It was insufficient in appeasing Russia-as evident by the 2008 war in Georgia the beginning of war in Ukraine in 2014 and the festering of unresolved conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. It frustrated the buffer countries’ ambitions for prosperity, democracy, and security. The buffer zone strategy was clearly suboptimal. They only acknowledged-weakly-the buffer states’ desire to move westward. In neither case were these NATO and EU decisions precursors to enlargement, however. The spiral of events that culminated in Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas began in light of Russia’s opposition to the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area. The 2008 Russian war in Georgia took place against the backdrop of NATO’s Bucharest summit, which declared that Georgia and Ukraine “ will become” members. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Western Balkans, not to mention Turkey.įreezing EU and NATO enlargement also meant meeting Russia halfway given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opposition to it on the alleged grounds of Moscow’s security concerns. Consumed by them and alarmed by the challenges bedeviling its neighbors, the EU lost the will to expand. Since 2005, the EU has confronted successive constitutional, sovereign debt, migration, and pandemic crises-as well as Brexit. These buffer states served a double purpose: By putting a break on NATO and European Union enlargement, they allowed both organizations, especially the latter, to concentrate on themselves while also (at least in theory) appeasing Russia. In the 2000s, an unspoken belief began spreading in the West: There would be a gray zone between the rest of Europe and Russia made up of Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus countries in the South Caucasus and perhaps those of the Western Balkans and Turkey as well.
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