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

The Kremlin has used the charged political environment to enact legislation that curbs free expression and strictly limits non-governmental links to the West. Examples include stiffer fines for support of separatism and for participating in unauthorised protests; a law requiring any blog with more than 3,000 daily readers to register and be regulated as a media outlet; and a provision allowing the prosecutor’s office to brand as ‘undesirable’ foreign non-governmental organisations that ‘threaten constitutional order, defence capabilities or national security’. Once so designated, an organisation is forbidden from maintaining an office in Russia and disseminating its work in the country. By autumn 2016, the US National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and the Open Society Foundation, among others, had been designated undesirable.

As in Ukraine, the conflict also radicalised Russian political discourse. In the months following the seizure of Crimea, TV news anchors, talk-show hosts and pro-government politicians slandered the Kremlin’s opponents with the terms ‘fifth column’ and ‘national traitors’, terminology that Putin had endorsed in his 18 March 2014 speech announcing the annexation. Politicians and journalists who spoke out online against government policies were hounded by a paid army of pro-government internet trolls.[31] Many other online attacks – including some that contained threats of violence – came from Russian nationalists who were not on the Kremlin payroll. Nationalist – or more accurately, pan-Slavic neo-imperialist – groups, long frozen out by the authorities, felt newly empowered by the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, in which their members played a role as volunteer fighters.[32]

Russia’s position in international politics has also worsened in certain ways since 2014. Its allies in the neighbourhood, while outwardly compliant, worry that one of them might be the next target and hedge against Moscow as much as their circumstances allow. Further west, countries that had previously been on the dovish end of the debate over policy toward Russia within NATO and the EU now see it very differently. In 2013, it would have been inconceivable for the German government to label Russia ‘a challenge to the security of our continent’, as its 2016 defence white paper did.[33] Berlin has led the effort to maintain unity within the EU on Russia sanctions. Moscow is at serious risk of permanently alienating the entire EU, which as a bloc has long been Russia’s largest trading partner and direct investor. With its Western partnerships blighted, Russia is becoming more dependent on China both economically and geopolitically, and over time that may limit its freedom of manoeuvre.

Both Russia and the West have been left worse off by the period of confrontational relations that began in 2014. This Cold War-like climate has impeded cooperation on shared challenges, raised risks of a military clash, and transformed civil conflict into proxy hot wars in Ukraine and Syria. In Europe, new tensions between Russia and NATO have led to a significant deterioration in the security environment. The US withdrew its last battle tank stationed in Europe in 2013; 6,000 had been deployed in Germany at the height of the Cold War. That trend, which facilitated a gigantic peace dividend for the US and the EU, is now being reversed.[34] The frontier between Russia and the alliance is the locus of a new build-up. The US earmarked US$789m in the fiscal year 2016 and US$3.4bn in 2017 to expand its military presence in East Central Europe, including periodic rotations of armoured and airborne brigades to Poland and the Baltic states. Following consultations at a NATO summit in Warsaw in July 2016, Canada, Germany and the UK now have troops on persistent rotation in the Baltic states. The alliance has also stepped up military rehearsals and manoeuvres, conducting the largest exercise since the end of the Cold War in June 2016.