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

Moscow continued its coercive economic diplomacy in the region throughout the subsequent years. The motives, as far as one can divine from the circumstances, ranged from punishment for perceived bad behaviour to strong-arming concessions during unrelated negotiations. Moscow rarely announced its objectives openly, instead airing ludicrous cover stories for public consumption. In 2006 alone, allegations of hygiene violations led to import bans on dairy, meat and poultry products from Ukraine (January); Georgian and Moldovan wine (March); and Georgian mineral water (May). Later that year, in retaliation for the Georgians’ public arrest of four suspected Russian spies, Moscow suspended all transportation links with Georgia, and deported migrant workers amidst what seemed to be a campaign of intimidation against ethnic Georgians in Russia. There were two energy disputes with Belarus in 2006–07, including an oil cut-off. Little by way of grand design seems to have been involved. As Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk note, Moscow had developed a reflex of ‘deploying selective, targeted sanctions toward any states which pursued a policy that Russia regarded as unfriendly’.[16] The tactical goals varied in these scattered episodes. Taken together, the Russian actions did not amount to much, let alone a strategy for regional domination.

What is often called Russian soft power in its neighbourhood became a focus in the period following the colour revolutions. But Joseph Nye’s classic definition of soft power – the ‘ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion’ – never quite fit the Russian case. Less than two months after the Orange Revolution, Putin established a ‘department for inter-regional and cultural ties with foreign countries’ in the presidential administration, with a mission to solidify the bonds with former Soviet neighbours. Its first director was Modest Kolerov, the founder of the news site Regnum, which had a well-honed anti-Western bent and a focus on those same neighbours. Pro-Russian NGOs sprouted across the region, including in sensitive areas like Transnistria and Crimea. Groups of this ilk organised protests that disrupted a planned NATO–Ukraine exercise in the Crimean port of Feodosia in 2006. Assertions of Russian government funding for the NGOs throughout the region were ubiquitous in Western analysis. The evidence offered was circumstantial at best. A dearth of hard data is part of the problem: some groups certainly received financing from Russia, but the very opacity of these arrangements suggested a sinister intent, sharpening threat perceptions. Even though Moscow’s actions bore some likeness to common Western soft-power instruments, they lacked transparency and featured ominous undertones. It was more like ‘soft coercion’, as James Sherr puts it, than soft power.[17] Even efforts to engage Russian co-ethnics in the region seemed underhanded.[18]

The colour revolutions helped catalyse a tough Western, particularly American, approach to the region. In Washington, a well-placed faction within and around the Bush administration was determined to continue the enlargement of Euro-Atlantic institutions. Its most high-ranking member was then-vice president Dick Cheney, who, as he was to write in his memoir, ‘had long believed that the United States should play a more active role in integrating Ukraine and other former Soviet states into the West’.[19] It also included some figures who had been at the forefront of the first round of NATO enlargement. One of them, Ronald Asmus, explicitly argued in 2005 that:

the Orange Revolution has opened up an opportunity to redraw the map of Europe and Eurasia…. Anchoring Central and Eastern Europe to the West was a tremendous strategic accomplishment…. The Orange Revolution has now offered us the historic chance to extend that same degree of peace and stability further eastward into Ukraine, perhaps across the Black Sea and maybe eventually into Russia itself…. Ukraine’s anchoring to the West must become the next step in the completion of Europe and the Euro-Atlantic community.

He anticipated that Ukraine could be granted a NATO Membership Action Plan ‘no later than the next NATO summit in 2006’.[20] For this group, expanding NATO’s writ had become intimately linked to democracy promotion. Bush himself writes in his memoir, ‘I viewed NATO expansion as a powerful tool to advance the freedom agenda.’[21]