An Alternative Approach to Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy before February 2022

There is no doubt that NATO expansion, particularly the West’s refusal to compromise on enlargement to Ukraine and settle for a buffer zone with Russia, was the main cause of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, the War over NATO Expansion, or the Maidan War. Whichever title one prefers, the essence remains the same: the present war is a war for the West’s self-proclaimed ‘right’ to expand NATO wherever and whenever it chooses under its so-called ‘open door policy.’ This has been proven by Ukrainian leaders’, and in particular, Kiev’s lead negotiator at the Russo-Ukrainian peace talks in March-April 2022, who testified to the fact that the issue was Russia’s main demand during the negotiations (https://twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1728157255009198202?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1728157255009198202|twgr^af3e5351276acc73ac2d461311ac3c612ca98c3b|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html). Moreover, Ukrainian negotiator and Kiev’s former ambassador to the US, Oleksandr Chaly, noted that “Putin did everything possible” to achieve agreement in those talks and personally approved the preliminary draft agreement (https://twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1740231338546864453?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1740231338546864453|twgr^af3e5351276acc73ac2d461311ac3c612ca98c3b|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html; see also https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html and https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1750362694949966291?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ). Although this is generally true, putting aside the rhetorical hyperbole, it can be argued and may have even been the case that the Russian president had viable options other than beginning Russia’s ‘special military operation’ on 22 February 2022. What might they have been?

One option would have been for Putin to accept the January 2022 US counteroffer to conduct talks and arms control and a new European security architecture made in response to Putin’s December 2021 proposals for negotiating the NATO-Ukraine issue, NATO-Russian arms control, and a new European security architecture (www.npr.org/2022/01/26/1075880940/biden-administration-is-offering-to-negotiate-with-russia-over-the-crisis-in-ukr). Even while understanding that Washington and Brussels were highly unlikely to respond positively to any Russian effort to raise the Ukraine issue, no less to abandon, or at least place a moratorium on NATO expansion to the country, there would have been value perhaps in making the attempt. First, any attempt to negotiate arms control and especially European security without addressing the Ukraine issue would have been futile. So if any Western counteroffer to Moscow’s December 2021 proposals and any intent to seek an accommodation with Moscow on arms and security had been sincere, perhaps the West would have conceded to talks and perhaps, say, a moratorium rather than a full prohibition on NATO expansion to Ukraine. This is particularly so, given the coercive diplomacy that Putin was conducting at the time and could have been intensified, if necessary, but maintained below the SMO threshold. Second, if the West was insincere or insisted on keeping Ukraine off the table, then Moscow could have been more robust in its coercive diplomacy below the SMO threshold while it appealed to the UN to adopt a resolution on the need for a compromise on NATO’s Ukraine expansion project. Third, in the event of the latter case, Moscow would have unmasked the West’s obstinacy and disregard for Russia’s security concerns, lending Moscow perhaps even greater support for any SMO it decided to undertake.

Moreover, In lieu of a willingness to compromise regarding NATO enlargement on the West’s part, Moscow could have gone farther than it did in ratcheting up the coercive component of its pre-SMO diplomacy by gradually leaning more and more forward militarily. If that failed to prompt the West to negotiate, then posing the threat of occupying the Donbas breakaway regions, the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR). If the West remained obstinate, Russia then could have appealed to the UN one last time for a resolution condemning NATO’s open door policy towards Ukraine. This could then have been followed by employing the Crimean model in the LNR and DNR, which would have been an almost explicit threat of something larger perhaps to come. If Moscow was indeed concerned over the de facto NATOization of Ukraine then ongoing, it could have then made explicit threats of further military action, if NATO did not agree to a treaty on Ukrainian neutrality, all the while demonstrating its restraint from carrying out a larger military operation like the SMO Putin ultimately decided to implement. If the SMO was then necessary, with NATO rejecting Ukrainian neutrality yet again, then it or something similar likely would have been more effective in prompting a successful Gomel-Istanbul process, begun immediately after Russia’s February invasion but scuttled by the West in early April. 

In terms of the former coercive measures, leaning more and more forward militarily, a host of various measures could have been incrementally implemented. Moscow could have gradually increased the geographical scope and military power of semi-symmetrical or asymmetrical measures to maximize Russian security and challenge Western security along the NATO-Russian line of contact. Geographically, additional troop and weapons deployments could have been made to the Russian border area near Ukraine (Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk), in Belarus, in Kaliningrad, and near the borders of the Baltic states. Military deployment could be escalated by a mix of measures such as increasing troops strength, deployment of various conventional and even nuclear weapons. For example, Russia could have massed more troops and build military bases for hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with the separatist breakaway territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics (not today’s entire ‘constitutional oblasts’) at higher levels than occurred throughout 2021. Another example would the stationing of additional troops and tactical nuclear and conventional missiles in Kaliningrad, at one of the military bases near the Ukrainian border, and in Belarus if Minsk was amenable. With the threat level raised, Moscow again could have proposed once more that Washington and Brussels reconsider Moscow’s December 2021 proposals on Ukraine and a new European security architecture.

