December 8, 2015

Invitation for Montenegro is signal Moscow cannot stop NATO enlargement

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NATO’s membership offer to Montenegro has set off a firestorm of protest from Moscow that might seem outsized considering the small scale of the Balkan country and its minimal military force.

Montenegro’s army has about 2,000 soldiers, and its navy has just two active frigates.

But if the Kremlin’s angry response seems out of proportion to what NATO stands to gain, it may make more sense given the unspoken message the alliance’s invitation sends: that all nations should be free to choose their alliances, without Moscow’s interference.

“One of the key arguments that has persuaded NATO member states to issue the invitation is precisely the message to Moscow that Russia cannot divide Europe into spheres of influence,” says Jonathan Eyal, international director at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

He notes that the membership offer to Montenegro comes a year after Russia intervened in Ukraine in response to Kyiv seeking closer ties with the West. Russia’s ongoing interference in Ukraine has caused a wave of uneasiness among NATO states in Russia’s immediate neighborhood and NATO has responded by increasing its presence in many of them.

Now, the NATO invitation for Montenegro, which Moscow had actively sought to dissuade from joining the alliance, appears intended to reassure both NATO members themselves and would-be members in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that the alliance is not intimidated by Moscow.

“For NATO, it gives a stronger sense of having a security reach in this part of Europe and sends a signal to other countries in the Western Balkans that NATO membership is a possibility for them in the future,” says Judy Dempsey, a senior associate at Carnegie Europe and editor in chief of the Strategic Europe blog.

In making the invitation on December 2, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that Bosnia, Macedonia and Georgia were also making progress toward NATO membership. After NATO invited Georgia in 2008 to step up cooperation toward eventual membership, Russian forces drove deep into the ex-Soviet republic in a five-day war and Moscow recognized two breakaway Georgian regions as independent states.

The question now is how Russia will answer NATO’s message.

Reacting to the December 2 invitation, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that “the continuing expansion of NATO… to the east cannot fail to lead to actions in response from the east – that is, from Russia.”

RFE/RL’s Balkan Service contributed to this report.

Copyright 2015, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036; www.rferl.org (for the unabridged version of this story see, http://www.rferl.org/content/nato-montenegro-signal-moscow-cannot-stop-enlargement/27403048.html).

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