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

The period of largely unchallenged Russian predominance among the outside actors in the region had clearly come to an end. The fuse had thus been lit for an explosion. An ambitious agenda to seize the moment following the colour revolutions was taking hold in certain Western capitals. This agenda – and the conflation of nominal democratisation, as touted by geo-ideas, with geopolitical gain – was amplified by the new leaders in Kyiv and Tbilisi, who were far more savvy about getting their message across in the West than their predecessors. Incendiary rhetoric heightened Russian paranoia about Western intentions. In May 2006, Cheney delivered a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which he said: ‘The system that has brought such great hope to the shores of the Baltic can bring the same hope to the far shores of the Black Sea, and beyond. What is true in Vilnius is also true in Tbilisi and Kiev, and true in Minsk, and true in Moscow.’[22] One can only conjecture the reaction to such statements in the Kremlin.

Yet there was no consensus in the West about extending offers of formal membership to the new aspirants in post-Soviet Eurasia. In NATO, one of the reasons cited by those member states opposed to such a step for Ukraine was the lack of popular support for membership.[23] So the Bush administration pushed the Ukrainian authorities ‘to become more actively involved in the public outreach and education campaign about NATO and why it is in Ukraine’s national interest to join the Alliance’.[24] Washington was thus going far beyond support for Ukraine’s aspirations, as it often claimed. It was selectively reading those aspirations, focusing on parts of the elite and not the public, and attempting to alter them.

The Bush administration also threw more support than before behind the GUAM enterprise. It came in the form of high-level participation in US–GUAM meetings and a significant hike in financial support.[25] It is hard not to read US assistance to the grouping as anything other than an attempt to strengthen intra-regional ties that did not involve Russia.

The accumulated tensions began to take their toll on the regional security architecture. At the OSCE summit in Istanbul in November 1999, an Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (A/CFE) had been signed, modernising the 1990 treaty as a confidence- and security-building measure for the post-Cold War environment. At the same summit, Moscow made commitments to withdraw its remaining military units in Georgia (in stages) and Moldova (by the end of 2002). Moscow ratified the new treaty, which it much preferred to the original, but slow-rolled the withdrawal commitments. NATO member states in 2002 adopted a policy of formally linking their ratification of A/CFE to Russia’s following through on its commitments. By 2003, the annual OSCE summits, the NATO–Russia Council (a consultative body established in 2002) and CFE implementation meetings were marred by polemics between Russia and the West about what came to be known as the Istanbul Commitments. The removal of troops from Moldova came to a halt in March 2004 and has never resumed. Russian forces had left Georgia by November 2007.[26] By that time, though, the CFE regime at large was on the verge of implosion.

Russia had dug in its heels in Moldova following the collapse of the Kozak Memorandum and Russian-inspired settlement efforts in 2003. But the West, and particularly the US, seemed intent on using the linkage between A/CFE ratification and the Istanbul Commitments to drive Russia’s army out of the region and force settlements to the protracted conflicts. In Moldova, Russia’s military presence was twofold: remnants of the 14th Army guarding weapons stockpiles, and the Russian component of the peacekeeping force (PKF), created via the ceasefire deal that terminated the fighting in Transnistria in 1992. Within NATO, no ally questioned that the Istanbul Commitments governed the former, but the latter was the subject of dispute. The US insisted there was a link and proposed to replace the PKF with a multinational EU–Russia force.[27] Washington’s position on this issue seemed designed to compel Moscow to accept terms regarding the Transnistria conflict and its presence there by holding back on A/CFE ratification, which Moscow was eager to achieve. The gambit backfired.

In April 2007, Putin, in his annual address to parliament, declared a moratorium on Russia’s implementation of the original CFE agreement, evidently in order to force NATO to ratify A/CFE. He denounced Western ‘attempts to gain unilateral advantages’ by ‘making use of an invented pretext for not ratifying [A/CFE]’ while ‘build[ing] up their own system of military bases along our borders’.[28] In December of that year, Russia suspended its implementation of CFE, while no NATO member state moved to ratify A/CFE.[29]