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

This argument is a worthy one to consider, and we explore it below. The decisions made between German reunification in 1989 and the decision to enlarge the EU and NATO in 1993 and 1994 led, largely inadvertently, to a regional order in Europe that could not feasibly incorporate Russia. Yet this shortcoming cannot fully account for the current conflict between Russia and the West. For quite a few years, Russia had an often unhappy but nonetheless functional relationship with the Euro-Atlantic institutions. It could have persisted if there had not been a test of wills in post-Soviet Eurasia. Clearly, the possibility that NATO and the EU might eventually assimilate, in some way, all of Russia’s neighbours, but not Russia itself, was a worry for the Kremlin, and one determinant of its intemperate reaction to the Maidan Revolution. But the decision to extend those institutions’ outreach into post-Soviet Eurasia was made over the course of a decade after the mid-1990s, as one element of a broader contest for influence in the region. It is this contest that grew into a negative-sum interaction, and this contest that will be the focus of our book.

While the lack of an inclusive post-Cold War architecture was a precondition for the Ukraine crisis, this ruinous outcome could have been averted without revisiting the fundamentals of the European order. It was the contestation over the lands between Russia and the West that led to the explosion in Ukraine and sent tensions spiralling out of control.

We begin the next chapter with an examination of the foundational years of the post-Cold War order (from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s), since decisions taken in that period foreclosed the opportunity to erase completely the continent’s dividing lines. Had that opportunity been seized, it could have headed off the Ukraine crisis and the broader regional contestation that long antedates it. Our book elides those disputes between Russia and the West since 1991 that did not bear directly on this negative-sum game – such as divergences over Russia’s wars in Chechnya, ballistic-missile defence, the US occupation of Iraq, the civil war in Syria and the Western military intervention in Libya, to name just a few. This is not just a matter of establishing a clear scope. All these episodes did, to varying degrees, harm relations between Russia and the West. But the damage was limited and manageable. By contrast, the tensions resulting from the regional contestation that culminated in the Ukraine crisis were neither limited nor manageable. An understanding of the origins of the crisis is thus central to explaining how we got to this low ebb in Russia–West ties and how we might get out of it.

A brief word about geographic references: Historians, politicians and opinion-makers argue endlessly about the appropriate descriptors for countries and regions on the world map. For the lands that populate this book, there are a host of disputed terms: Eastern Europe, East Central Europe, Central Europe, Russia and Eurasia are prominent among them. Settling these terminological debates is beyond our remit here. We will avoid the phrases Eastern Europe and Central Europe, although we will quote them verbatim if characters in our story utter them. We will use East Central Europe to refer to the states that were part of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact during the Cold War and are now members of NATO and the EU, and thus of the West. Russia will be used to refer to the post-Soviet state that under its constitution bears the dual moniker Russia and the Russian Federation. Eurasia is the most loosely defined of these terms, describing a space that spans the continental divide between Europe and Asia. We will apply the label post-Soviet Eurasia to the area occupied by the successor states to the Soviet Union. For a few years after 1991, post-Soviet Eurasia may be said to have covered the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), but they speedily exited the category and will be treated in the bulk of what follows as part of East Central Europe.

CHAPTER ONE Cold Peace

Where to find the roots of the disastrous scene at the Donetsk airport? One might well look to background factors such as Russian imperialism, ancestral enmities over language and religion, Soviet nationality practices, and the micro-history of Crimea and the Donbas. Although variables like these are germane at some level of abstraction, our emphasis is on dynamics in the relative foreground.