Russian President Vladimir Putin once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the past century”. Now he wants at least to restore Russia’s influence in the territory of the former USSR. He would like to push NATO back from this area and rule out any expansion and even military cooperation of the western defense alliance with states from the cosmos of the collapsed Soviet empire.
This emerges from the drafts of two security agreements that Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov presented on Friday. The Kremlin wants to conclude one treaty bilaterally with Washington, the other with NATO. Ryabkov handed the documents over to US diplomat Karen Donfried in Moscow on Wednesday; she briefed the NATO ambassador in Brussels on Thursday. It is already clear: in this form, both treaties are unacceptable both to Washington and to the other NATO allies.
NATO diplomats in Brussels pointed out that the allies had their own security concerns about Russia’s behavior, not least because of the troop deployment on the border with Ukraine. These would also have to be taken into account. The “core principles and fundamental documents of European security” would also have to be taken into account, as in a Statement by the North Atlantic Council is called. This means that every country can freely choose its alliances. A dialogue with Russia “is only possible in coordination with the European NATO partners”.
No expansion, no cooperation with former Soviet states
Moscow has been calling for security guarantees in the context of the Ukraine crisis for weeks, and the Kremlin has now spelled out what it means by this: The US should undertake to prevent further expansion of NATO to the east and to exclude the admission of further states that were earlier to Belonged to the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Georgia. Russia also demands that the USA must not enter into any military cooperation with former states of the USSR, nor establish bases there or use military infrastructure.
in the Russian draft treaty Moscow and Washington would also promise each other not to do anything that could affect the security interests of the other – without further defining it. The stationing of weapon systems should be restricted to one’s own territory as well as areas that are beyond the reach of the opposing side. Mainly missiles, cruise missiles, warships and strategic bombers are meant. This applies to both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea region, where Moscow has been complaining about the presence of US warships and air patrols for months.
The Document for NATO goes even further: Moscow calls on the Alliance to withdraw its troops behind the May 1997 lines. This would rule out the stationing of NATO units in the area of the former Warsaw Pact. This would affect Poland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Nato is also not allowed to send any soldiers to Albania or the territory of the former Yugoslavia that were non-aligned. The alliance would also be prohibited from any military activities in the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia in the future.
In 2008, NATO announced the prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining and cultivates cooperation in the form of training aids and support for reforms in the security sector. Ukraine receives defensive weapons from individual NATO states and, to a lesser extent, from structures of the alliance. In the “Partnership for Peace” launched in 1994, NATO cooperates with 20 countries that do not belong to the Alliance, including EU countries, but also Central Asian countries.
The US should withdraw its nuclear weapons, including from Germany
Russia is also calling for all nuclear weapons to be withdrawn to US territory, which meant a withdrawal of the tactical US warheads that were stationed in Germany and other allies as part of NATO’s nuclear participation. Moscow is also demanding that no medium-range nuclear weapons may be stationed within range of the opposing side. According to this formula, Russia could keep such weapons and station them in the Asian part of the country.
All NATO countries are unanimously convinced that Russia has broken the INF treaty banning medium-range nuclear weapons with ranges between 500 and 5500 kilometers by developing a cruise missile; the US then terminated him. While NATO has not yet pursued any plans to station such land-based weapons systems in Europe, according to NATO, Russia has the weapon system in question SSC-8 Introduced into the force with an estimated range of 2000 kilometers and stationed in the West military district bordering the NATO countries.
The Kremlin is now putting pressure on it. From the Russian side, talks about these documents could start tomorrow, said Ryabkov. The US and NATO “only have to sign, you can do that within a few days”. When asked that this proposal was hardly acceptable, Ryabkov said that he believed that the situation in Europe and Eurasia is “very different from what it was before”. The “colleagues on the other side” should “break away from the past” and completely rethink relations between Russia and the United States. In some places this should be understood more as a threat.