Volodymyr Ishchenko, International Socialism:
As for the question of NATO, this is a question not so much of Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO, but of Russia’s exclusion—a point Putin himself emphasises quite often.
This is apparent, for example, from recently de-classified transcripts of conversations between Putin and George W Bush in the 2000s. In a recent article in the Washington Quarterly, political scientist Deborah Boucoyannis marshals evidence that NATO’s eastward expansion was not driven by fear of a Russian military threat as Russia was widely seen as quite weak in the 1990s. Rather, she demonstrates that this expansion was about filling the “security vacuum” left in Eastern Europe after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In addition, local elites looked to anchor themselves within the Western civilisation, fearing that their own plebeian classes, hit hard by post-socialist transition, might become politically receptive to Russia.
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If Western corporations had been allowed to acquire ownership of Russian oil and gas in the 1990s, Russia would have been an earlier member of NATO than Poland. But this didn’t happen. The integration of the Russian economy and political system into Euro-Atlantic structures would have required much more profound change than was the case in Eastern Europe, which took a different “transition” path after 1989, including opening themselves to transnational capital.
