Warsaw Pact

Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact.

Back during the Cold War, the Kremlin blocked its Warsaw Pact allies from developing or obtaining nuclear materials—it even confiscated some of those allies’ uranium mines.

That grabbed the attention of NATO’s members, especially those in Eastern Europe, closest to Russia’s borders and in some cases former members of the Russia-led Warsaw Pact.

In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama imagined an “end of history.”

When it was signed, the CFE envisaged weapons limits for the Warsaw Pact and NATO, but the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist shortly after it was signed.