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

In practice, restrained balancing against Russia could work in an assortment of tangible ways, rarely earth-shaking. In expeditions to the post-Soviet capitals, Western envoys got used to hearing pleas to intercede with Moscow on their behalf, on points both petty and consequential. Few meetings passed without requests for public manifestations of solidarity with the locals. Governments enrolled in all available international organisations, signed declarations of good wishes ad infinitum with the Americans and Europeans, garnered invitations to Brussels, Berlin and Washington, showed up at protocol events and celebrations staged by the West, and dragged their feet on the implementation of CIS agreements. They could also accept or solicit sometimes-generous Western foreign-aid programmes. These were ostensibly apolitical measures but they reflected the realities of the time: Western prosperity and Russia’s relative lack of resources. From 1995 onwards, the US had a declared policy to give the In-Betweens and the Central Asians a bigger collective slice of the assistance pie for the former Soviet region than Russia’s share. By 1998, Russia received only 17% of the total aid for the 12 post-Soviet Eurasian countries, while Ukraine, with less than one-third of Russia’s population, got more and was now the third-largest recipient after Israel and Egypt globally. ‘In part, strategic considerations – including the desire to fortify the security and independence of Ukraine and Uzbekistan and the goal of establishing better relations with the oil-rich states of the Caspian region – pushed aid in this non-Russian direction.’[79] Pocketing favours from one side was not seen as incompatible with doing the same from the other. Some of the In-Between leaders of the time – Kuchma of Ukraine and Shevardnadze of Georgia come to mind – were virtuosos at playing the West and Russia off each other in order to wring concessions from both.

An oft-heard explanation of the turbulence between Russia and the West that eventually surfaced is the coming to power of a new Russian president: Vladimir Putin, inaugurated in May 2000 after serving four months as acting president following Yeltsin’s early retirement. In fact, Putin’s arrival corresponded with several years of an upturn, generally speaking, in Russian interaction with the West. The new man in the Kremlin revived the NATO–Russia relationship and received the NATO secretary-general, George Robertson, soon after taking office. The latter opined that things had crept ‘from the permafrost into slightly softer ground’.[80] Putin’s public statements recalled Yeltsin’s and Gorbachev’s musings about Russia finding a home in the Western community. ‘Russia’, he said in an interview with David Frost of the BBC in 2000, ‘is part of the European culture’, and he could not picture it ‘in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world’. He was against demonising NATO as a perpetual enemy; ‘even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world’. ‘Could Russia ever join NATO?’, Frost wanted to know. ‘I don’t see why not’, replied Putin. ‘I would not rule out such a possibility… if and when Russia’s views are taken into account as those of an equal partner.’[81] He raised the issue of Russia’s potential NATO membership when he first met an American president, Bill Clinton, in June 2000. Clinton was non-committal, but Kremlin staffers were instructed to investigate the nuts and bolts of Russian accession.[82] Putin hit it off personally with several Western leaders, including Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush. After meeting the Russian in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush legendarily exclaimed that he had caught a glimpse of Putin’s ‘soul’.

Putin telephoned Bush with condolences over the 9/11 attacks before any other world leader, and asked CIS governments in Central Asia to satisfy US basing needs for the onslaught against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Russia filled intelligence gaps before the American invasion and there was some cooperation with the American services in the field. This led to talk of a new US–Russia alliance in the war on terror. In the months after 9/11, Putin again raised the possibility of a Russian place in NATO with Robertson. The NATO secretary-general reportedly gave him the standard line about formal procedures and practices. Putin undoubtedly heard: ‘get in line behind Estonia and Bulgaria’.