The Bucharest Shadow: NATO Enlargement, Russian Threat Perception and the Road to War in Ukraine, 2008–2022

Abstract

This paper investigates how NATO's Bucharest declarations of 2008 on Ukraine and Russian threat perception were linked to the series of crises which led to Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It resists a “one cause” explanation. It is a qualitative documentary study and faces official records from NATO, OSCE and the UN and other realist, constructivist and diplomatic-history literature. The main analytical framework is that of Security Dilemma Theory. The analysis is guided by three propositions: First, the long-known “Ukraine would become a NATO member” commitment in the Bucharest speech was a factor that aggravated Russia's pre-existing perception of the EuroAtlantic security order moving against Moscow; second, the unresolved 2014 conflict, combined with growing NATO–Ukraine cooperation, turned the enlargement debate from a distant institutional question into an immediate military–security dilemma; and third, the “Ukraine would eventually become a NATO member” commitment, the refusal of NATO to close its open door, and the failure of diplomacy interacted in this crisis, while Russia had retained agency and the responsibility to choose invasion. The results indicate that the city of Bucharest was an important structural turning point but it was neither a sufficient nor a determinant cause of war. In 2008, Ukraine was not issued a Membership Action Plan and was not a member of NATO in February 2022. The paper points out that contested security orders, incompatible threat perceptions and unresolved territorial conflict are part of a multi-layered, and interactive, causation that leads to war