Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

Putin is more rational than Nato realises

Over the last nine weeks Vladimir Putin has moved more than 90,000 troops to the borders of Ukraine and, according to US intelligence, ordered his military planners to draw up detailed blueprints for a full-scale invasion. Putin insists the build-up is defensive. Russia is acting only in response to a ‘growing threat on our western border’, he told an audience of newly accredited diplomats in the Kremlin earlier this month, and to accuse Moscow of escalating tensions would be ‘laying the blame at the wrong door’.

Call it the Kennedy defence. In September 1962 US intelligence uncovered secret Soviet plans to station short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy lost no time in publicly warning the USSR that ‘if Cuba should ever become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union, then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies’.

Many — not least the Ukrainians — would find the comparison of Putin to Kennedy odious. But there is no denying that Putin believes he is following exactly the same logic. If America is entitled to protect its backyard from enemy military build-up, why not Russia?

Opposing Nato expansion has been a drum that Putin has been banging for more than 20 years — so far to no effect other than to scare his neighbours further into Nato’s embrace. But he remains convinced that the alliance has been consistently acting in bad faith, promising one thing and doing another. Last week, he said that all Russia wants is to be ‘granted reliable and long-term security guarantees… precisely legal, juridical guarantees because our western colleagues have failed to deliver on verbal commitments they made. Specifically, every-one is aware of the assurances they gave verbally that Nato would not expand to the east.

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Written by
Owen Matthews
Owen Matthews writes about Russia for The Spectator and is the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.

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