhetoric has been to justify Putin’s foreign policies that often had little to do with NATO, as my @TheStudyofWar colleagues @KatStepanenko and Dr. Fred Kagan, and I have written: . 🧵understandingwar.org/backgrounder/w…

2/ Putin has long sought to break NATO and Western unity, but not because the Kremlin felt militarily threatened by NATO. Russia’s military posture during Putin’s reign has demonstrated that Putin has never been primarily concerned with the risk of a NATO attack on Russia. Russian military reforms since 2000 have not prioritized creating large mechanized forces on the Russian borders with NATO to defend against invasion. Russia deployed the principal units designed to protect Russia from NATO to Ukraine, which posed no military threat to Russia, in 2021 and 2022. In 2023 - at the height of Russia’s anti-NATO rhetoric - Russia continued to withdraw forces and military equipment from its actual land borders with NATO to support the war in Ukraine.

3/ Putin has always been more concerned about the loss of control over Russia’s perceived sphere of influence than about a NATO threat to Russia. Putin’s actual issue with NATO and the West has been that they offered an alternative path to countries that Putin thought fell in Russia’s self-declared sphere of influence. The “color revolutions” that so alarmed Putin were, after all, the manifestations of those countries daring to choose the West, or, rather the way of life, governance and values the West represented, over Moscow.

4/ NATO and the West threatened Russia by simply existing and being the preferred partner to many former Soviet states – which, in Putin’s view, undermined Russia’s influence over these states. Putin saw the ability to control former Soviet states as an essential prerequisite to reestablishing Russia as a great power. In simple terms, the West – and those in the former Soviet states who preferred to partner with the West even without fully breaking with Russia - stood between Putin and what he believed to be Russia’s rightful role in the world.

5/ The prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership did not drive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The first NATO commitment to admitting Ukraine to the alliance came in the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, which promised Ukraine and Georgia paths to membership but took no concrete steps toward opening such paths. Successive NATO summits generated no further progress toward membership for either country. Putin intensified the narrative that NATO was a threat to Russia over the years, alleging by 2021 that Russia feared NATO’s imminent expansion in Eastern Europe. NATO had taken no meaningful actions to enlarge at the time, however. Accession of new members to the alliance requires that they complete a formal Membership Action Plan (MAP). NATO produced no MAP for Ukraine or Georgia, meaning that the formal process for their accession had not even begun. NATO had taken no new formal steps toward Ukrainian membership by the time of the 2022 Russian re-invasion beyond restating the 2008 Bucharest Declaration promising Ukraine a path to NATO membership in a 2021 June communique that followed a massive Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. Ukraine enshrined the commitment to joining NATO in its constitution in 2019, and NATO recognized Ukraine as an Enhanced Opportunity Partner in 2020. Neither of these events constituted formal steps toward NATO membership. The Enhanced Opportunity Partnership announcement explicitly said that Ukraine’s new status “does not prejudge any decisions on NATO membership.”

6/ The blocks on Ukraine’s accession to the alliance that Putin had helped establish remained firmly in place. Russia had succeeded by 2022 in freezing any move to bring Ukraine into NATO in accord with the 2008 declaration, and there was no plausible argument to make that any further enlargement of the alliance was imminent. Hungary’s relatively pro-Russian position and NATO’s unwillingness to absorb a new member state with an unresolved military conflict with Russia meant not only had there been no meaningful progress toward Ukrainian NATO membership by 2022 but also that no progress was on the horizon. Putin had effectively blocked Ukrainian accession to the alliance by the time he launched his full-scale invasion— clear evidence that Russian fears of imminent Ukrainian NATO membership did not drive the invasion.

7/ The prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership had most certainly not driven Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Ukraine pursued a non-alignment policy, the NATO Bucharest Declaration notwithstanding, from 2010 through 2014. Ukraine renounced its non-alignment status in December of 2014 as a direct result of Russia invading Ukraine and illegally occupying three of its regions in 2014. This point is essential to keep in mind for those who argue that Putin’s goal is Ukraine’s neutrality.

8/ Russian fictional rhetoric notwithstanding, nothing about the NATO threat was more urgent in 2022 than it had been for years, and Putin could offer no plausible reason for thinking that it would become more urgent any time soon. We must look elsewhere for the explanation for the 2022 invasion, and therefore for Putin’s actual war aims. Read more in our 2023 @TheStudyofWar assessment "Weakness is Lethal: Why Putin Invaded Ukraine and How the War Must End." 🔚understandingwar.org/backgrounder/w…