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

But it was the colour revolutions of 2003–05, and most of all Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, that truly kicked off the unravelling of the Cold Peace. Breakdowns of regimes that were part of the status quo order in the region testified to a waning of Russian influence. The instinct of Russia and the West to respond to these breakdowns in opposite and opposing ways also pointed to more hard-hitting competition on the horizon.

The colour revolutions solidified linkages between geopolitics and geo-ideas in the region. Moscow came around to the interpretation that the uprisings next door were a tool of Western, and pointedly of American, policy. The tool was deployed, many in positions of authority argued, in order to remove sitting governments that pursued policies counter to US interests, replace them with figures who would do the Americans’ bidding, or conceivably, if all else failed, to sow sheer disorder. According to this view, colour revolutions were particularly insidious because they furthered power objectives under the cover of devotion to universal principles of democracy and human rights – what the Russians call maskirovka (camouflage). The West’s geo-ideas, in short, were geopolitics in disguise.[2] The Russian military developed a detailed schematic for this purported policy, beginning with Western government sponsorship of efforts to train opposition movements, moving to the process of delegitimising sitting governments, sparking protests and so on until the final act of installation of a puppet regime.[3]

Incongruities abounded in the Russian narrative. We mention just three here. Firstly, the popular uprisings in question originated predominantly in domestic outrage about poor governance, not intrigues by foreigners. Secondly, they occurred under a tangle of circumstances and led to very different outcomes. In Georgia, Russia was far more involved in mediating the political crisis than any Western country. In Kyrgyzstan, the successor government under Kurmanbek Bakiev behaved no differently toward Russia or the West than the ancien régime. In Ukraine (see below), Western-sounding rhetoric outpaced Western-tending policy. Thirdly, the degree of Western involvement in the uprisings and the extent to which Washington in particular guided the aftermath was grossly overstated.

The blemishes and blinkers in the Russian narrative are beside the point. Threat perceptions do not need to be logically consistent; they matter to the extent that they are widely held in a country’s political establishment. It became a consensus view in Moscow that the West, beginning with the United States, was fomenting colour revolutions in post-Soviet Eurasia as a non-kinetic means of engineering the same result as Operation Iraqi Freedom did in Iraq: regime change. And, to be fair, there were kernels of truth in the Russian narrative. The US and the EU did provide training to some of the activists and parties that came to power as a result of the revolutions, and often were involved in brokering political compromises.[4] Moreover, some US officials did claim credit for these events, although sometimes the very same individuals would also downplay the American role.[5] And in the cases of the Rose and Orange revolutions, as well as in later upheavals in the region, the governments that emerged were indisputably more pro-Western, loosely speaking, than their predecessors. In Ukraine, president Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, his co-revolutionary prime minister, had for some time been proponents of NATO and EU membership and opposed closer ties with Russia. When they came to power, there truly was a swing in Ukrainian foreign policy. Kuchma had attempted to balance between Russia and the West so as to maximise benefits; the new government tacked sharply toward the West.

Domestic politics in the region had thus become an arena of Russia–West contestation. It was a matter of geo-ideas as much as geopolitics. For Moscow, the struggle was linked to preservation of domestic stability, since it was widely taken as gospel truth that political change in the neighbourhood could be used to undermine the foundations of the Russian government. For the West, the colour revolutions also solidified a linkage between geopolitics and geo-ideas. ‘Pro-Western’ became synonymous with ‘democratic’ as a descriptor of local political forces. Democratic political change and geopolitical gain went hand in hand, and many saw Russia as an impediment to both.