If the above military encroachments failed to produce results, Putin could have implemented the truncated version of the SMO or applied the Crimean model to the Donbas breakaway regions. First, he could have sent in troops to occupy the breakaway territories, while subtly implying the need to occupy all the territory of the two regions beyond the rump regions under the separatists’ control. A robust force of at least 60,000 troops could have been sent into Donbas, with another 100,000 stationed right over the border in Russia. He could have then threatened to annex the regions if Minsk 2 was not implemented by Kiev within a period of two months, particularly the clauses on direct negotiations with the Donbas separatists and the adoption of a Ukrainian law on the breakaway regions’ autonomy as envisaged under Minsk 2 and fully ignored by Kiev. A key demand would have been the withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops out of artillery range of said territories along with the standing requirement that NATO and Ukraine sign a treaty with Russia guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality. Moscow could have sought this reinvigoration of Minsk II without the participation of the Western powers, limiting their role to the signing of a treaty on Ukrainian neutrality. If all this failed to move Western minds, Moscow then could have proceeded with referenda as was done in Crimea in 2014 and later under the larger SMO in the breakaway Donbas regions themselves and then recognized there independence, as Russia did with regard to Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the August 2008 Five-Day Georgian-Ossetian/Russian War. Refraining from annexing them would have allowed Moscow to employ annexation as a threat to force NATO finally to agree to Ukrainian neutrality. Another rejection from the West then could have been used to justify annexation of the LNR and DNR. One final gambit would have been to play the same game, using the threat to incorporate the larger, full Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. If NATO once more rejected Moscow’s overtures for a treaty on Ukrainian neutrality, then military action could have begun to seize the remainder of the oblasts. All this would have left the rest of Novorossiya, the Azov and Black Sea coasts and Kiev untouched. A similar approach of ratcheting up military action could have applied to those areas if wished.

To be sure, such an incremental approach has its shortcomings. It would have allowed the NATOized Ukrainian army to meet the Russian advances, but it would have also made it easier to blame Kiev for the outbreak of a larger war, and indeed it would have made it more likely that Kiev would initiated a larger war first. Another minus is that realization of this Crimean model would not have solved the problem of Ukraine’s creeping, or stealth NATOization that had progressed ever more intensively from 2014 forward. NYT CIA article. As the New York Times so kindly reported in February of this year, the CIA was deeply embedded in Ukraine from 2014, had 12 intelligence and operational centers there, and trained Ukrainians who were already carrying out attacks against pro-Russian Donbas separatists (https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001pvh7zNuvk9sG1Z_xPjXHBmVlP4sgLFzVG_ZsnatlSHVXTeBeDPntUyToye_h1dkS2-34ofEboTDGB8T6NH7mjewLFsC83M7_agtWG45oHqMkCqm99cuGNhXeq2D3gQ-DAn9wYGSKqCm4s0IpRBckiFqKZnQ6gkjnVWlBdCiCop2QDOL0gPrAVm8cV-Gt9PsCMdUrEjeHFooGJdFjSCiNMHIPwT-xjRnmgWAdb4zYX3XoZZ9splZgOA==&c=_c-56anW6yQKbUHOvdmpR5Jlr5aGtDKIjFhKA_dsMxFDwPRDZBpQGg==&ch=NSBYJsncXxolDQfb9F2xmUKUyF5mqXsQrBBQaehit6Yd4tSDUVxh7Q== and https://gordonhahn.com/2024/03/10/update-to-did-the-west-intentionally-incite-putin-to-war/). Also there have been previous reports that NATO troops, British and Polish, were in Ukraine from the very beginning of the war (Hindustani Times, Polish journalist Zbigniew Parafaniowicz, https://youtu.be/Igrh79RKpIA?si=VvTGcBDybuQUOAOY). However, the reports do not specify exactly when the troops arrived. If they arrived before 24 February 2022 or before Putin’s final decision to invade days or at the most weeks earlier, did Russian intelligence discover this and report it to Putin, driving the decision? Surely or at least very likely, the growing NATO presence in Ukraine and creeping integration of Kiev’s armed forces into NATO also helped drive Putin February 2022 invasion decision. The CIA and any Western military presence surely would have made very difficult, but not impossible a decision to participate in talks with the West before making a final decision to invade. It is important to recall that Russia’s army was not ready for all-out war in Ukraine, no less with Kiev receiving massive NATO support. It had cut its defense budget as recently as 2016, with only minor increases afterwards, and had an army too small to take Kiev and all of the more pro-Russian territories stretching in a long arc from Kharkov in the northeast of Ukraine down through Donbas and turning west in the south along the Black Sea over to Kherson.

In addition to some or all of the above, before military action, occupation, and annexation of the Donbass, Putin could have undertaken some of the steps that have been taken in the international arena more broadly since the SMO began such as: turning even more to the ‘strategic partnership’ with China, invigorating relations with Iran and North Korea, expanding BRICS, and refocusing Moscow’s oil and gas trade.

If all the above failed, then Putin could have proceeded with the SMO and another attempt to negotiate—this time directly with Kiev, as he eventually did. Again, however, it is important to point out that having done some of the above, the Gomel-Istanbul process would have taken place in a wholly different international environment, given the Russia’s more than good faith effort to put off as long as possible the much more violent coercive ‘diplomacy’ of the February 2022 SMO. In such an alternative atmosphere, Washington and Brussels may have been more hard-pressed to succeed in scuttling those talks and wage a proxy war-turned semi-direct war for the precious ‘right’ to expand NATO all along Russia’s borders and beyond.

In the end, NATO’s increasing build up in Ukraine seems to have made any delay in undertaking military action seem too risky in Putin’s eyes. The Western build up created the sense that the longer Moscow waited to escalate its coercive diplomacy the less effective it would be. Put before a choice between action and inaction, Putin is the kind of leader to choose the former. History will tell whether he made the right call in starting the special military operation in Ukraine.

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About the Author – 

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media. 

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.