The implications for Putin’s policy toward Ukraine and Belarus of NATO and EU expansion

The New Strategic Triangle that includes the United States, the European Union and Russia has had a significant impact on other relationships as well, especially relations among states along the new borders. In recent years, this impact has been evident in the Caucasus (especially in Georgia) and in Central Asia (especially in Uzbekistan), but nowhere as evident as in Ukraine and Belarus. And as indicated in the introductory chapter of this volume nowhere has the clash of two (the US and the EU) with the third (Russia) been as evident as in the Ukrainian presidential elections in late 2004, where two political cultures and political norm systems clashed. The ‘orange revolution’ was in my view a showdown between the ‘European’ and the ‘Asian’ and the normative differences between the two, the importance of which goes far beyond Ukrainian domestic politics. Chapter 6 in this volume studies the way in which security issues are handled in the EU and Russia: different perceptions of security constitute an obstacle to further cooperation in the field. The analysis of the US-Russian relationship in Chapter 10 tells us how the NATO enlargement issue has affected – and not affected – the triangular relationship. In this chapter, we are concerned with the extent to which President Putin has attempted to surf on the enlargement debate and practice to regain control of the culturally, socially, politically, militarily and economically closest Russian neighbours – Ukraine and Belarus – by using geo-economic rather than geo-political means.