And complementing this principle is the core lesson from this crisis. That is, a robust settlement of the Ukraine issue requires an agreement that satisfies the interests of all three parties involved, Ukraine, NATO and Russia.    

Why does Ukraine matter to Russia? It can be summed up in one word – geography. Ukraine shares a land border with Russia that is just under 2,000 kilometers and a 321 km sea border. It is NATO’s continued insistence on the eventual incorporation of Ukraine as a member that is the underlying cause for the current crisis.

NATO has gone through five phases of expansion from 1999 to 2020, adding 14 countries as members. As a result, five of NATO’s 30 members share borders with Russia. These are Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway and Poland. A declaration released at the end of the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest specified that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO” at an unspecified date.

The problem with NATO’s plans is that membership for Ukraine (and Georgia for that matter) would represent a direct assault on Russian interests. The logic is straight-forward. Great powers naturally seek a sphere of influence. And Ukraine’s membership in NATO would almost certainly increase the momentum for Georgia to join the organization.

This should not be difficult for the US to understand. After all, sphere of influence logic has been US policy for two centuries.

Indeed, more serious US strategic thinkers understand the folly of unnecessarily heightening Russian insecurities by expanding NATO into Russia’s sphere of influence. In an opinion piece in the New York Times in February 1997, George Kennan, the architect of US Cold War containment concept, stated that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected … to impel Russian foreign policy in a direction decidedly not to our liking.”

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