EVERYONE LOSES: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Adelphi Book 460) by Charap Samuel & Colton Timothy J

EVERYONE LOSES: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Adelphi Book 460) by Charap Samuel & Colton Timothy J

Author:Charap, Samuel & Colton, Timothy J. [Charap, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The International Institute for Strategic Studies
Published: 2017-01-11T21:00:00+00:00


A deceptive calm

Although the geo-economic zero-sum interplay between Russia and the EU picked up after the 2008 war, in the period between that conflict and the Ukraine crisis in 2014 there was a noticeable diminution of the intensity of the overall regional contestation. However, this intermission arose from contingent, circumstantial factors that served to paper over the underlying problem without a serious effort to negate its causes.

The first factor preceded the short war in the South Caucasus by three months: the swearing in of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president. While the differences between him and Putin should not be exaggerated, his presidency did have a positive effect on the relationship with the West. Most importantly, he wasn’t Putin, who had come to be personally associated with a truculent approach to foreign policy. Medvedev was a fresh face without the same political baggage. He also did not share the same sense of personal betrayal that Putin seemed to wear on his sleeve in dealings with Western leaders. Additionally, his agenda of economic modernisation led him to seek some measure of normalisation in relations with the West.72

Soon after the changing of the guard in Moscow, leadership turned over in Washington. Barack Obama, and his team that took office in January 2009, were not interested in playing ‘great games’ (a reference to the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia) or pursuing other policies that were egregiously confrontational toward Russia in post-Soviet Eurasia. ‘Reject idea of “Great Game” in Central Asia’ was a bullet point on an official presentation of the administration’s Russia policy.73 The US ceased pushing the NATO MAP issue for Georgia and Ukraine, and generally dialled back the competitive dynamic in the region.

A third leadership change also contributed to the lull: the election of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine in February 2010. Yanukovych never fully deserved the moniker ‘pro-Russian’, but certainly he was far less gratuitously anti-Russian than his predecessor Yushchenko. Soon after taking office, Yanukovych signed a new foreign-policy doctrine renouncing Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations in favour of pozablokovist’ (‘non-blocness’, i.e., neutrality). In April 2010, he signed a 25-year extension of Russia’s lease on the Black Sea Fleet in return for a discounted gas price. Ukraine, always the most important arena of competition, had removed itself from the geopolitical game (though not the geo-economic one, as we shall see).

All three leadership changes facilitated the ‘reset’ in US–Russia relations and the improvement in Russia–Europe relations in 2009–12. There was some positive spillover into West–Russia interaction in post-Soviet Eurasia. The US facility at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas airport, a stopping point for US soldiers and materiel on the way to Afghanistan, was a good example. In February 2009, Russia offered US$2 billion in assistance to Bakiev, Kyrgyzstan’s strongman, in return for evicting the US from Manas. Toward the end of its time in office, the Bush administration had treated the basing arrangements as an exclusively bilateral issue with the Kyrgyzstanis, which had led Moscow to conclude that the US intended to stay there indeterminately and/or to use Manas as part of a strategy to encircle Russia.



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