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

As with the relationship in toto, it would stretch the truth to say that Russian–Western cooperation in post-Soviet Eurasia was non-existent in the 1990s. The outstanding case was the conjoint effort to counteract the dispersal of weapons from the USSR’s nuclear storehouse. When the hammer-and-sickle was run down the Kremlin flagpole on 25 December 1991, 3,200 strategic warheads were located in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in storage or on intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber aircraft, as were 4,000 of the less destructive tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons. All of the tactical weapons were transported without incident to Russia by 1992. The Lisbon Protocol, brokered and co-signed by the Western powers the same year, bound Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to send their strategic warheads to Russia as well, where the fissile materials were to be converted into fuel for civilian reactors. There were no hiccups with Belarus and Kazakhstan; Ukraine resisted handing over its arsenal of 2,250 warheads, the third largest after Russia and the US. American pressure and aid were central to incentivising Ukraine to denuclearise. In November 1994 Ukraine relented and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state. The next month, Russia (with the US and Britain) gave its assent to a Budapest Memorandum solemnly obligating it ‘to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine’. The last nuclear weapons were shipped to depots in Russia in May 1996. Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme put forth by senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the American taxpayer footed much of the bill for deactivating the weapons, reprocessing the fissile material into reactor fuel and purchasing it for US power plants.[51]

Low-grade competition

Yet what typified the Cold Peace was not cooperation but the chilly disinterest insinuated by the catchphrase and the rise of competition in and over the In-Betweens, and to a lesser degree Central Asia. The competition was low-grade and muffled by situational factors, but competition all the same.

A starting point was the new Russia’s avowal of geopolitical supremacy in post-Soviet Eurasia. Contrary to myth, this sense of entitlement was not the invention of Vladimir Putin after 1999. His more forward-thinking predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, laid it out unapologetically in a presidential decree on ‘The Strategic Course of the Russian Federation with Respect to the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States’, dated 14 September 1995. The decree is in force to the present day. ‘On the territory of the CIS’, it was affirmed, ‘are concentrated Russia’s most vital interests in the domains of economics, defence, security, and defence of [its citizens’] rights’. Russia was envisaged as a ‘leading force in forming a new system of international… relations in the post-USSR space’, and integral to this effort as acting ‘to foster integrative processes in the CIS’. In a sharply worded section on security, Yeltsin stipulated that Russian policy ‘obtain from the CIS states performance of their obligations to desist from alliances and blocs directed against any of these states’. NATO should stay at arm’s length, and the CIS countries should be in unison with Russia in waving a ‘No Trespassing!’ sign at interlopers. The decree allowed for cooperation with international organisations like the UN and the OSCE in regulating intra-regional conflicts, but underscored the need ‘to get them to understand that this region is first of all Russia’s zone of influence’.[52] The text on the face of it was a classic example of zero-sum geopolitics.