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

In the first decade or so after the Soviet collapse, the role of Western governments in these meanderings was modest. The 1999 Carnegie Endowment study concluded that no CIS member state was a serious candidate for NATO admission, and that PfP was mostly of ‘no more than a marginal influence’, attuned to bland endeavours like search-and-rescue training rather than hard geopolitics.[68] The EU approach to post-Soviet Eurasia until 2004 was ‘Russia first’, other than allowing the three Baltics to apply for accession. As with NATO’s efforts, the In-Betweens were involved only tangentially. Between 1995 and 1999, all six went for PCAs that provided for political dialogue and economic advice. Words almost universally outpaced deeds. Moldova may serve as an illustration: it ‘repeatedly heralded European integration but did little to honor its obligations, and Europe remained only marginally interested in the small country’.[69]

American diplomats who served at the time recount that Washington’s prime aim was to craft a ‘presence’ in every capital – an embassy, a military attaché, trade and aid missions, and so on – and to forge working relationships with the fledgling countries. Russian diplomats will say the Americans and less so the Europeans bad-mouthed all Russian integrationist moves as neo-Soviet. As one of them put it in an interview, ‘They were constantly throwing a spanner in the works…. Any action we took was considered an attempt to bring back the Soviet Union.’[70]

There is some truth to the Russian allegation. Inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US national security adviser who warned in 1994 of Russia’s ‘proto-imperial’ leanings, some policymakers did see Russia as bent on re-establishing an anti-Western bloc with the In-Betweens and the Central Asians.[71] The ritualistic endorsements of these states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity intimated that Russia represented a threat to both. As then-US secretary of state Christopher brusquely put it, ‘Russia must avoid any attempt to reconstitute the U.S.S.R.’[72] But the push to show the flag and the finger-pointing at an alleged Soviet-style approach to the region did not beget a Western eagerness to get tangled in local conflicts or to act systematically to thwart Russian policy. As one former practitioner recalls, ‘Despite loud warnings from political and academic critics that Moscow was seeking to restore… control, many Western European states, and even the United States, accepted and at times welcomed Russian actions to stop the fighting and try to manage the conflicts on its periphery.’[73] In the early and mid-1990s, crises in the Persian Gulf and strife-torn Somalia and the Balkans seemed more salient, and absorption of the one-time Warsaw Pact states and the three Baltic countries was mission enough for even the most evangelical NATO supporters.[74] Primakov took pride in Russia’s having made a place for OSCE and UN observers in its peacekeeping missions in Georgia, and remarked wryly that ‘no one was in any hurry to replace the Russians, let alone to repeat what NATO had done in Bosnia’.[75]