NATO tries to discourage Putin from additional expansionism

At last week’s NATO summit in Wales, President Obama and the Western European nations drew a line in the sand and warned Russia not to cross it.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, that country is on the wrong side of the line. NATO has no grounds on which to threaten military action against Russia, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to support pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine. And, frankly, Western Europe has shown little inclination to get further involved in Ukraine than it already has.

The Ukrainian government is going to have to fight its own battles with the separatists, hoping that they can inflict enough damage on those forces to effect a cease-fire. Crimea is irrevocably lost, and the eastern front is effectively lost, as well. The present tenuous cease-fire in Ukraine will help Russia establish new lines for its area of influence in Ukraine. It is drawing its own lines on which future boundaries will be established.

Perhaps the government in Kiev can stem further losses if it gets financial and military support from the West, along with even more stringent economic sanctions aimed at Russia. Clearly the separatists couldn’t score the kinds of gains they have against Kiev without Russian support, any more than they could have shot down a Malaysian airliner without access to Russian rocket launchers and technical support.

Putin knew he would be facing pushback from the West, including the United States, if he took back parts of Ukraine, but he calculated that the cost of the West’s response would be outweighed by his gains in the Crimean Peninsula and the ethnic-Russian eastern Ukraine. There are not only economic benefits to Russia, but there are political benefits to Putin, whose Ukrainian strategy is popular with Russians. It shows, among other things, that the Russian bear still has a growl to be reckoned with.

WARNING TO RUSSIA

However, NATO’s declaration Friday serves as a strong warning to Putin that if his expansionist ambitions extend beyond Ukraine to other former Soviet republics and satellites, force would be met with force, not economic sanctions.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria have become NATO members. As such, the 27 NATO nations, including the United States, are bound by the 1949 NATO treaty to respond to an attack on any state as an attack on all.

Putin has been a vocal opponent of NATO’s expansion, and it could be argued that he acted against Ukraine now precisely because it was not yet a NATO member. If so, he recognizes that the cost of violating a NATO nation’s sovereignty is far greater than the cost of supporting a pro-Moscow uprising in Ukraine.

Putin, now 61, cannot be underestimated — not for his ruthlessness, not for his political survival instincts and not for his devotion to the concept of returning Russia to its glory days. He has cycled between terms as Russian prime minister and president since 1999, and a second six-year term as president would keep him in office until at least 2024.

Look for Russia to be a topic of debate in the 2016 U.S. presidential debates with a degree of intensity unseen since the Reagan era.

In the meantime, President Obama and his European allies are going to have to be steadfast in sending a message to Putin that the world has been awakened to the dangerous nature of his ambition. Putin must become convinced that the West is ready to unite in ways that would make further expansion of the empire he envisions more expensive to him and his countrymen than it is worth.