During my tenure in Kyiv, State Department–sponsored public opinion polling never showed a majority of Ukrainian public support for NATO membership. Private sector polling showed that as late as 2012, only 28 percent of Ukrainians wished to join NATO. Not surprisingly, pro-Russian sentiment was stronger in the east, but the largest plurality was for neutrality. The 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea and the fomenting of a violent separatist movement in eastern Ukraine sharply shifted Ukrainian public opinion. A poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation in June 2017 found 69 percent supported joining the alliance.
Putin has promoted a narrative that the Western alliance took advantage of the chaos and weakness of Russia in the 1990s, and somehow pressured its former Warsaw Pact allies into joining NATO. But this was not the case at all. Having served in U.S. embassies for many years in communist Hungary (1986-1989) and later in post–Soviet bloc Ukraine (1997-1999) and Bulgaria (2009-2012), it is clear to me that Russia has mostly itself to blame for the alienation of its former allies.
As in the Kyiv NATO conference cited above, Western officials hardly took the initiative to strong-arm Eastern European countries into joining. On the contrary, starting with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, these former Soviet satellites whose aspirations for autonomy had been crushed by Soviet tanks (Budapest 1956, Prague Spring 1968) saw NATO membership as a shield from a future round of attacks from Russia. A wise post-Soviet Russian government policy would have been to issue swift and credible assurances that the era of Soviet-style suppression of true independence was past forever, and to implement that with concrete measures to reduce the threat perception.
Russia for its part would have benefited by reducing its burden of military expenditures. But Russian policy in the Putin years turned increasingly aggressive, beginning with the attack on Georgia in 2008, and then the annexation of Crimea, instigation of separatism in the eastern Donbas region, and the start of a troop buildup on the Ukrainian border in early 2021.
afsa.org
