Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Another thorny complication of the settlement-that-wasn’t of 1989–91 bore on the soon-to-be-former Soviet superpower. Absent any act of reconciliation with the West, and any formal agreement to record and enforce it, no one could know where it fit in the new/old scheme of things. The quick fix of prefab did not delineate any definite place for it, not out of conscious malice but because it was too unwieldy to conform to the rigid standards. As a result, to borrow Sarotte’s words, ‘Russia was left on the periphery of a post-Cold War Europe’.[24] The country agent in her sentence is Russia, the Soviet Union having gone extinct at the end of the two years.

A flotilla of successor states, formerly constitutive ‘union republics’ of the USSR, which fell apart as the central government and the Communist Party lost their grip, set sail as 1991 came to a close. In their midst was Russia, formally co-titled the Russian Federation (identified until then as the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), which became the agreed legal successor of the Soviet state, and took over its embassies, its veto-bearing seat in the UN Security Council and the lion’s share of its awesome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This new Russia, its top offices housed in the same midtown Moscow buildings as their Soviet precursors, encompassed 77% of the USSR’s landmass (16.4m square kilometres), 51% of its population (147.4m), 70% of its manufacturing and 91% of the oil pumped. That said, it was no Soviet Union. Territorial contraction and political and economic turmoil (its GDP dropped calamitously by 40% between 1991 and 1998) diminished it in almost every objective respect and in the subjective assessments of onlookers. While the Russian Federation was nominally a brand-new state, and not a rump USSR minus its non-Russian parts, its citizens and elite saw themselves as heirs to the Soviet legacy. Loath as the Americans and Germans were to say it out loud, the unwinding of two quasi-empires – an outer one in East Central Europe, an inner one in post-Soviet Eurasia – amounted to a staggering defeat for the ‘Russian’ state. Trauma stemming from this loss of face was inevitable and would need to be well managed – which it was not, to the detriment of all.

The proliferation of the other offspring of the Soviet Union was no less bewildering than the advent of a downsized Russia. A few had fought for their independence; the rest accepted it when it fell into their laps after the republic leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the December 1991 Belavezha Accords, which declared the end of the USSR. Nine of the 14 were sandwiched between the Russian Federation, East Central Europe and NATO member Turkey; the other five were in faraway Central Asia. Eleven of those 14 assented to join a loose-knit supranational Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) along with Russia.[25] The three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), having declared independence as early as August 1991, boycotted the CIS. It was a mark that they were already positioning themselves in the East Central European category, a move strongly backed by the US and not much resisted by Russia.[26]

The newcomers were internationally recognised and had seats in the UN and the CSCE (membership of which ballooned to 53). They would waste no time acquiring diplomatic services, border posts and national armies, and all the other trappings of statehood.[27]

The problem of the In-Betweens

On what principles was a post-Cold War order in the region to rest? After the dust of 1989–91 had settled, the answer was still unclear, although two of the suite advanced in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe offered clues. On the one hand, the document heralded national ‘freedom of choice’ on security matters. On the other, it nodded to a principle of ‘indivisibility’: ‘Security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others.’ The two tenets pointed in opposing directions, as time was to tell.

At the very start, the post-communist states of East Central Europe advanced incremental security remedies, such as reform of the Warsaw Pact and dialogue with NATO. More ambitiously, Czechoslovakia plugged a CSCE-based European Security Commission to supplant both venerable alliances. The outgoing Bush administration punted, getting NATO to birth a North Atlantic Cooperation Council whose parleys were good for ‘a photo op and an exercise in high political symbolism’ but little else.[28] It also urged the East Central Europeans to get hold of regional security measures on their own. Only in 1993, with the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House, did Western policy planners engage in the process, with the Americans taking the lead.