Ukraine Has Shifted Europe’s East-West Fault Line

During a joint press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lambasted the EU as an “unreliable partner” and accused European leaders of lying about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who just days before was sentenced by a Moscow court to an extended prison sentence. Borrell’s diplomatic humiliation served as a wake-up call for leaders in Western Europe: Moscow’s worst instincts had not collapsed alongside the Soviet Union but had merely gone into hibernation. 

“I think, for him, it was a mini-shock that a Russian foreign minister could treat him like that,” said Marina Kaljurand, a member of the European Parliament who previously served as Estonia’s foreign minister. “It was an eye-opener. After that, nobody could think that Russia could be treated as a partner. They are not partners.” 

It was a message that Eastern Europe had been trying to convey to the West for years, and it finally hit home. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year later—igniting Europe’s largest land war since World War II—the Western world put aside years of debate over how to change Moscow’s behavior, uniting to impose bruising sanctions designed to cut the Kremlin out of European energy markets and leave Russian natural gas pipelines into Europe rusting at the bottom of the sea. 

As the war grinds into its second year with little end in sight, familiar fissures threaten to reemerge. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—once under the Soviet boot and always suspicious of a post-Berlin Wall Russia—have found themselves in the driver’s seat in pushing their Western counterparts to speed up weapons deliveries to Ukraine and getting European capitals to stop fearing Russia’s saber-rattling rhetoric.

But Eastern European diplomats are tired of hearing that they had Russian intentions right all along. Now, they’re aiming to make sure that Western isolation of Moscow becomes a permanent feature of U.S. and European policy, not a bug in the software that shows up whenever Russian tanks roll over another former Soviet border. 

“We should have listened to Eastern Europe, right?” said a U.S. congressional aide, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. “[U.S. President Joe] Biden should not have been doing summits with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. Some of this shit was such a no-brainer. We were kind of on foreign-policy autopilot.”

The fault lines run right down the center of Europe—and play right to the heart of Russia’s war in Ukraine—with deep philosophical differences over how the war might end.

“From a Central and Eastern Europe perspective, if Russia is not evicted from all of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, then we will see an escalation,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

But in Western Europe, even as it bolsters support for a Ukrainian victory, there is fear that a crushing Russian defeat in Ukraine could embolden Putin to lash out more violently. “From the German and French perspective, it’s the other way around,” Fix said.

A protester holds an Estonian flag next to an anti-Putin poster during a demonstration in front of the Russian Embassy in Kyiv on May 10, 2007. Protesters supported Estonia in its removal of a Soviet war monument from central Tallinn. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images

Despite initial hopes that Putin, who came to power in 2000, could serve as a reformer of the post-Soviet state, the contours of what would become a familiar challenge were beginning to emerge. As the Kremlin began to show authoritarian tendencies at home and expansionist inclinations abroad, the West hoped to get Putin back on course. But Eastern European countries wanted Europe and NATO to show firmer resolve, fearing they’d be next. And they had reason to worry. 

Later in 2007, Estonia was hit by a devastating wave of Russian cyberattacks after the country’s government announced plans to relocate a Soviet war memorial from the capital, Tallinn. Kaljurand, the former Estonian foreign minister who was then her country’s ambassador to Russia, said she was not allowed to go on Russian state television to explain the move. Russia launched a smear campaign against her, and a pro-Putin youth organization surrounded the Estonian Embassy in Moscow, just half a mile from the Kremlin. 

“When they left, there was a group of kids, maybe first or second graders, who were standing in front of our embassy,” Kaljurand recalled. “And the teacher was telling the kids: ‘That’s the embassy where fascists work.’” Propaganda posters were put up all over Moscow depicting Kaljurand with a Hitler mustache. The incident has come to be regarded as one of Russia’s first forays into hybrid warfare, testing a number of tactics that would later be deployed against Ukraine. 

The following year, Russia went from a hybrid war to a hot one, invading neighboring Georgia in August 2008 and carving out two pro-Russia breakaway regions. Still, the West was eager to hit the reset button—literally. Seeing the possibility of another reformer emerging in Russia with Dmitry Medvedev’s election as Russian president in 2008, the nascent Obama administration a year later announced plans to reset the relationship. In 2010, at a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, the parties agreed to forge ahead in developing a “true strategic” partnership. 

