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

The EU and the US, while less acutely affected, have not come out unscathed. For Europe, the crisis is possibly a direct threat to its security and is a very real, and very costly, policy quagmire. The EU’s Eastern Partnership, of which the agreement with Ukraine is an integral component, was intended to create a band of stable and prosperous countries along the Union’s borders. Ukraine, the largest neighbour, is today anything but stable and prosperous, and the EU has felt compelled to sink billions of euros into keeping it afloat. The sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions have hit European economies at a time when they can ill afford it. And the Ukraine gas-transit corridor is under perpetual threat of shut-off, jeopardising much of the broader EU–Russia gas trade. Washington for its part has felt required to bolster deployments and military expenditures in Europe in the context of tight budgets and competing demands from the ‘pivot’ toward the Asia-Pacific and the turmoil in the Middle East. The complete breakdown in US–Russia relations, which were bad to begin with, stands in the way of efforts to address all manner of global challenges.

In sum, the Ukraine crisis has catalysed a negative-sum political interaction. All of the parties to it, in our view, are worse off than before it began.

The central claim of this book is that the negative-sum outcome we behold today is a product of zero-sum policies pursued by Russia, the US and the EU. These developed fitfully in the first decade and a half after the Cold War but dramatically intensified thereafter. Russia and the West implemented policies toward the states of post-Soviet Eurasia that aimed to extract gains at the other side’s expense, without regard for overlapping or shared interests. Neither invested serious effort in the task of outlining or even contemplating a cooperative regional order that all parties could accept. The result has been not only a deepening east–west divide, but also dysfunction in the politics of the region’s states, where elites seek to milk this contestation to suit their own narrow, often pecuniary, interests.

Analysis done in the midst of a crisis generally tends to shed more heat than light. Much of what has been said and written about the Ukraine crisis is no exception. The roots of the crisis extend far beyond the political earthquake in Kyiv and Russia’s jarring response. This volume seeks to understand those events as an outcome of the recent, post-Soviet past. Its purpose is analytical, not normative. We do not seek to assign blame or to provide justification for any party’s actions, not only because making such judgements is not our role but also because no party to this chain of events has clean hands. Indeed, this book will demonstrate that constructive, considered policy and actions in this region were the exception, not the norm, for all sides.

Several alternative explanations of the Ukraine crisis – and particularly of Russia’s actions – have emerged since the watershed of early 2014.[4] The most prominent describes the crisis as a result of Russia’s nefarious ambitions toward its neighbours. Through this optic, Moscow harbours the long-term strategic objective of subjugating all former Soviet lands. The latest manifestation of this strategy is said to be the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Moscow-led regional economic-integration bloc, which Russia purportedly sought to compel Ukraine to join. As Serhy Yekelchyk writes, ‘The [Maidan Revolution] frustrated Russia’s political leaders, who had just forced the Yanukovych regime to turn its back on the West. The Kremlin could not undo the overthrow of its ally in Kyiv, but it could cripple the new Ukraine while at the same time asserting Russia’s greater geopolitical role.’[5] According to Andrew Wilson, it was ‘Russia’s addiction to dangerous myths’, including ‘that the former USSR was the “lost territory” of historical Russia’, that explains the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in eastern Ukraine that followed.[6]

It should astonish no one that a country of Russia’s capabilities and ambitions will seek influence over its periphery; the US or China are no different in that respect. And it is clear that early in Yanukovych’s presidency Russia wanted to bring him around to joining the EEU, and between late 2013 and early 2014 wielded sticks and carrots to keep Ukraine from signing an Association Agreement (AA) with the EU. But to begin and end our understanding of the Ukraine crisis with Moscow’s supposed grand strategy of regional hegemony assumes that Russian actions in Ukraine in 2014 (and in the broader region) occurred in a vacuum, which, as this book will demonstrate, is contrary to the record.