4: 7. Bucharest 2008 and the Failed Bid to Prevent Russian Aggression. Serhii Plokhy (Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University) discusses how Vladimir Putin's powerful presidency, rooted in a manipulated super-presidential constitution, enabled h

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🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

7. Bucharest 2008 and the Failed Bid to Prevent Russian Aggression. Serhii Plokhy (Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University) discusses how Vladimir Putin's powerful presidency, rooted in a manipulated super-presidential constitution, enabled him to assert the right to dictate which countries could align with the West. The April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest was a critical turning point. Though the US, led by George W. Bush, favored inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance, Western allies, notably Germany, opposed the idea, leading to a split. The outcome—a promise of future membership with no specifics—was the "worst outcome possible." Putin used this weakness, starting a war in Georgia months later, effectively annexing territory and disqualifying Georgia from joining NATO due to territorial conflicts. This demonstrated that Ukraine and Georgia had exposed themselves to future Russian attacks by publicly seeking NATO membership without securing "meaningful Western support," meaning military aid. Domestically, Putin viewed the 2004 Orange Revolution, which rejected his preferred candidate Viktor Yanukovych, as a threat to his own power structure. Yanukovych later returned and, in 2013, was bribed and pressured by Russia not to sign an EU association agreement, sparking the Euromaidan Revolution which served as a stepping stone toward the 2014 Crimean annexation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchew with Serhi Ploki, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, the author of the new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, written between the winter of 22 and the winter of 23. The war 500 days plus unknown future. We are discussing the
0:25.0	roots of it because that will somehow be present in when there is an end of it, or at least a
0:31.1	ceasefire. Professor, Vladimir Putin becomes critical here because it's his authority that drives the tragedy.
0:41.4	He becomes president in May of 2000 with a constitution that empowers him, although it limits him to two terms.
0:49.8	Later on, of course, that will become something he can manipulate because the presidency in Russia,
0:56.1	thanks to Boris Yeltsin and vouchsafed by Bill Clinton, is much more powerful than our understanding
1:02.0	of checks and balances here in the United States.
1:04.9	That gives Putin the power both to play the friend of the U.S. during the war on terror and also move towards the assumption that he has the right to dictate who can join NATO, who can join EU, who can be Western regarding, and who cannot.
1:25.1	You identify April of 2008 as an important summit for NATO and Bucharest. At that time,
1:32.5	Georgia and Ukraine both wanted to join NATO. What happened? What happened was split within the
1:41.0	alliance. The United States at that time led by President Judge W. Bush
1:47.9	was in favor of inviting Ukraine and Georgia joining the alliance and part of the Western
1:58.6	Allies, in particular Germany, opposed to this idea.
2:04.6	So what happened as the result of the summit was the worst outcome possible for Ukraine and
2:12.7	Georgia. They invited to summit. Mr. Putin traveled to summit as well, trying to lobby the European
2:21.7	members of the alliance to say no to Ukraine and Georgia. At the end, alliance never reached
2:30.6	an agreement. So there was a promise given to Ukraine and Georgia that one day
2:35.2	they would become the member of alliance. But there was no specifics on when that day would come.
2:42.4	But there were quite a lot of specifics in Mr. Putin's thinking about the whole issue.
2:48.4	Within a few months after the Bucharest summit, he starts
2:52.2	war in Georgia in 2008, invading the territory and really, really de facto annexing parts of Georgian
3:02.8	territory, making Georgia uneligible to join an alliance because the country had a territorial,
	...

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