Eastern allies were incensed. Today, they insist that the West’s refusal to show Putin a flashing red light in Georgia’s short war allowed the Kremlin to continually overstep, all the way to February 2022. “It did not start with Ukraine,” Kaljurand said. “It started with the war in Georgia, when the EU and NATO did not react quickly enough and efficiently enough and returned back to business.”

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The Western side of the NATO alliance—hundreds if not thousands of miles away from a war that threatened to show up on the doorstep of the eastern flank—was still in disbelief. “This intelligence was put in doubt by certain allies,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who served as NATO’s secretary-general from 2009 until just after the 2014 Russian invasion. “There was no consensus within NATO when it came to even recognize the Russian aggression within Ukraine.” 

Still, Western leaders began to deploy some artillery—economically, at least. By early March, weeks after Russia’s invasion, the United States and EU countries kicked sanctions against Russia into gear, with the Obama administration freezing the assets of top Russian officials close to Putin and slapping wide-ranging travel restrictions on the Kremlin. There were also U.S. sanctions on Russia’s energy and defense sectors.

Eastern Europe wanted to put economic cooperation with Russia on a permanent timeout. But even after Russia’s snatch of Crimea, Moscow was seen as both too important to isolate and too weak to pose a real threat. The Obama administration was intent on refocusing on China, its top foreign-policy priority, while Germany and other European countries still thought Russia was the best game in town to fuel their economies. 

A year after Russia’s little green men took parts of Ukraine, European energy companies signed a deal with Russia’s state-owned Gazprom to build a second natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would redouble Berlin’s—and Europe’s—reliance on Russian energy exports. The storm around the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would continue until it was canceled just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and later blown up by unknown saboteurs.

“Estonia and all the Baltics were against it from the very beginning because we’ve seen clearly it’s not an economic project, it’s not an energy project—it’s a political project,” Kaljurand said. “Yes, on paper, the EU was talking about diversification of sources and diversification of partners, but in practical terms, the EU did nothing to dismantle itself from Russia.” 

Officials in Berlin, including former Chancellor Angela Merkel, maintained that it was purely commercial in nature. Meanwhile, Washington and countries in Eastern Europe feared that going back to business as usual with the construction of the pipeline would give Moscow outsized influence over the continent’s energy markets. The Obama administration also began making overtures to the EU to convince members of the bloc not to go ahead with the energy projects, and Eastern members, such as Estonia, began pushing for the continent to move toward energy diversification. Yet Western sanctions shied away from targeting Russia’s ongoing energy production, preferring to kneecap its future output. That let the Kremlin bank billions of dollars while squatting on another country’s turf.

“The lack of natural resource sanctions was a huge, huge problem for a really long time,” the U.S. congressional aide said. “It’s kind of the reason the Russian economy is still afloat now.” 

While Germany plowed ahead with the Nord Stream 2 project, suspending the pipeline’s certification only days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Eastern Europe began trying to move further out of the grip of Moscow’s pipelines. Lithuania was among the first out of the gate, importing U.S. natural gas from ships. Others soon followed.

“[Poland] knew from the get-go that Putin would use energy as a weapon,” said Marek Magierowski, the Polish ambassador to the United States.

Warsaw began importing liquefied natural gas from Qatar ahead of the war. Now, it is hoping to tap the Baltic Pipe project, which connects North Sea gas from Norway to the Polish grid. Not until March 2022 did the European Parliament pass a resolution calling for an embargo on all Russian energy sources. It was a sign of influence beginning to shift in the European bloc from West to East. 

“There’s this big debate about the gravity shift toward the East, and I do think there’s some truth to it,” said Fix, the Council on Foreign Relations fellow. “Poland plays a much larger role now.” 

Soldiers stand in front of a German tank used by the NATO Enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to Pabrade, Lithuania, on June 7, 2022. Scholz pledged additional military support to Lithuania to defend against a possible Russian attack. Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, vowed to send 5,000 helmets, sparking derision. “What does Germany want to send next? Pillows?” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko asked in January 2022. 

Europe’s top diplomat, Borrell, has since acknowledged that many in Brussels failed to heed Washington’s warnings ahead of the war. “We did not believe that the war was coming. I have to recognize that here, in Brussels, the Americans were telling us, ‘They will attack, they will attack,’ and we were quite reluctant to believe it,” he told a meeting of EU ambassadors last October. 

Early on, Europe had unity, ratifying wave after wave of sanctions on Moscow and rallying in support of Ukraine and the millions of refugees fleeing the war. “That was only a very short period,” Fix said. “And then all the old Europeans fell back to their original positions with different takes on the situation.”

