beyondukraine.euandrussiainsearchofanewrelation

After Maidan: Re-Starting NATO-Russia Relations 59
early 2000s, when the ‘color revolutions’ sparked deeply
conflicting reactions, events in Ukraine were viewed in the West
and Russia in almost opposite images. Although in his inaugural
speech new NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg noted that
NATO does not seek confrontation with Moscow 31 ; the Kremlin
perceived Western support for the Euromaidan demonstrators as a
threat to its endeavors to regain a grip on former Soviet republics
through Eurasian integration projects, while the alliance viewed it
as an opportunity to hammer a further nail in the coffin of Russian
hegemonic ambitions over the post-Soviet space. Whereas
Moscow accused the West of masterminding the Euromaidan
‘coup d’état’ – as the Kremlin termed it –, it rapidly secured
control of the Crimean peninsula, where the Russian Black Sea
Fleet was based, on the grounds of protecting Crimea’s largely
Russian population – a move that for many Russians was simply
the rectification of a Soviet-era internal border and one that carried
the overwhelming endorsement of the people of the peninsula 32 .
The Kremlin also provided vital support to the separatist revolts in
the Donbass region, asserting Russia’s historical ties to the area
and referring to Eastern Ukrainian districts north of the Black Sea,
including the towns of Donetsk, Luhansk, Odessa and
Dnipropetrovsk, as ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’ 33 . As an
immediate reaction to the ‘Russian aggression’, in April 2014
NATO decided to suspend all practical civilian and military
cooperation with Moscow, although the dialogue in the NRC
31 http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_113488.htm. Also Andres Fogh
Rasmussen had confirmed, on his first speech as secretary general at the Carnegie
Endowment in Brussels, that relations with Russia remain a priority for the alliance.
See A.F. Rasmussen, “NATO and Russia: A new Beginning”,
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/opinions_57640.htm.
32 “What next in Russia’s ‘near abroad’?”, The Quarterly Review, April 2015,
http://www.quarterly-review.org/?p=4084. At the end of March 2014 Moscow
unilaterally terminated the 2010 Kharkiv agreements with Ukraine that extended the
status of its naval facilities in Crimea until 2042. See “State Duma approves
denunciation of Russian-Ukrainian agreements on Black Sea Fleet”,
http://tass.ru/en/russia/725964.
33 A. Taylor, ‘‘‘Novorossiya’, the latest historical concept to worry about in
Ukraine”, The Washington Post, 18 April 2014.