RUSSIA’S PRESSURE ON NATO AND ITS RESPONSE DURING THE FULL-SCALE WAR IN UKRAINE
RUSSIA’S PRESSURE ON NATO AND ITS RESPONSE DURING THE FULL-SCALE WAR IN UKRAINE

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the pressure exerted by Russia on NATO during the full-scale war inUkraine and the Alliance’s response to this pressure. This issue is considered in the theoreti-cal perspective of neoclassical realism, which is to explain the attitude of Russia and NATO.The article poses the following main questions: Why did Russia decide to implement a con-frontational policy towards NATO and put so much pressure on it? Is the West effectivelybalancing the threat from Russia and what are the conditions for successfully and long-termcountering its pressure? As a part of the research, interviews with American scientists and ex-perts were conducted and strategic documents of the parties were analyzed. The article arguesthat domestic-level variables created an opportunity for the Kremlin to implement a confron-tational policy towards NATO, but it misjudged the structural variables. NATO’s ability toresist pressure from Russia effectively and over the long term will be determined by domestic-level variables of member states. The first section of the article includes embedding the ana-lyzed issues in a theoretical framework and formulating research hypotheses. The second andthird sections of the article cover, respectively, a discussion of Russia’s pressure on NATO andof the Alliance’s reaction to the pressure.

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