Russian President Vladimir Putin has a Siberia-sized chip on his shoulder. He hasn’t gotten over the unraveling of the once-mighty Soviet Union, which he served as a KGB agent, and he doesn’t think the West pays sufficient attention to Russia’s security interests.
What’s a strongman to do? Threaten war, of course. Putin has amassed over 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, which Russia already has invaded once (in 2014) to forcibly annex Crimea.
As Ukrainian forces continue to battle pro-Russia separatists in the country’s Donbas region, a second invasion is a plausible threat. To defuse it, the Biden administration dispatched diplomats to meet their Russian counterparts in Geneva Monday. At Russia’s insistence, neither Ukraine nor European nations were invited to this parley, an omission that reflects Putin’s disdain for Europe and nostalgia for Cold War-style summitry.
Here’s the gun-to-the-head deal Russian diplomats put on the table: Russia won’t invade Ukraine if Washington agrees to halt NATO’s eastward expansion, and dismantle military infrastructure in Eastern European countries that have joined the alliance. They presented draft security treaties obliging NATO to rescind its 2008 offer of membership to Ukraine and Georgia.
