An important, largely unstated, subtext to current Russian concerns about alleged Western expansionism and military build-up in eastern Europe is the slow but significant political integration of Ukraine into the EU's periphery. Ukraine would like membership, once promised but now long-fingered by the EU, and has to content itself with involvement in its Eastern Partnership, a major programme of aid and political and economic rapprochement with former Soviet republics.
Not surprisingly, given the closeness of that relationship with its neighbour, the EU diplomatic machine is frustrated by exclusion from the current round of Ukraine-related discussions – bilateral talks between the US and Moscow on Monday, at Nato yesterday, and in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development later in the week. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has written to foreign ministers insisting "our main goal should be to ensure EU involvement in the process".
The exclusion of the EU reflects the reality of the union’s diplomatic disunity and as-yet-embryonic status as a foreign policy power and a security union concerned with defence, and of the framing of the current crisis as essentially about containing military threats. On Russia’s part that is of Nato positioning missiles and offensive capabilities on Russia’s borders; on the Western part, of the threat of invasion posed by the massing of troops on Ukraine’s border.
Putin's demand that the US guarantee to prevent further enlargement of Nato is one that cannot and will not be met
But Moscow's narrative of encirclement is not, as it is describing it, primarily a military threat, but a fear of the encroachment of alternative democratic models of governance, of the erosion of its political legitimacy and the sustainability of autocratic rule. There is no risk that Nato will attack Russia, but there is every chance that European democratic values and ideas will continue gradually to erode Vladimir Putin's grip on power. And so the current war of words between Moscow and the West, notwithstanding the understandable security fears in Ukraine's EU neighbours, is largely a phoney war that ignores the beast in the room, Russia's real vulnerability to political contamination.
Putin's demand that the US guarantee to prevent further enlargement of Nato is one that cannot and will not be met. US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman on Monday reassured allies that there will be a place at the table: " We will not make decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine, about Europe without Europe, about Nato without Nato. As we say to our allies and partners, nothing about you, without you".
It is significant, however that Putin’s demand was not accompanied by similar insistence in respect of EU membership. Moscow has made clear repeatedly that it regards Ukraine’s closening relationship with the EU as an act of hostility.