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

For Moscow, unease over Western involvement in the debacle in Moldova turned into alarm when taken together with trends in several other nearby states. Georgia, Ukraine – the premier In-Between, and Kyrgyzstan were rattled around this time by ‘colour revolutions’ propelled by mass protest and civil resistance. The three revolutions came within 18 months: the Rose Revolution in Georgia in November 2003, which unseated Shevardnadze; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in December 2004, after a disputed national election to replace Kuchma, which denied the presidency to Kuchma’s associate, Viktor Yanukovych; and, in April 2005, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in which perennial leader Askar Akaev fell from power. The events in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, were reminiscent of those in Tbilisi and Kyiv but otherwise had scant international resonance. The same could not be said of the Rose and Orange revolutions. Shevardnadze and Kuchma had thumbed their noses at Russia on NATO, but they had been senior members of the Soviet nomenklatura, and Kuchma had played along with Russia’s SES initiative. Their replacements – Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko – were pro-Western nationalists who would necessarily be more of a handful for Moscow. Russia played go-between in Georgia but in Ukraine unabashedly took Yanukovych’s side, with Putin making two well-publicised visits to Kyiv during the election campaign, the Kremlin paying for pro-Yanukovych polling and electoral activities, and a premature congratulatory phone call from Putin to Yanukovych after the disputed second-round vote. American and European democracy-promotion programmes had funded some of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and movements that swept Saakashvili and Yushchenko into office; Western governments and media effusively embraced the new governments. That was enough for Russian officials to dismiss them as lapdogs of the West, and above all of the US, which Putin indicted for a high-handed foreign policy boxed in ‘beautiful, pseudo-democratic phraseology’.[86]

The interactions described hitherto added up to a messy equilibrium among the main external actors in post-Soviet Eurasia. In time, the equilibrium was revealed to be fragile. The Cold Peace got colder and the interaction in the region more and more unmistakably adversarial. Discord erupted with greater frequency, at a shriller pitch and with more animosity.

CHAPTER TWO Contestation entrenched

A decade and a half after the settlement-that-wasn’t marked the end of the Cold War, the best opportunity to forge a new, inclusive order for Europe and Eurasia had passed. The year 2004 brought the ‘big bang’ enlargement of Euro-Atlantic institutions, ushering the Baltic states and several adjacent countries into NATO and the EU.[1] The Western umbrella now extended deep into the former imperium of the Soviet Union. But at that time one could find only hints of the ferociously adversarial behaviour that yielded a hot war in Ukraine a decade later. Russia was far from happy with what had transpired since 1989, and often exuded resentment. Yet it had a multilayered and interdependent relationship with the EU and its member states, a functional dialogue with the US and even some cooperation with NATO. Although Moscow was on guard about Western activity in post-Soviet Eurasia, the competition was still low-grade in comparison with today.

A few short years after the colour revolutions, tensions over geopolitics and geo-ideas reached unheard-of levels, a process that culminated in a five-day war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. The focus then moved to geo-economics, as the EU became more active and Russia finally got serious about its plans for regional economic integration. While contingent factors temporarily eased tensions during the ‘reset’ interval, contestation had now been entrenched.

The Cold Peace unravels

The tenuous and mostly informal arrangement in post-Soviet Eurasia that emerged from the 1990s had reflected Russia’s relative dominance in the region, constraints on Russia–West competition, and a shared sense that Russian institutions and practices were gradually converging with Western ones. Vladimir Putin, in his first few years in power, subscribed, at least rhetorically, to the logic of convergence, but by 2003–04 he was moving the Russian political system down a more authoritarian path. The ponderings of officials and intellectuals (Western and Russian alike) about the eventual drawing of Russia into the West’s institutional web had not yet died out, but they were looking more and more implausible.