The tragedy in Ukraine is not NATO´s fault

Some commentators agree with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov and other Russian leaders, who say that NATO´s expansion eastward is a threat to Russia. Since 1999 14 East European countries have become NATO members.  One of the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine was that he wanted to prevent the country from establishing ties with the West. 

In 2013 Ukraine, under the leadership of President Viktor Yanukovych, negotiated a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union. The Russians put pressure on him not to sign the deal, and instead seek closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. This despite the large majority of Ukrainians who wanted both EU and NATO membership. Massive protests followed, culminating in the Maidan Revolution in February 2014.

The history of East Europe since 1940 explains why countries in this region sought association with Western Europe when the opportunity presented itself as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Take for example the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Soviet Union invaded these countries in 1940 on Stalin´s orders. Soviet friendly regimes were installed, and the societies were «sovietified» by various means, such as required Russian language teaching in the schools. During the period of 1940-1953 some 200.000 people labelled «anti-Soviet elements» were deported to Siberia and areas north of Kazakhstan. In addition, some 75.000 people were sent to Soviet concentration camps, known as Gulag. Together these figures made up 10 percent of the adult Baltic population. From 1947 all private farms were confiscated, and the farmers were forced to work on collective farms.

Or take what happened to the rest of Eastern Europe after Germany capitulated in 1945. In the aftermath of the invasion in Normandy in June 1944, the allied forces moved eastward into Germany, while the Red Army moved in from the East. The United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each assumed responsibility for a quarter of Germany. The allied powers gave their sectors back to the Germans in September 1949. Thus, West Germany was established. A month later East Germany saw the light of day. The Soviet Union dominated politics in East Germany. The country became a member of the communistic, economic organization COMECON and the military Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet Union also dominated countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. While the United States sent 13.5 billion dollars (135 billion in 2022 dollars) known as the Marshall Aid, to West Europe, the Soviets dismantled factories all over Eastern Europe and rebuilt them in the Soviet Union.  Farmers were forced to work on collective farms.

Protest movements emerged, and the Soviet reaction was brutal. First in Hungary in 1956, then in Czechoslovakia in 1968 mass protests were stopped with tanks and soldiers firing on people. In East Germany the flood of refugees into West Germany was stopped by the erection of the Berlin wall in August 1961. The whole of Eastern Europe was held captive behind the so-called Iron Curtain until 1989. Eastern Europeans breaching the wall in to West Berlin constituted the end of the dream of world communist dominion, which was kindled during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

When Western Europeans saw how the Soviet Union captured Eastern Europe after the Second World War, they joined the United States and Canada and established NATO in 1949. The whole point of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is to prevent Soviet expansion westward. NATO has never threatened the Soviet Union or Russia. But the organization has an open-door policy, which means that countries desiring membership and are qualified, are welcomed into NATO.

The Russians look at NATO as a threat. This is not new. In the mid-nineties I flew in a Russian cargo plane to Armenia with medical supplies donated by the Norwegian Church Aid. These supplies were destined for Nagorno-Karabakh and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I was sent by the foreign news desk of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and sat in the back of the cockpit.  Conversing with the Russian crew, I discovered that several of us had been in the area around the Norwegian/Russian border during 1969/70. I was there as a soldier with the Norwegian Army Northern Brigade which constitute NATO´s northern flank. The Russians had been with the Russian forces on the Kola peninsula. My new Russian friends wanted to know if we at that time planned to invade Russia. That was at least what their officers told them. I said that neither during the large-scale NATO exercise Artic Express, nor at any other time during my military service had I or any other person I knew, been involved in anything other than preparations for defense of Norway and West Europe against a possible Russian attack. This despite the incident the year before, in 1968, when the Russians surprised our border guards in the garrison of Sør-Varanger, by rushing up a column of tanks stopping just short of the border.

During the entire postwar era, the Soviet Union/Russia has been a threat against Western-Europe and also against its own citizens. It was Michael Gorbatsjov who, at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, managed to end the Cold War in cooperation with Ronald Reagan. He introduced terms like Glasnost (economic restructuring) and Perestroika (openness). All this led to what President Putin, in his address to the Russian people in 2005, described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in a century. What now threatens the peace in Europe and the world at large, is that Putin wants to rebuild what collapsed in 1991.