Abstract

A number of Western scholars have been building an argument for quite some time that the United States and its allies are to blame for Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 (including the annexation of Crimea) and its subsequent full-scale assault in 2022. The case that NATO’s actions caused the war is difficult to sustain in the face of overwhelming evidence that President Vladimir Putin’s imperial beliefs are far more important to understanding why the Russian president wants control of Ukraine. NATO enlargement contributed to the deterioration in the West’s relations with Russia over the past quarter century, but that was to an important extent because Russian imperialists never fully accepted Eastern Europe’s sovereignty and rejected Ukraine’s altogether.

These scholars believe that the issue is one of classic great power politics and preventive war, and that the root cause of the Russia-Ukraine war is essentially what Putin sometimes says it is: NATO encroached onto Russia’s sphere of influence, and Putin had no choice but to respond as he did. Their solution is therefore straightforward: grant Russia its coveted sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union—Russia’s neighbors will have to “learn to be both more fearful of and more deferential to the Kremlin,” as political scientist Graham Allison put it—and build a foundation for better relations between the West and Russia at the expense of Eastern Europe’s sovereignty and security.

Rather than seeing Putin’s full-scale invasion as a preventive war launched to protect Russian security from an encroaching NATO, we need to understand his war as an imperial war designed to bring Ukraine under Russian control. Putin is looking to rebuild Russian greatness through empire, with profound implications for the future of European security and world politics. Analysts who emphasize realist logic may not believe that world politics affords the possibility of protecting the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and agency of small states (particularly as Central and Eastern Europeans were seeking to join NATO; membership was not imposed on them), but a globally legitimate international order depends on it.

In this article, we first briefly lay out the argument that the reckless pursuit of NATO enlargement caused Putin’s war against Ukraine. Second, we revisit the history of NATO enlargement and US-Russia relations after the Cold War, showing that it was one irritant among many in the US-Russian relationship; that Ukraine was not close to joining NATO in 2021 when Putin made the decision for full-scale war; and that Russian fear of NATO was not a major factor in the march to war. Instead, we argue that Putin’s imperial beliefs about Ukraine were the most important cause of the war. Putin had long sought to bring Ukraine under Russian political control and made the decision for war at a time when everything else he had tried had failed to achieve this core objective. These deeply held beliefs were compounded by a flawed decision-making process that convinced Putin that it would be easy to overthrow the Ukrainian government and put in place a pro-Russian puppet regime. The 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we conclude, was primarily about imperial beliefs, not great power politics.