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

Moscow did resort to economic coercion with Moldova. In September 2013, two months before Chisinau planned to initial its AA, Moldovan wine exports to Russia were banned on public-health grounds. Further sanitary restrictions were imposed in April and July 2014 and the next month Russia suspended tariff-free imports for 19 categories of goods.[71] Russia’s economic bullying failed to affect Moldova’s choice to proceed with the AA, which it signed at the same time as Georgia in June 2014.

Russia also turned the screws on Armenia, and here it worked. Armenia had been negotiating an AA with the EU for three years, and the two sides planned to initial the document in November 2013. However, in September 2013 Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan abruptly changed course and announced his country’s intention to drop the AA and join the EEU. He was widely reported to have been put under significant pressure from Moscow to do so.

Armenia’s about-face reflected its deep dependence on Russia not only for economic prosperity but also for security. Russian state firms own most of its utilities, including the railway and the natural-gas distributor, while private financial-industrial groups from Russia dominate other strategic sectors. And, given Armenia’s economic isolation – its borders with hostile Azerbaijan and Turkey have been closed off for 20 years – and resulting poverty, Yerevan has no alternative to Moscow’s patronage. It also relies on Russian security guarantees and military assistance in its conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. After a year of talks that led to a number of concessions, including on import duties and gas prices, Armenia signed the EEU treaty in October 2014, becoming a rare case of a trade-bloc participant that shares no borders with its fellow members. Talks on membership for Kyrgyzstan, which shares borders with Kazakhstan (and China) but not with Russia, also began in 2014, and Bishkek joined in August 2015.

A deceptive calm

Although the geo-economic zero-sum interplay between Russia and the EU picked up after the 2008 war, in the period between that conflict and the Ukraine crisis in 2014 there was a noticeable diminution of the intensity of the overall regional contestation. However, this intermission arose from contingent, circumstantial factors that served to paper over the underlying problem without a serious effort to negate its causes.

The first factor preceded the short war in the South Caucasus by three months: the swearing in of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president. While the differences between him and Putin should not be exaggerated, his presidency did have a positive effect on the relationship with the West. Most importantly, he wasn’t Putin, who had come to be personally associated with a truculent approach to foreign policy. Medvedev was a fresh face without the same political baggage. He also did not share the same sense of personal betrayal that Putin seemed to wear on his sleeve in dealings with Western leaders. Additionally, his agenda of economic modernisation led him to seek some measure of normalisation in relations with the West.[72]

Soon after the changing of the guard in Moscow, leadership turned over in Washington. Barack Obama, and his team that took office in January 2009, were not interested in playing ‘great games’ (a reference to the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia) or pursuing other policies that were egregiously confrontational toward Russia in post-Soviet Eurasia. ‘Reject idea of “Great Game” in Central Asia’ was a bullet point on an official presentation of the administration’s Russia policy.[73] The US ceased pushing the NATO MAP issue for Georgia and Ukraine, and generally dialled back the competitive dynamic in the region.

A third leadership change also contributed to the lull: the election of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine in February 2010. Yanukovych never fully deserved the moniker ‘pro-Russian’, but certainly he was far less gratuitously anti-Russian than his predecessor Yushchenko. Soon after taking office, Yanukovych signed a new foreign-policy doctrine renouncing Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations in favour of pozablokovist’ (‘non-blocness’, i.e., neutrality). In April 2010, he signed a 25-year extension of Russia’s lease on the Black Sea Fleet in return for a discounted gas price. Ukraine, always the most important arena of competition, had removed itself from the geopolitical game (though not the geo-economic one, as we shall see).