Do Russia’s complaints about NATO enlargement amount to valid security concerns? First of all, talk of “encirclement” is ludicrous. Russia currently shares less than 6 percent of its land border with NATO countries; if Ukraine joined NATO, that would go up to 16 percent, a significant increase but still very far from a steel vise closing around the country. Second, if there’s one thing the last few days have conclusively demonstrated, it’s that Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal is a virtually insurmountable deterrent to NATO military action even in response to extreme provocation—let alone to an unprovoked invasion by land. What’s more, as Miller points out in his Quillette article, there were no NATO bases and hardly any NATO troops in the alliance’s new member states until after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. (Putin’s latest round of aggression already seems likely to add new NATO members, including Finland.)
Finally, it is worth noting that while Kremlin opposition to an “anti-Russian” Ukraine has focused mainly on NATO membership, there is no evidence that the Putin regime would have looked any more kindly on Ukraine’s pursuit of European Union membership. Indeed, the 2013-14 “Euromaidan” protests that led to a new revolution in Ukraine—and to the beginning of Russia’s protracted war against its neighbor—were sparked when Putin strong-armed and cajoled Yanukovych, who succeeded Yushchenko in 2010, into abruptly abandoning an about-to-be signed EU trade agreement and ditching several bills meant to fulfill the EU’s conditions for the pact. The agreement would not have created any military cooperation, but it would have pulled Ukraine further out of Russia’s “sphere of influence” and into the West’s orbit.
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