Destruction in Kyiv due to Russian mass attack on the city by missiles and drones in the night on 24 April 2025. An apartment building was destroyed and a number of other buildings were damaged. Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
During the Soviet era, the Allies built a solid deterrence system against the USSR, with NATO as its centerpiece. This was supplemented by French nuclear deterrence, which was not integrated into the armed wing of the Atlantic Alliance. Overall, deterrence against the USSR was based on a combination of nuclear and conventional forces. Western nuclear weapons were certainly not intended to be used, but they were designed to prevent Moscow from acquiring nuclear supremacy that would have enabled it to impose its will. What was known as the “balance of terror” was ultimately intended to prevent either side from making decisive advances—the West was also, in a sense, deterred. At the 1975 Helsinki Conference, Brezhnev had even achieved his goal, to the indignation of some dissidents in the prison of the people, of having the borders of the USSR recognized as inviolable by the Final Act—beyond the decisive progress that the third basket would later represent. Conventional forces were to be used to stand up to the Russian armies, at best for a few days, before the Allies—specifically the United States, the United Kingdom and, separately, France, as soon as it acquired the nuclear weapon (1960)—took a dramatic decision if necessary.
It cannot be repeated often enough how dangerous this period of the Cold War was. Above all, it must be remembered that, at least on the European continent, it was based on the tacit acceptance of Soviet domination in its sphere of influence. Some, including General de Gaulle, certainly hoped for an evolution of the Eastern Bloc, as it was called at the time, towards freedom, helped dissidents, and tried to make people aware of the intrinsic perversion of communist ideology, but they did not have an official policy of liberation.
The USSR could certainly try to gain support zones elsewhere than in Europe, and it succeeded better than the West. The latter often struggled to defend the countries that were still loyal to it, sometimes losing all credibility and legitimacy by allying itself with oppressive or criminal regimes in order to, allegedly, prevent the spread of Soviet-style communism.
Deterrence vis-à-vis today’s Russia is a completely different matter.
First, since the period 1989-1991, zones of influence have been a thing of the past—and the Paris Charter of November 21, 1990, without uttering the word, reestablished the principle of the sovereignty of peoples and, implicitly, abolished any legitimacy in Europe of spheres of influence, in accordance with the UN Charter, even before some former republics of the USSR regained their independence, which was achieved the following year on the basis of the self-determination of peoples. The first necessary deterrent, which the Allies refused to put in place, should therefore have been to prevent Moscow from attacking Georgia and then Ukraine. It must now consist of putting an end to Russia's aggression against Kyiv and allowing Ukraine, like Georgia, to regain its territorial integrity, Belarus to end its dependence on the Kremlin, and other countries, such as Armenia and Moldova, to resist Russian pressure.