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

The NATO moves are a response to genuine threat perceptions of East Central European allies over Russia’s behaviour since 2014. Regardless, Moscow sees in them nothing more than a continuation of the long-running process of NATO moving its military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders. In response, Russia has announced a build-up in its Western Military District. In May 2016, Russian Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu said that the army would form two new infantry divisions in the district by the end of 2016.[35] The Kremlin has also responded asymmetrically. Since 2014, Russia has abducted an Estonian intelligence officer; intensified submarine patrols in the North Atlantic; provided moral and, it has been reported, financial support to eurosceptical and anti-EU parties; and engaged in dangerous brinksmanship in the skies and on the seas, with repeated near misses between Russian air patrols and Western jets (civilian and military) and warships.[36]

NATO and Russia have come closest to a direct military clash in Syria. In September 2015, two days after a meeting between Putin and Obama failed to produce agreement, Moscow began bombing opponents of the Syrian regime – its first military intervention beyond the former Soviet region since the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Russian and NATO warplanes were operating in the same theatre but pursuing competing if not conflicting objectives. Less than three months later, a Turkish pilot downed a Russian military jet near the Syria–Turkey border, the first head-to-head clash between Moscow and a NATO country since the Korean War. Several close calls have occurred in Syria since then, including a near miss between US and Russian warplanes in June 2016.

It bears noting that the shattering of US–Russia ties as a result of the Ukraine crisis helped pave the way for Russia’s intervention in Syria. While the facts in and around that war-torn country were the primary motive for the move, it was the breakdown in relations that led Russian decision-makers to believe that only military force could compel Washington to take into account its interests in Syria. And the Ukraine crisis further incentivised Moscow to act in order to break out of the diplomatic isolation that the West had attempted to impose after Crimea and demonstrate that Russia could not be denied its rightful place at the high table of international politics.

The nuclear sabre-rattling associated with the Cold War has returned, although in different forms. In an interview in March 2015, Putin said that he considered putting Russia’s nuclear forces on alert during the Crimea operation. In November 2015, Russia’s state-owned Channel One displayed images of a general studying plans for a nuclear-armed torpedo, ‘Status-6’, a doomsday retaliation weapon that could irradiate the entire US east coast. US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has named Russia as a top threat to the US and spared the nuclear-weapons budget from any cuts, despite strict budgetary sequestration imposed by Congress.[37] Furthermore, several arms-control and confidence-building regimes that helped end the Cold War peacefully seem near collapse. This is particularly true of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Russia and the US have accused each other of violating it, and the current atmosphere in the relationship makes a diplomatic resolution almost unthinkable. In short, there is a very real risk of returning to a time when miscalculations in Moscow or Washington can at any moment lead to the destruction of life on earth.

More broadly, this proto-cold war undermines the possibility of collective action to address global challenges. The international order, such as it is, depends on a basic level of comity among the permanent members of the UN Security Council. That level of comity between Russia and the West is gone and will not return for years, if not decades. Constructive interaction within the UN and beyond will thus depend on the ability of governments to compartmentalise, that is, not allowing confrontation on one front to prevent them from cooperating on another. Thus far, the post-2014 record is patchy. Russian and Western diplomats did work together on the 2015 deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear programme and on the Paris climate change accord of 2016. However, the tensions have led to the breakdown of cooperation on a range of matters that have nothing to do with Ukraine: Moscow’s boycott of the US-led Nuclear Security Summit of March–April 2016 and its renunciation of the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement in October 2016, or the suspension of joint counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan, to name but a few. Both the US and the Russian governments have been internally divided about the wisdom of compartmentalisation, with those opposed to any cooperation gaining the upper hand as time passes without any prospect of resolving the crisis.