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

The cause for jubilation in Western capitals was their seeming come-from-behind victory in the contest with Russia over Ukraine. The new government was bent on reversing Yanukovych’s relatively Russia-friendly foreign policy and resurrecting the EU AA. The elements of the 21 February pact that remained relevant, particularly the formation of a national unity government, the clearing out of protesters from occupied buildings and the confiscation of unregistered firearms, fell by the wayside. Moreover, no high-level outreach with Russia was attempted in the critical days following Yanukovych’s fall; Obama did not call Putin again until 1 March. After the interlude of cooperation on 21 February, the zero-sum dynamic was once again ascendant.

Unlike in the West, there were no high fives in the corridors of power in Moscow. Russian leaders insisted on the implementation of the 21 February agreement and cast aspersions on the new government as illegitimate and put in place by an unconstitutional coup d’état.[32] The Russian ambassador to Ukraine was withdrawn. Putin and his advisers seem to have concluded that the collapse of the 21 February agreement resulted in part from a Western plot to install a loyal government in Kyiv that would move Ukraine toward the EU and even NATO. While no Western conspiracy in this simplistic form existed, the truth was not much better for Russia: individuals from the customary hotbeds of Ukrainian ethno-nationalism dominated the new administration; one in three ministers belonged to the far-right (and virulently anti-Russia) Svoboda party, and these authorities had come to power thanks in part to armed nationalist groups that still controlled government buildings in central Kyiv.

A spring snaps back

Within days, Russia struck back with a vengeance, as Putin set out to pry victory from the jaws of defeat by challenging the political order that had emerged after the Maidan Revolution. He had by this time run through all the standard plays in Russia’s foreign-policy playbook with Ukraine: economic coercion (the trade war in July–September), lavish economic assistance (US$15bn in assistance for Yanukovych in December) and diplomacy with the West (the 21 February agreement). None of these had worked. So Putin reached for the only tool he had yet to deploy. To force the new Ukrainian authorities and the West to take Russia’s interests into account, he decided to use the Russian military, now battle-ready after intensive reform and modernisation.

On or around 25 February 2014, special forces, paratroopers, and other men and materiel arrived in Crimea to bolster the sizeable contingent stationed there as part of the Black Sea Fleet, while other Russian forces deployed near the long land border with Ukraine and began large-scale drills. Russian commandos, the insignias removed from their uniforms, fanned out across the Crimean peninsula and began taking over Ukrainian military facilities and government buildings, including the Crimean parliament in the provincial capital of Simferopol, and setting up roadblocks.[33] On 1 March, Putin obtained unanimous approval from the upper house of Russia’s parliament to deploy the armed forces on the territory of Ukraine ‘until the normalisation of the socio-political situation’ there.

If Putin had expected the invasion of Crimea and build-up along the border to force a return to something like the 21 February agreement, he was disappointed. Although the government in Kyiv was terrified, it refused a compromise on Russia’s terms. When the speaker of the Russian lower house, Sergei Naryshkin, called Turchynov to convey an ultimatum from Putin, the acting Ukrainian president responded by calling Naryshkin a war criminal, rather than agreeing to concessions.[34] While holding out for the prospect of an ‘off-ramp’ (i.e., de-escalation) if Moscow pulled back its forces, Western governments focused on condemning Russian violations of Ukrainian borders and threatening consequences, eschewing high-level diplomacy with the Kremlin that might have defused the crisis.

Russia’s incursion into Crimea had a raft of other unintended effects, setting off potent forces that among other things constrained its own policy. It emboldened pro-Russian politicians in Crimea and evoked latent separatist sentiment among the majority of the population on the peninsula. It also brought to the fore Russians’ attachment to Crimea; surveys in 2013 had shown that more than half of Russian citizens considered Crimea to be part of Russia, not Ukraine.[35]