Putin

According to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine would surrender its nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantlement. In turn, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom pledged to “respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders” and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine.” The memorandum was, however, not binding like a treaty, as subsequent events would amply demonstrate.

At first Ukraine seemed to have a good chance. It had coal, iron, and the fabled “black earth.” The people had the positive, life-affirming energy of the sunny south, as John Steinbeck noted when traveling through back in 1948: “The people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the street.”

But things went bad soon enough. Though the economy righted itself after a long, nasty bout of inflation and a 60 percent drop in GDP in the nineties, Ukraine was still failing at its two principal tasks—state-building and nation-building. The east and west of the country, which had been in agreement about seceding from the USSR, soon found themselves increasingly at odds, splitting along the fault lines of cultural allegiance either to Moscow or toward Kiev, meaning Europe and the West. With a little luck Ukraine might have developed into something like Bulgaria, a largely invisible European country, a destination for adventurous vacationers. There were, however, forces afoot that would make Ukraine the most important country in Europe.

Chief among them was what might be called “Gorby and the angry inch.” Though its implications are blurred with denial and duplicity, there is a generally agreed upon version of the event itself. In a 1990 conversation between Soviet leader Gorbachev and American secretary of state James Baker, Baker promised Gorbachev that if he pulled Soviet troops out of East Germany and permitted the peaceful reunion of the two Germanys, NATO, in return, would not move “one inch east.”

NATO, of course, moved not inches but hundreds of miles east. This was effectuated by granting membership to three former Soviet republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and seven former Eastern Bloc countries—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia between 1999 and 2004. George Kennan, U.S. ambassador to the USSR and author of the containment doctrine that guided U.S. policy throughout the Cold War, called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era” and foresaw its leading to a resurgence of “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”

But of course there were other factors and forces here besides NATO expansionism. The former Soviet Bloc countries were only too happy to take cover behind NATO’s shield. Having suffered centuries of Moscow’s domination, their desire for freedom and security was only natural. And among those nations there was also a strong sense that the democratic Russia of the nineties was a passing illusion, or as Estonia’s president Lennart Meri, saw it, Russia was a malignancy in remission: the Yeltsin era was at best a fleeting opportunity to be seized before Russia relapsed into authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.

What gave those formerly Warsaw Pact nations their sense of security was Article 5 of the NATO charter, which states: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

This meant that the United States and Europe were in the rather odd position of having to risk nuclear armageddon to defend Slovenia.

And of course none of this went over well in Moscow, where Baker’s promise had been taken seriously. The obvious rejoinder here is: Next time, get it in writing, pal, or perhaps Samuel Goldwyn’s immortal line that a “verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

But the obvious rejoinder from Gorbachev and company could be: We were dismantling a nuclear empire and facing one crisis after the other, and did not have the time for all the niceties. Not only that—one’s word counts for a great deal in any dealings with Russians, and true partners don’t need everything on paper. As Gorbachev himself put it in a recent interview: “The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises. It shows they cannot be trusted.”