MOSCOW — In May 1993, Estonia’s first post-Soviet leader Lennart Meri — a wise man with bitter experience of life in the Soviet Union — told the visiting U.S. deputy secretary of state that Estonia urgently needed to join NATO. It was, he said, the only guarantee that Russia wouldn’t invade the Baltic state once a less Western-friendly and authoritarian Russian leader replaced then-President Boris Yeltsin.
Meanwhile, Yeltsin openly warned the U.S. that NATO’s expansion to the east would inevitably lead to an explosion in nationalist and imperialist sentiment in Russia. Some of Meri’s and Yeltsin’s predictions have come true. It took Vladimir Putin, prone to imperial obsession, to awaken Russians’ ultraconservative feelings, complete with phantom pain for the lost Soviet Union. The more the Russian president advances his Make Russia Great Again strategy, the more Russians are convinced that their country was humiliated following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet Putin’s recent buildup of military forces along Ukraine’s border has equally brought out Russians’ fears as tensions heighten. The Pentagon announced Wednesday that about 2,000 U.S.-based troops will be deployed to Poland and Germany, and another 1,000 soldiers from Germany are shifting to Romania, in a show of American commitment to NATO allies. The U.S. says it will not enter Ukraine. The view from Russia isn’t clear-cut.
