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Fintan O’Toole: Putin bad and Nato expansion good is not a binary we have to accept

Nato’s eastward expansion broke the West’s promises and played on Russia’s fears

Russian president Vladimir Putin: his main aim is to recreate as much of the lost Soviet empire as he can. Photograph: via AP

One of the things that complicates life is that those who are not malign may not be entirely benign either. This is true even of the unfolding crisis over Russia's implicit threat to invade Ukraine.

And it is the existence of these grey areas that makes Ireland’s military neutrality entirely legitimate. Complication, to adapt what Hugh says in Brian Friel’s Translations, “is not an ignoble condition”.

There is no ambiguity about the malignity of Vladimir Putin. He is a murderous kleptocrat bent on the destruction of democracy in Europe and America.

One incident alone – for him a relatively minor affair – encapsulates his thuggery. In March 2018 Putin launched a chemical weapons attack, using one of the most toxic substances on Earth, the nerve agent Novichok, on a small city in England, Salisbury.

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These thuggish shapes are being thrown, not just at Ukraine, but at small countries to which Ireland is closely allied in the European Union: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia

The immediate target was a Russian defector, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia. But they could have been killed in a hundred quiet ways, all of which Putin, as a professional KGB agent, probably knows. Novichok was used instead because it could have killed hundreds or even thousands of innocent people. That was Putin's message: I can do this any time I like in any of your cities. Best to stay out of my way.

His main aim is to re-create as much of the lost Soviet empire as he can by intimidating and destabilising the former republics that gained their independence when it broke up in 1991.

These thuggish shapes are being thrown, not just at Ukraine, but at small countries to which Ireland is closely allied in the European Union: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. There can be no room for doubt about Ireland’s support for them – even if we did not have our own history of having to assert ourselves against a bigger imperial neighbour.

But Putin being the bad guy does not make the West blameless. There are very good reasons to question the wisdom of the eastward expansion of Nato since the fall of the Soviet Union to which Putin so vehemently objects. Just because Putin is despicable does not mean that he may not, in this, have a point.

Two big truths must be acknowledged. Russia is paranoid about being invaded from the west. And this fear has rational roots in horrific experience.

Russia’s modern sense of nationality was shaped by Napoleon’s cataclysmic invasion in 1812. It is not accidental that its great national epic, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is set during that conflagration.

This horror was renewed and redoubled by Hitler’s invasion in 1941. Its scale is scarcely comprehensible. The death toll remains literally incalculable – respectable estimates range between 20 and 30 million dead.

To take just one sliver of this barbarism, the number of Soviet military prisoners murdered by the Nazis after being captured was roughly equivalent to the entire population of Ireland at the time.

There is a profound level at which we in the West just don’t get this collective trauma. Look at an American movie or documentary series, and the second World War was fought and won by Americans. The British equivalent is all Churchill and Spitfires and “standing alone” against the Nazis.

But if you’re Russian, there is a real sense that what you would call the Great Patriotic War ended, not in 1945, but much more recently, in 1994. That is when the last Russian troops pulled out of a reunified Germany.

As they were departing, then Russian president Boris Yeltsin told them that they could return home in the knowledge that “for Russia, a military threat will never again rise from German soil”. Only the slightest acquaintance with history is needed to understand why that reassurance was necessary.

Here, though, we have the core of the problem: what assurances were the Russians given to persuade them to agree to the re-emergence at the heart of Europe of a powerful, unified German state that had inflicted such unspeakable suffering on them?

This has been a highly controversial question. But it is answered in a 2016 study by Joshua Shifrinson of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University – hardly a pro-Putin source.

Shifrinson concludes that “archival evidence indicates that US officials repeatedly offered the Soviets informal assurances – a standard diplomatic practice – against Nato expansion during talks on German reunification throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1990”.

You don't have to like Putin to acknowledge that there has been a monumental breach of faith on the part of Nato

He quotes from the contemporary records multiple instances of the George HW Bush administration emphatically indicating to the Russians that Nato would not expand eastwards.

Germany made the same promises. Its foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, stated in public that there would be “no extension of Nato territory to the east, ie, nearer the borders of the Soviet Union” if the Soviets allowed reunification. He went so far as to suggest that Nato would not even operate in the old territory of East Germany.

Shifrinson’s objective conclusion from his research is that, “collectively, this evidence suggests that Russian leaders are essentially correct in claiming that US efforts to expand Nato since the 1990s violate the ‘spirit’ of the 1990 negotiations: Nato expansion nullified the assurances given to the Soviet Union in 1990.”

You don’t have to like Putin – or excuse in any way his belligerence towards Ukraine and other former Soviet countries – to acknowledge that there has been a monumental breach of faith on the part of Nato. Not only did it expand rapidly eastwards, but it has refused to give any guarantees that this expansion will stop.

There are legitimate arguments about the rights of the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries to express their newfound independence by joining whatever military alliance they choose. They are free countries – and so is Ukraine.

But Nato did not have to accept these new members. It could have honoured the assurances given to the Soviets in 1990 and sought to create instead a mutually guaranteed neutrality for all the newly liberated states.

It didn’t do that, essentially, because Russia was so weak under Yeltsin in the 1990s. Nato could not resist the temptation to exploit that weakness by ignoring its own promises and taking the opportunity to move the alliance’s presence right up against Russia’s borders.

Ireland's interest in maintaining an independent approach to the Ukraine crisis is not a mere shirking of responsibility

It is reasonable, surely, to believe both that this is a historic mistake and that Putin is a malignant presence on the world stage. Putin bad/Nato expansion good is not a binary we have to accept.

And that is why Ireland’s interest in maintaining an independent approach to the Ukraine crisis is not a mere shirking of responsibility. As a neutral country with a seat on the United Nations Security Council, we have a small but worthwhile presence in the grey zone of complicated reality.

Someone has to be able to oppose Putin while acknowledging that Russia’s fears have deep roots in traumatic experience and that Nato is wrong to dishonour the assurances that were meant to assuage them. It might as well be us.