Boris Yeltsin's bewildered reaction to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia - "why are they not afraid of us" - captured the moment when Russia's post-Soviet illusions about its own power were definitively shattered, Michael Kofman has argued. The 1999 Kosovo crisis made brutally clear that the United States and its allies did not need to consider Moscow's concerns when managing European security.
Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, traced this argument in a discussion with Kennan Institute director Michael Kimmage on the origins of Russia's war against Ukraine, "Hvylya" reports.
The NATO air campaign was "a crystallizing moment because it conveys very overtly what had been the case for a while," Kofman said - namely, the decline of Russia as a power and of Russian influence in Europe. What made it especially painful for Russian elites was the realization that even traditional allies like Serbia could not be shielded from Western military action.
Yeltsin's frustration, Kofman noted, pointed to a deeper truth about nuclear weapons. Despite what some theorists argue about nuclear superiority conferring leverage in negotiations, "nuclear weapons don't do much for you in a lot of issues." Russia was a nuclear state, yet that status could not be instrumentally used to prevent the outcome in Kosovo. Beyond nuclear deterrence, Russia had little else to make its case.
Kofman placed Kosovo within a broader framework of what he described as two historical processes that shaped the current conflict. The first was the US and European decision to manage the security vacuum left by the Soviet collapse - primarily through NATO enlargement. The second was the fragmentation of Russian influence as a long-running aftershock of Soviet dissolution. Kosovo made it starkly visible that the post-Cold War settlement left Russia on the outside.
The war in Ukraine, Kofman argued, is in part a Russian attempt to relitigate that settlement and "dictate that Moscow will once again be able to have a role in stating how security is managed in Europe." The roots of that attempt trace directly back to the humiliation of 1999.
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