NATO, European Security, and the role of Russia at the end of the Cold War

In his statements of February 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, besides accusing the Ukrainian government of violence against the Russian-speaking populations of Donbass, Vladimir Putin stigmatized the process of Kyiv’s close cooperation with the United States and NATO. Ukraine’s NATO membership would jeopardize Russia’s security, as – in Putin’s word – it would be a «direct threat» to Moscow, a sort of «knife in the throat», held by the United States and its allies to contain Russia’s role in global politics. According to the Russian president, the actual origin of the ongoing conflict (for the outbreak of which the defense of Russian-speaking minorities appears more as the immediate trigger rather than the deep cause) is the failure to build a new European security system at the end of the Cold War, within which post-Soviet Russia might have felt unthreatened by the international choices of the other European States, to begin with those of its neighbors. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to offer an overall picture and a critical reflection of the post-1989 European security problem in the light of the available documentation, the memoirs of some of the leading figures of international politics of that period, and the most relevant scholarly works on the attempt to create a post-Cold War Europe.

Keywords: NATO’s enlargement to the East; European security; post-Soviet Russia

Massimo Bucarelli, La Nato, la sicurezza europea e il ruolo della Russia alla fi ne della Guerra fredda in "VENTUNESIMO SECOLO" 52/2023, pp 9-34, DOI: 10.3280/XXI2023-052002