“Was the body language coming out of Washington, Kiev and every European capital enough to provide some room for trade if he wanted it? Yes. But he didn’t seem to pick it up,” Mr. Kupchan said.
“I think that if we go back to the early 1990s, the US foreign policy institution has dismissed Russia’s objections to NATO enlargement too easily,” he added. “That said, stepping back from the events of recent months, the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO seems more like a smokescreen than the crux of the matter” to Mr Putin.
Understand the Russian attack on Ukraine
What is the basis of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine to be within its natural sphere of influence, and it has become nervous about Ukraine’s proximity to the West and the prospect of the country becoming a member of NATO or the European Union. Although Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.
Andrew S. Weiss, the head of the Russia-Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia had made impossible demands from the start, but the illusion of diplomacy sparked a political debate in the West that Mr. P. Putin’s purposes. Moscow, he said, focused “quite cleverly on age-old complaints about Ukraine’s theoretical suitability for NATO membership, knowing that this issue triggers many people in the West.”
The United States had an “old and predictable academic debate with ourselves about whether previous administrations’ policies were unnecessarily provocative toward the Kremlin,” said Mr. weiss. That discussion, he added, played into the hands of “isolationists like former President Trump who argue that American alliances are an unnecessary burden and that Americans would do better to defend the border with Mexico.”
“In Europe, where anti-Americanism and Ukraine fatigue lie just beneath the surface, the Kremlin’s Potemkin diplomacy has also paid off,” said Mr. weiss.
Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said it’s hard to know whether Mr. Putin ever took diplomacy seriously. But she said he might have expected the extreme pressures of invasion to break the West and make him concessions. “Because he underestimated Western unity, he may have felt trapped and couldn’t pull back without showing it,” she said.
Ms Schake said it was also possible that Mr Putin was shocked by the quality of the Biden government’s intelligence, including access to its war plans, “and furiously pulled the trigger.”