While countries on Europe’s eastern flank fear they’ll be next, Western members of NATO, including the United States, Germany, and France, seem to be counting beans. Getting deliveries of serious arms—whether artillery and shells, tanks, or infantry fighting vehicles—has been a yearlong struggle inside the alliance, even as Eastern Europe seems prepared to spend whatever they have to declaw the bear on their borders. 

“The war revealed huge gaps in Europe’s defense capabilities, but it also revealed the huge gaps between Eastern and Western allies,” said one former senior official at the U.S. Defense Department, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Here, we have Poland and the Baltic states practically begging on Ukraine’s behalf for more weapons, and Germany, France, and other powerful militaries saying, ‘Well, hang on, let’s wait and see.’”

In the year since then, some Western European officials, chastened by their miscalculations, have readily admitted their mistakes. “For years, it almost seemed like our Eastern allies were the boy who cried wolf. Well, the wolf came, and we were too slow to believe them,” said one senior Western European diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We are, of course, all close allies, but there is bad blood there that we cannot ignore.”

“We saw the same intelligence. We had the same warnings. But I just couldn’t believe there would be an actual invasion, until there was,” the diplomat added. 

Others say Western governments have done due diligence and paid due service to Ukraine. Germany, for instance, had long refused to send German-made weapons into active warzones, including Ukraine, before reversing course days into Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. Now, in the past year, Berlin has shipped advanced tanks, air defense systems, and more to the front line. 

“This isn’t just about Germany sending weapons into conflict zones for the first time in its modern era or about spending more on defense. It’s about a fundamental shift in how Germany sees itself as a member of Europe and a defender of Europe,” said Rachel Rizzo, an expert on European security at the Atlantic Council. 

“Whatever Germany promises, they follow through on,” said one Eastern European defense official. “The issue is getting Berlin to make the decision in the first place, but after that, then they really move.” 

The question is coming to a head this spring, as Ukraine prepares for a counteroffensive to boot the Russian invaders off its soil. If the offensive is successful, officials say, Eastern Europe may let up on the pressure on Western Europe to do more. If it founders, however, the arguments from the East that Western Europe is drip-feeding Ukraine too few weapons too late in the game will only sharpen these divisions within NATO and the EU. 

But even though the scale of German and French commitments has far exceeded some of the tiny Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania rank first, second, and third in contributions to Ukraine by percentage of GDP. (Poland, a much larger economy, is fourth.) And they’re cutting right into bone to do it: Tallinn sent its entire stockpile of 155 mm howitzer artillery pieces to Ukraine in January. 

“They’ve really taken direct action and just handed over a lot of their stuff to the Ukrainians,” said the U.S. congressional aide. “They’re not asking permission from Brussels. They’re just kind of doing it.”

Slow and cautious isn’t always the best course.

“Our hesitation has actually facilitated Putin’s escalation of the war,” said Rasmussen, the former NATO secretary-general. “You cannot win a war by an incremental, step-by-step approach. You have to surprise and overwhelm your adversary.”

People hold flags and posters during a protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine near the Lithuanian Parliament in Vilnius on Feb. 24, 2022.Paulius Peleckis/Getty Images

This time, in 2023, it was Western leaders echoing talking points that emerged from the East. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told delegates that Russia had committed war crimes in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and that the United States wanted an international tribunal. And after Kallas called for the EU to start buying ammunition to help Ukraine, Borrell, the bloc’s top diplomat, gave the plan an almost immediate public endorsement.

Kallas, a lawyer by training, saw a parallel in the different responses from East and West. “We are expecting the worst because of our experience and positively surprised when it doesn’t happen. For the West, it is vice versa,” she said. “What is the strategy to actually be better prepared for the future? I think it’s better to prepare for the worst and then be positively surprised when it doesn’t happen.”

More than a year after Russia’s invasion, Europe is indelibly marked by the largest land war on the continent in a generation. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, overcoming a diffuse three-party coalition and the ugly World War II-era connotations of German tanks being sent to fight Russia, is massing Berlin’s largest military buildup in 70 years. The Baltic states have seen the attitude change in the West. They’re worried it won’t stick. 

“Almost every Western leader has said, ‘We should have listened to you.’ We’re not happy about that, but that’s the reality,” Kaljurand said.

“Now the question comes, is it only in words, or are you really going to listen to us so that in a year or two we will not be back in business with Russia as we were before the 24th of February?”