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

When talks did occur, little progress was made. Western leaders, pushing their geo-ideational case, argued that the root cause of the crisis was Russia’s aggression against Ukraine that had begun in late February when its people made their choice for a new political order. The West demanded an end to Russia’s belligerence and expected it to respect the will of the Ukrainian people. There was no appetite to negotiate with Moscow about that. As Obama said in July 2014:

The sooner the Russians recognize that the best chance for them to have influence inside of Ukraine is by being good neighbors and maintaining trade and commerce, rather than trying to dictate what the Ukrainian people can aspire to, rendering Ukraine a vassal state to Russia… the sooner we can resolve this crisis.[51]

He and the Europeans insisted on a cessation of Russian aid to the rebels and a pullback of the Russian troops now deployed along the border. While legally and morally justified, this demand was not a viable basis for talks; Moscow was not going to comply, since doing so would have allowed Ukrainian government forces to crush the insurgency. Russia was not prepared to permit the restoration of government control in the Donbas until it got a deal along the lines of the 15 March document. And neither the West nor Kyiv was willing to negotiate on these terms. While abjuring such a compromise, the West was also – understandably – not ready to escalate to the level required to shake Russia’s determination to pursue its objectives.

Russia’s actions in this period constituted a major roadblock to a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. The annexation of Crimea and stoking of the insurgency in eastern Ukraine not only made dealing with Moscow an order of magnitude more politically fraught; it also forced a reassessment of Russia’s intentions in the West. Western leaders began to question whether Putin’s ambitions extended beyond Ukraine; Russia’s unpredictability was now seen as a huge security problem for the West itself. Uncertainty about Russia’s intentions was compounded by the cognitive dissonance in the interactions between Russian officials and their Western counterparts. By late spring, it became clear that talks at the ministerial level were largely pointless. Two days after signing the Geneva joint statement in April, Lavrov repudiated the document and his Western negotiating partners in an English-language interview.[52] US officials drew the conclusion that his ‘wings had been clipped’ because he had not been given a clear mandate and had unwittingly crossed a red line.[53] A similar scenario unfolded after Economic Development Minister Aleksei Ulyukaev made a concession in talks on Ukraine’s DCFTA that autumn.[54] Putin had reduced the decision-making group on Ukraine to himself and a few close advisers.

But talking directly to Putin also yielded little. The Ukrainian, US and EU leaders wanted to discuss a pull-out of Russian troops and an end to the conflict in the Donbas; Putin consistently denied that there were any Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He was likely doing so to maintain the veneer of legality and to give himself a way of withdrawing without retreating. Putin’s two main opposite numbers, Obama and Merkel, were infuriated by what they saw as his lies and penchant for long-winded tirades. Both are result-oriented, pragmatic politicians. So when Obama’s phone calls with Putin were dominated by complaints about threats to Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine from what the Russian president called the ‘fascists’ in Kyiv, and Merkel’s tête-à-tête with him at a G20 meeting began with a two-hour litany of Western betrayals, both began to lose interest in further dialogue.[55] However, Putin was not simply being obstructionist. He wanted to talk to Obama and Merkel about a new geopolitical and geo-economic settlement for Ukraine, and perhaps the regional architecture more broadly. They wanted Russia out of Ukraine. In other words, there was no common ground.