ANALYSIS

Thirty years to a war

27 July 2026 — Russia / Ukraine / NATO

The context

Wars rarely erupt from a single cause. The one between Russia and Ukraine, in its fifth year of full-scale fighting by 2026, has roots reaching thirty years before the first shot — a useful case for understanding how an escalation is built, often with neither side fully able to stop it in time.

The roots (1990-2008)

In 1990, during talks on German reunification, US Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO jurisdiction would not move “one inch eastward.” Declassified National Security Archive documents (2017) show similar assurances repeated by other Western leaders in the following months. Historians disagree on how narrowly these applied to Germany alone; they agree that **none was ever formalised in a treaty**. In 1997 the NATO-Russia Founding Act, with Russia’s signature, affirms every state’s right to choose its own alliances. Two rounds of enlargement follow (1999, 2004). In 2008 the Bucharest Summit declares that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members,” with no timeline — an ambiguity that would prove more destabilising than a clear yes or no.

The interference never fully reckoned with (2014)

In February 2014 a phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt was intercepted and posted online — the US never disputed its authenticity. Reported by the BBC, it shows Nuland openly discussing who should lead Ukraine’s future government: “I think Yats is the guy [...] Klitsch and Tyahnybok need to stay on the outside.” After Yanukovych fled, Yatsenyuk did become prime minister. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war followed. The Minsk agreements (2014-2015) remained largely unimplemented over an unresolved ambiguity about which condition should be met first. A 2022 admission by former Chancellor Angela Merkel — that the agreements also served to “give Ukraine time to get stronger” — fed Russian distrust, though it remains an ex-post political statement, not an independently verifiable fact.

The ideological leap (2021)

In July 2021 Putin published the essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” later added to mandatory reading for the Russian military. It argues Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and questions the legitimacy of Ukraine’s borders, calling Ukraine an “anti-Russia project.” From here on the problem is no longer only military security, but Ukrainian nationhood itself — something no technical deal on missile bases could resolve. December 2021 brought a formal Russian ultimatum, rejected by the West.

The invasion and the miscalculation (2022)

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Russian planners expected capitulation within days. Per Foreign Affairs (Charap and Radchenko, based on direct interviews with negotiators), Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv in late March 2022 — presented by Moscow as a goodwill gesture — was in fact a forced retreat, after “the Russians had overestimated their capabilities and underestimated Ukrainian resistance.”

The window that closed (Istanbul, April 2022)

By mid-April 2022 Russia and Ukraine had reached a nearly complete draft treaty: Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the five permanent UN Security Council members. A Ukrainian negotiator publicly stated “we were very close to ending the war.” Why the deal collapsed remains contested: Moscow blames British pressure (never independently confirmed); the prevailing Western account attributes it to Kyiv’s choice, emboldened on the battlefield and shaken by the Bucha revelations, to press on rather than accept painful concessions.

The opposite effect

The December 2021 ultimatum and the invasion produced the exact opposite of Moscow’s stated goal: not a NATO retreat, but Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) joining, doubling the Alliance’s direct border with Russia.

The symmetry test

The legal and behavioural planes must be kept separate. Legally, the Russian invasion does not meet Article 51 requirements: there was no Ukrainian armed attack to repel, and this remains true regardless of what follows. Behaviourally, none of the three main actors comes out clean: the 2014 US interference, the Minsk ambiguity attributable to more than one party, Ukraine’s choice to fight on after Istanbul. None of this rebalances the legal plane.

Editorial judgment

The Russia-Ukraine case shows a pattern that will recur, with variations, in other conflicts: security dilemma, a narrative denying the other’s legitimacy, diplomacy left deliberately ambiguous, miscalculation, and at least one real diplomatic window left to lapse. Understanding this mechanism is not about distributing blame equally — the violation of international law remains a distinct fact — but about understanding why wars, once triggered, are so hard to close.

Fonti: BBC, Nuland-Pyatt call transcript (7 February 2014) · Christian Science Monitor (6 February 2014) · National Security Archive, George Washington University — "NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard" (2017) · Atlantic Council / OSW Centre for Eastern Studies — Putin’s essay (July 2021) · Foreign Affairs, Charap & Radchenko — "The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine" · European Council on Foreign Relations — "Ukraine, Russia, and the Minsk agreements: A post-mortem"

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