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

Working away all along were the self-interested country scripts that realist theories of international relations would predict. For the countries of East Central Europe, once emancipated by the Soviet collapse, affiliations with the Western clubs were unsurpassed aids for balancing against the time-honoured Soviet/Russian hegemon. The overnight dissolution of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR itself licensed them to migrate from balancing to bandwagoning with the triumphant Western alliance, and then to jump from the bandwagon right into playing trombone in the band.

But another script was also unfolding. Although there has been some backsliding in recent years, on the whole NATO and particularly EU enlargement undergirded the development of secure and pluralistic market democracies. The prefab model empowered both organisations to reshape institutions of governance and impose Western rules on countries eager to ‘rejoin Europe’, as the saying went. The success of the transition from communism was no foregone conclusion in the early 1990s. As the Arab Spring has recently demonstrated, shifts from authoritarianism on this scale are often violent and inconclusive. The prefab model was a quintessential factor in the transformation of a wide swath of post-communist Europe.[47]

The lack of an inclusive regional order did not prevent many non-trivial acts of cooperation and benevolence across the old East–West fault line after 1991. But the foreign-policy realm Russia scrutinised most diligently was its neighbourhood, where the political map had been profoundly reshaped since Gorbachev opened Pandora’s box. Given the fait accompli of an ever-larger NATO and, with a slight lag, an ever-larger EU, the countries of East Central Europe, including the Baltic trio, were fully absorbed into Western systems. Even hardliners in Moscow recognised that they were gone for good.

In another category entirely were the quintet of ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia. Landlocked and secluded from the European theatre, they were in no danger of decamping to the West; in fact, China soon became a much more palpable force there than Western governments or institutions. Two of them (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) owned shoreline on the Caspian Sea but did not share a land border with a member or prospective member of NATO or the EU. The Central Asians have thus played a secondary role in our story. Their importance as a great-power playground temporarily grew during the US-led operation in Afghanistan following 9/11 but faded following the exit of most combat troops in 2014.[48]

The critical area of interest for our story consists of six ‘In-Betweens’, that is, former Soviet republics flanked by Russia and East Central Europe. Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova were situated to Russia’s west and southwest; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan constituted the South Caucasus, a mountainous area lying between the Black and the Caspian seas. Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan bordered Russia; Moldova and Armenia were separated from it by a few hundred kilometres. Their combined 962,762 sq km was 6% of Russia’s land area, but their population, 82.1m, was 56% of that of the erstwhile imperial metropole. They varied on characteristic after characteristic: cartographic location, climate, size, economic conditions, language, religious tradition, past association with Russia. Still, they shared much history, remote and recent, Russian as a lingua franca, a multitude of informal practices and norms, and a visceral reaction to – and propensity to manoeuvre around – any foreign policy made in Moscow.

Ukraine, the state with which Russia’s relations were to be the rockiest, held custody of 63% of the In-Betweens’ population (51.8m) and 58% of their landmass (579,330 sq km). Russia had a latent territorial grievance against Ukraine over the Crimean peninsula, which had been reassigned from RSFSR to Ukrainian jurisdiction by Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership in 1954. Acrimony flared up over proprietorship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, headquartered in Sevastopol, Crimea, which had 100,000 personnel and 835 ships in 1991. A treaty of ‘friendship, cooperation and partnership’ sealed by Yeltsin and the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in May 1997 set aside the territorial issue. Separate agreements partitioned the fleet, with Moscow buying out much of the Ukrainians’ share in exchange for debt relief, and provided Russia a 20-year lease on the naval base in Sevastopol and the right to billet 25,000 sailors, aviators and marines there.