Overview by Prof. Geoffrey Roberts:
The Washington-based National Security Archive has just published the US records of three Bush-Putin conservations, including the memo on the April 2008 meeting, at which Putin supposedly said Ukraine was not a real/proper country/state.
At the first meeting in June 2001, Putin spoke about NATO expansion:
You know our position. You have made an important statement when you said that Russia is no enemy. What you said about 50 years in the future is important. Russia is European and multi-ethnic, like the United States. I can imagine us becoming allies. Only dire need could make us allied with others. But we feel left out of NATO. If Russia is not part of this, of course it feels left out. Why is NATO enlargement needed? In 1954, the Soviet Union applied to join NATO. I have the document… NATO gave a negative answer with four specific reasons: the lack of an Austrian settlement, the lack of a German settlement, the totalitarian grip on Eastern Europe, and need for Russia to cooperate with the UN Disarmament process. Now all these conditions have been met. Perhaps Russia could be an Ally. But the real question is how we associate Russia with the rest of the civilized world. The fact is that NATO is enlarging and we have nothing to say about it.
(On the 1954 Soviet proposal and its background see: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/molotovs-proposal-the-ussr-join-nato-march-1954 and https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/chance-for-peace-the-soviet-campaign-to-end-the-cold-war-1953-1955).
In September 2005, the two President’s discussed North Korea:
There may be a lot of nuts there, but not everyone is. I used to be a member of the Communist Party. I believed in the ideas of communism. I was prepared to die for them. It’s a long road to inner transformation. People are limited to the cubicle they live in. And many are sincere in what they believe. The North Koreans live in more seclusion than we lived in. They are more isolated than the Soviet Union was under Stalin. The overwhelming number are prepared to die. This is not East Europe or East Germany. For any serious change in mindset, there needs to be rapprochement between the North and South.
This is what Putin actually said about Ukraine in April 2008:
I’d like to emphasize accession to NATO of a country like Ukraine will create for the long-term a field of conflict for you and us, long-term confrontation…Seventeen million Russians live in Ukraine – a third of the population. Ukraine is a very complex state. This is not a nation built in a natural manner. It’s an artificial country created back in Soviet times. Following World War II Ukraine obtained territory from Poland, Romania and Hungary – that’s pretty much all of western Ukraine. In the 1920s and 1930s Ukraine obtained territory from Russia – that’s the eastern part of the country. In 1956 [sic] the Crimean peninsula was transferred to Ukraine. It’s a rather 1arge European country built with a population of 45 million. It’s populated by people with very different mindsets. If you go to western Ukraine you’ll see villages where the only spoken language is Hungarian and people wear those bonnets. In the east, people are wearing suits, ties and big hats. NATO is perceived by a large part of the Ukrainian population as a hostile organization…
This creates the threat of military bases and new military systems being deployed in the proximity of Russia. It creates uncertainties and threats for us. And relying on the anti-NATO forces in Ukraine, Russia would be working on stripping NATO of the possibility of enlarging. Russia would be creating problems there all the time. What for? What is the meaning of Ukrainian membership in NATO? What benefit is there for NATO and the U.S.? There can be only one reason for it and that would be to cement Ukraine’s status as in the Western world and that would be the logic. I don’t think it’s the right logic…And given the divergent views of areas of the population on NATO membership, the country could just split apart. I always said there’s a certain pro-Western part, and a certain pro-Russia part. Now the power there is held by the pro-Western leaders. As soon as they came to power they split within themselves. The political activity there fully reflects the attitudes of the population. The issue there is not accession to NATO, but to ensure the self-sufficiency of Ukraine, Also, their economy should be strengthened.
Seventy percent of the population is against NATO. Condi [Rice] told me in Slovakia and Croatia the population was opposed at first and they’re now in favor. What we are against is Ukraine’s accession to NATO, but in any case we should wait until a majority of ·the population is in favor, then let them accede, not vice versa.
The full texts of these documents may be found here:
This was a most interesting article! However one must understand that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine rarely call themselves ”Russians” but more often Russian-speaking Ukrainians, most Ukrainians are today speaking both Ukrainian and Russian. In the national referendum in late 1991 over 83% of the population in eastern Ukraine, including Donbas region, voted for leaving the Moscow rule for being ruled by a national Ukrainian government in Kyiv. Most of the refugees who left their homes after the Russian invasion in 2022 were actually the Russian speaking population from the eastern part of the country. So the putinism has actually harmed by far more Russian speaking people than any other group in present Ukraine during this illegal war attack. I have met some refugees from eastern Ukraine in Europe, with native Russian as family language, over these years, and they are the most anti-Russian people of all harmed people in Ukraine during this war. Their sympathy and ”loyalty” with Putin’s Russia and Moscow is zero. Many of them have even introduced Ukrainian as their domestic family language, and by so dropping their former native Russian family language. It tells a lot about the feelings this war has created. Instead of unify the Slavic peoples in the ”Russkij mir”, modern putinism has actually broken the former east-slavic bonds in eastern Europe.