Game without rules

There was an unusual gathering of journalists at NATO headquarters. I don't remember this since 1999, the bombing of Yugoslavia. Even the Iraqi crisis, which split the NATO countries, and the Libyan one, in which the alliance intervened on the occasion of Great Britain and France, did not attract such attention to this organization.

This time it was about a possible change of eras. The points are not set, and there is hope for the restoration of the pre-Crimean status quo, but less and less people believe in this.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, after a meeting with the foreign ministers of 28 countries of the alliance, said that Russia, by annexing Crimea, undermined the basis of relations with NATO and the alliance is free to choose measures to strengthen the collective defense of its members. Decisions on the deployment of troops and bases in the eastern members of NATO have not been made, but there are no obstacles.

20 years after the Cold War, NATO is returning to its original mission of protecting Europe from Russia. President Vladimir Putin breathed new life into the Western military alliance, which the citizens of its constituent countries have slowly begun to forget, believing in the blissful atmosphere of security that has reigned in Europe.

Their leaders reminded one after another that security and order in the European home are not free. The Europeans, still deaf to the calls of the United States and the NATO leadership to stop the fall in military spending, thought. The Baltic countries, which were labeled "net consumers" of security, pledged to raise spending above two percent of GDP.

In 1996, when the then NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov were bargaining in the Luxembourg castle of Senningen about the conditions for admitting the first three countries of the former socialist camp into the alliance, I pestered Solana with the question: why does NATO not want to conclude a legally binding document? In which it will consolidate its obligation not to deploy significant armed forces and structures in the new members of the alliance. Why does he consider a political statement sufficient?

Solana, a connoisseur of good wine and Iberian ham, seems to have said after the third glass: if Russia is not going to attack anyone, then a political commitment is quite enough, and if it suddenly does, then a legal document will not help either.

It seems that with the annexation of Crimea to Russia, such a moment has come ...

At the turn of the 80s and 90s of the last century, Russia returned to the Euro-Atlantic home. It was built after the Second World War, while she was serving time in the socialist camp she built herself. Certain rules have been established in the house, thanks to which Europe, emerging from the ashes of war, has become one of the most attractive places to live in the world. The only circumstance that did not allow the Europeans to sleep peacefully was the presence of nuclear missiles aimed at them behind the Iron Curtain. And they paid about three percent of their income for the needs of defense and NATO (the Soviet people paid relatively much more for the arms race).

Therefore, the Europeans were sincerely happy when Russia was freed and asked for a common home, expressing a desire to live by its rules. The former prisoner was accepted into the organizations that make up the “house management”, even in advance.

To the Council of Europe with its PACE, even if Russia fell short of post-war standards of human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law. The "seven" of the richest countries in the world with democratic systems, which became the "eight", although Russia was far from both criteria for "face control" by which members of the club were identified. The agreement on partnership and cooperation between Russia and the EU, signed in 1994, promised the Russians unity with Europe, except perhaps for representation in EU structures (not all Western European countries participate in them either). Even NATO, having offered all former Russian campmates the Partnership for Peace program, concluded a special cooperation agreement with it as an important international actor, which was strengthened by the new President Vladimir Putin, signing the Rome Declaration together with NATO colleagues in 2002.

But the newcomer found himself with complexes of the previous era, and, getting up from his knees, he decided that the rules of the house, drawn up without his participation, suit him selectively. In the Russian mass consciousness there was no understanding that freedom, democracy and the market are most needed by Russia itself. They thought that by renouncing communism and ceasing to threaten with nuclear missiles, she did the West a favor for which it should pay.

In the Euro-Atlantic rules, in addition to the priority of individual rights over the right of the state, there is also the inviolability of borders. They cannot be divided along ethnic lines if there is no threat to people's lives.

The German-speaking inhabitants of the Belgian and Swiss cantons, as well as the French Alsace, are not claimed by Germany, and the Anschluss of the Sudetes and Austria is branded with the curse of history. With the Hungarians in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, it is a little more difficult, but even there they adopted European rules.

On the other hand, state sovereignty cannot be an insurmountable obstacle to international intervention when the "sovereign" systematically destroys people, no matter what nationality and religion.

In Crimea, there was nothing like in Kosovo. Words (and quite a long time) failed to persuade Milosevic to stop the meat grinder. Then Kosovo was under UN protectorate and international occupation for more than a decade before it was allowed to declare independence. Ten years of reflection is not nine days of the Crimean campaign. Kosovo was not annexed to anyone. Now it itself has rushed to the EU, to the same place as Serbia ...

After breaking the rules of the game, over time, you will have to accept new ones. For a while, the world became less predictable. Will the new rules be better for Russia? Let's see.