Follow us on social

When officials say the quiet part about Russia and NATO out loud

When officials say the quiet part about Russia and NATO out loud

Was the invasion about the alliance's expansion to Moscow's doorstep? Depends on who's telling the story.

Analysis | Europe

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been told that the issue of NATO expansion is irrelevant to the war, and that anyone bringing it up is, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, at worst, apologizing for or justifying the war.

So it was curious to see NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this month say explicitly that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine, and the alliance’s refusal to swear it off — not once or twice, but three separate times.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.”

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact opposite.”

It’s not clear if Stoltenberg was referring to the draft treaty Putin put forward in December 2021 and simply mixed up the seasons (the provisions of each are the same), or if he’s referring to an earlier, as-yet-unreported incident. In any case, what Stoltenberg claims here — that Putin viewed Ukraine’s NATO entry as so unacceptable he was willing to invade to stop it, and put forward a negotiating bid that might have prevented it, only for NATO to reject it — has been repeatedly made by those trying to explain the causes of the war and how it could be ended, only to be dismissed as propaganda.

The only logical conclusion, if we’re to listen to the hawks, is that the man in charge of the very alliance helping Ukraine defend itself from Putin is, in fact, working for the Russian leader and spreading his propaganda.

This isn’t the only instance from a member of the NATO establishment. Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May this year, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said, alongside Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, that “we assess that Putin probably has scaled back his immediate ambitions to ... ensuring that Ukraine will never become a NATO ally.” Earlier in her testimony, Haines had said that Putin’s invasion had backfired by “precipitating the very events he hoped to avoid such as Finland's accession to NATO and Sweden's petition to join.”

Likewise, in a March 2023 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Russia expert Fiona Hill — who served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump — told the paper that “it was always obvious that NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine and to Georgia was a provocation for Putin.” Yet the opposite claim, that the invasion was entirely “unprovoked,” has become such an article of faith in Western discourse that this word is ubiquitous in news reports and official statements on the war.

On a similar note, an August 2022 Washington Post report based on “in-depth interviews with more than three dozen senior U.S., Ukrainian, European and NATO officials” reported four separate instances of high-ranking Russian officials telling their U.S.counterparts in the lead-up to the war that NATO expansion was a core part of the grievances motivating Moscow’s threatening troop build-up. That included Putin himself, who told President Joe Biden in a December 2021 video call “that the eastward expansion of the Western alliance was a major factor in his decision to send troops to Ukraine’s border,” according to the report.

To some extent, this isn’t surprising. As the analysts, journalists, politicians, and others pointing to NATO expansion as a leading cause of the war have copiously documented, the decades before the invasion saw countless members of the Washington national security establishment, from famed Cold War strategist George Kennan and current CIA Director William Burns to a parade of diplomats, military officials, NATO leaders and even Biden himself, warn that the alliance’s eastward creep was a fundamental source of Russian unhappiness and that it would provoke Russian hostility and aggression — or even spark war.

But what was once uncontroversial and widely acknowledged before the invasion has become verboten since it started in February 2022, as debate or dissent on the matter of the war and U.S. and European policy toward it have been clamped down on, often via vicious McCarthyite tactics. The topic has become verboten, that is, unless you happen to be a U.S. or NATO official.

It’s not just individual officials, either. Elements of this supposedly Kremlin-originating argument also pop up in major U.S. government documents. Take, for instance, the Annual Threat Assessment put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a year after the invasion started. Meant to reflect the “collective insights” of Washington’s various intelligence agencies, the report states that it expects Moscow to continue “to insert itself into crises when it sees its interests at stake, the anticipated costs of action are low, it sees an opportunity to capitalize on a power vacuum, or, as in the case of its use of force in Ukraine, it perceives an existential threat in its neighborhood that could destabilize Putin’s rule and endanger Russian national security.”

Yet today, anyone else saying that Putin or the Russian establishment genuinely view Ukraine’s growing integration into NATO as a security threat is liable to receive all manner of scurrilous accusations.

As with officials’ words, you can find similar points in documents before the war. A 2020 U.S. Army War College paper states that “future admissions to NATO for states in Russia’s near abroad will likely be met with aggression.” A 2019 paper from the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation — and sponsored by the Army Quadrennial Defense Review Office — states explicitly that the Kremlin’s fear of a direct military attack by the United States is “very real,” plus that “providing more U.S. military equipment and advice [to Ukraine in the war on the Donbas] could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it,” including by “mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory.” The 2017 National Security Strategy states outright that “Russia views the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) as threats.”

It’s the central paradox of the current war discourse: What is widely acknowledged by Western policymakers and officials in the halls of power, who rely on an evidence-based understanding of the world to shape foreign policy, is unspeakable anywhere outside of them.

What’s at stake is more important than just finger-pointing and apportioning guilt. By steadfastly refusing to understand one of the foundational causes of the war and the U.S. and NATO role in it, we will continue to fail to end it and to secure a lasting peace, leading to many more Ukrainian deaths, and to many more years of living in the shadow of global catastrophe.


NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg (Shutterstock/Alexandros Michailidis)
Analysis | Europe
President Trump with reporters
Top photo credit: President Donald Trump speaks with members of the media at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on Sunday, September 7, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Is Israel forcing Trump to be the capitulator in chief?

Middle East

President Donald Trump told reporters outside a Washington restaurant Tuesday evening that he is deeply displeased with Israel’s bombardment of Qatar, a close U.S. partner in the Persian Gulf that, at Washington’s request, has hosted Hamas’s political leadership since 2012.

“I am not thrilled about it. I am not thrilled about the whole situation,” Trump said, denying that Israel had given him advance notice. “I was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect of it,” he continued. “We’ve got to get the hostages back. But I was very unhappy with the way that went down.”

keep readingShow less
Europe Ukraine
Top image credit: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, President of Ukraine, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, and Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, emerge from St. Mary's Palace for a press conference as part of the Coalition of the Willing meeting in Kiev, May 10 2025, Kay Nietfeld/dpa via Reuters Connect

Is Europe deliberately sabotaging Ukraine War negotiations?

Europe

After last week’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Paris, 26 countries have supposedly agreed to contribute — in some fashion — to a military force that would be deployed on Ukrainian soil after hostilities have concluded.

Three weeks prior, at the Anchorage leaders’ summit press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Ukraine’s security should be ensured as part of any negotiated settlement. But Russian officials have continued to reiterate that this cannot take the form of Western combat forces stationed in Ukraine. In the wake of last week’s meeting, Putin has upped the ante by declaring that any such troops would be legitimate targets for the Russian military.

keep readingShow less
After bombing, time to demystify the 'Qatar lobby'
Top photo credit: The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, is standing third from the left in the front row, alongside the Minister of Culture of Qatar, Abdulrahman bin Hamad bin Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, who is at the center, and the Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth of Oman, Sayyid Theyazin bin Haitham Al Said, who is second from the right in Doha, Qatar, on May 9, 2024. (Photo by Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto)

After bombing, time to demystify the 'Qatar lobby'

Middle East

On Tuesday, Israel bombed Doha, killing at least five Hamas staffers and a member of Qatari security. Israeli officials initially claimed the US green-lit the operation, despite Qatar hosting the largest U.S. military in the region.

The White House has since contradicted that version of events, saying the White House was given notice “just before” the bombing and claiming the strike was an “unfortunate" attack that "could serve as an opportunity for peace.”

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.