On December 21, 1991, 10 years before becoming the US ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow watched the world order swing on a hinge. The setting was the inaugural meeting of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a NATO forum established to facilitate direct consultations with the alliance’s erstwhile Warsaw Pact adversaries. He reminisced about that day’s drama at a Perry World House colloquium in late January of 2022.
“At the end of that first meeting,” Vershbow recalled, “the Soviet ambassador announced that he had to take his name off the communique, because his country had just ceased to exist. And then, 10 minutes later, a telegram came from Yeltsin saying: I’m now the president of Russia, and I want to be a member of NATO.”
NATO archives and contemporaneous reporting suggest that Boris Yeltsin’s message—which framed Russian membership not as an immediate request but rather a “long-term political aim”—preceded the Soviet representative’s dramatic announcement. But three decades later, that moment of astonishing fluidity looms like a giant question mark about what might have been.
“So there may have been moments when we could have done more than we did,” Vershbow reflected, toward the end of a discussion devoted partly to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s objections to NATO’s eastward expansion in the 21st century.
“But it was the Russians themselves who decided that membership was less appropriate than a kind of special, unique strategic partnership,” continued Vershbow—who was the US ambassador to NATO from 1998 to 2001. “They didn’t want to be lumped together with Albania and Croatia and Slovenia. They felt that Russia deserved kind of a special arrangement.
“Maybe that was a mistake on their part,” he concluded. “Or we shouldn’t have taken no for an answer.”
As he spoke, Putin had amassed troops at Ukraine’s border but most observers were reading the buildup as a negotiating tactic. Yet while Vershbow felt the odds pointed to a “limited-scale” action combining cyber warfare, targeted infrastructure attacks, and political assassinations, he departed from then-current expert opinion on several counts.
“I personally worry that Putin, frustrated by his failure to break Ukraine’s will since 2014, may feel he has no choice but to deliver on his threats and impose a new Iron Curtain across Europe—regardless of the high price Russia will pay,” he said. That price would be “much more harmful to the Russian economy than what we did after [Russia’s annexation of Crimea in] 2014, when we were still hoping that we could find a diplomatic off-ramp that never appeared,” he continued—predicting that Germany would terminate the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline (which at the time was still widely viewed by German business interests as an intolerable step) after being “worn down” by US pressure.
Yet there was scant reason to think it would matter. “Does this all add up to preventing Russia from attacking? Probably not,” said Vershbow. “That’s the sad reality: our leverage isn’t as substantial as we might wish. And for Putin this is an existential issue—because without Ukraine the Russian Empire will never be complete.”
In all his grim pessimism, Alexander Vershbow turned out to be someone worth listening to during his late-January visit to Penn’s campus. Four weeks later, Putin ordered the most sweeping military invasion seen in Europe since World War II.
By March 2, when Vershbow returned to the stage at Perry World House (where he is a distinguished visiting fellow this year), some two million Ukrainians, overwhelmingly women and children, had fled the country amid the onslaught. Yet their nation was simultaneously mounting a resistance that surpassed virtually all predictions.
To some degree, the first month of the war was horrendous precisely on account of the deadening familiarity it bore to any number of recent conflicts—from Putin’s bloody 1999–2000 siege of Grozny, to the US invasion of Iraq, to Moscow’s incursions into eastern Ukraine, the site of chronic fighting since 2014 [“With the Donbas Battalion,” Nov|Dec 2014].
But it was also a mess of scrambled expectations.
Putin’s decision to cross the brink amounted to “the greatest gamble of his career,” in the view of Russia historian Benjamin Nathans—“so much more reckless” than anything he had done before. Ukraine’s response showed just how profoundly that nation’s political reality had shifted since the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity,” according to Mitchell Orenstein, a professor of Russian and East European studies whose 2019 The Lands in Between: Russia vs. the West and the New Politics of Hybrid War examined some of the dynamics at play [“Essays,” May|Jun 2019]. In Germany, prime minister Olaf Scholz announced military commitments that had become virtually inconceivable among younger generations, noted Wharton finance professor Stephan Dieckmann, who as a West German teenager happened to begin his own 18-month mandatory military service soon after the Berlin Wall came down. In the US, Russia’s invasion exposed political dynamics both amply precedented—like attempts by fossil fuel interests to milk the crisis for policy advantages—and altogether novel—like the whiplash spectacle of certain Republicans struggling to adjust yesterday’s pro-Putin rhetoric for a moment dramatically less amenable to it.
On Penn’s campus discussions unfurled everywhere from Marc Flandreau’s course on the history of the international monetary system, to Arthur Waldron’s Strategy, Policy, & War, to departmental roundtable events. The perspectives on offer varied considerably. An open-minded undergrad seeking to make sense of what was going on might have traveled any number of paths. But it wouldn’t have taken long before one analysis was complicated by another.
So Vershbow’s March 2 return to Perry World House makes for a good launching point. Calling Putin’s rationale for invasion a “fabricated crisis,” he posited that “neither Ukraine nor NATO poses a security threat to Russia. What Putin fears is that if Ukraine succeeds in building a prosperous democratic state, it will set a dangerous example that could undermine the authoritarian Putin system in Russia itself.”
Which is one way to interpret it.
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