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The Ukraine crisis that erupted in early 2014 has brought an end to the post–Cold War status quo in Europe. Russia, feeling betrayed by its Western partners because of their support for regime change in Kiev, has stepped forward to protect its vital interests—which the West saw as aggression by a revisionist power. The ensuing conflict will last long and have an impact far beyond Europe.

Great-Power Competition Is Back

• The Ukraine crisis has ushered in a period of U.S.-Russian rivalry, even confrontation, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Great Game, a fight for supremacy between the Russian and British Empires. The competition is asymmetrical and highly unequal.
   
• This conflict is being waged mainly in the political, economic, and information spheres, but it has military overtones as well. It differs from the Cold War in that human contact, trade, and information flows are not completely shut off, and there is a modicum of cooperation.
   
• Russia is focused on post-Soviet integration in Eurasia, while the United States has initiated a series of measures to restore a “holding line” against Russia in Europe.
   
• The U.S. approach toward Russia reflects traditional concerns, even phobias, and is not based on an adequate understanding of the country, in part because Russia has ceased to be a focus of U.S. foreign policy.
   
• The international system is becoming more balanced, and Washington needs to prepare for this by developing policies that account for the interests of major players, including Russia.

Global Implications

• Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia will be the battleground in the U.S.-Russian fight for influence. A number of other countries and territories, including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian North Caucasus and Crimea, and the Baltic states, may also be affected by this competition.
   
• In Central Europe, Poland, which has been most directly involved with the crisis over Ukraine, has toughened its attitudes toward Russia.
   
• Western Europe’s relations with Russia have changed significantly since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis. The period of cooperation and mutual understanding ushered in by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s agreement to Germany’s reunification is over.
   
• Faced with an increasingly hostile West, Russia is visibly turning East. In particular, China and Russia have become closer, signing a historic gas deal, conducting joint naval exercises, and increasing trade.
   
• Russia’s hardball policies in Ukraine and its defiance of the United States have won it increased credibility in the Middle East.

Introduction

The political crisis that erupted in Ukraine in early 2014 has ended the period in Russian-Western relations that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.¹ The crisis marks the end of a generally cooperative phase in those relations, which even included a failed effort at Russia’s integration with or into the West on its own terms. Instead, the Ukraine crisis has opened a new period of heightened rivalry, even confrontation, between former Cold War adversaries.

On the face of it, this new period is broadly reminiscent of the Cold War, but it differs from it in important ways. Today’s situation has a values component to it but is not nearly as focused on ideology as the conflict between communism and liberal democracy was. It has a traditional military dimension too, but this aspect is not—as yet—dominant. The current crisis has global implications, but, in and of itself, it is not central to the global system. Most importantly, unlike the Cold War, the present crisis is not the organizing principle of either world politics or even the foreign policies of the conflict’s main contestants, particularly that of the United States. If historical analogies are of any use, parallels to the nineteenth-century Great Game for supremacy between the Russian and British Empires would be more to the point, except, of course, that the present U.S.-Russian rivalry is asymmetrical.

The Ukraine crisis has opened a new period of heightened rivalry, even confrontation, between former Cold War adversaries.

The severity of the crisis came as a surprise to many, in Ukraine itself, Russia, the European Union (EU), and the United States. Not that the gestation of the crisis and the steadily worsening environment in Russia’s relations with the West had been overlooked. Rather, many Ukraine watchers who continued to believe that “the more the country changes, the more it stays the same” were caught off guard by the dynamics on the ground. In late February 2014, Ukraine moved too far and too abruptly to the West and lost balance. Just before that, U.S. policy in support of democratic change in Ukraine had steered past safe limits. Russia felt cornered, and its reaction surprised many Russians, not to speak of Ukrainians and Westerners.

This new battle for influence is very real and will have major ramifications beyond just Ukraine. The confrontation will take some time to lead to an outcome, and neither the time frame nor the result can be clearly foreseen at this point. What is clear, however, is that the Euro-Atlantic region has entered a different epoch.

Origins of the Ukraine Crisis

The Ukraine crisis was immediately preceded by competition between the EU and Russia for the future geoeconomic orientation of Ukraine. The roots of the crisis lie in the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, which ended the prospect of enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for both Georgia and Ukraine, and in the beginning of the global financial crisis, which seemed to give more credence to regional economic arrangements. Then, the EU and Russia drew different conclusions from the war and the crisis. The Europeans, through the Eastern Partnership program the EU launched in 2009, looked to associate Ukraine, along with five other former Soviet republics, economically and politically with the EU.² Rather than a step toward future EU enlargement, however, this initiative was an attempt to constitute a “zone of comfort” to the east of the union’s border and enhance these countries’ Western orientation.

The Russian Federation, for its part, tried to attract Ukraine and most of the rest of the former Soviet Union to its flagship project of a customs union, also energized in 2009, which led by May 2014 to the signing of the treaty establishing a Eurasian Economic Union.³ Rather than re-creating the Soviet Union, as suspected in the West, Moscow began building a Russian-led community in Eurasia that would give Russia certain economic benefits and, no less important, better bargaining positions with regard to the country’s big continental neighbors—the EU to the west and China to the east. Including Ukraine into the scheme, which Russian President Vladimir Putin had been trying to achieve since the 2003–2004 project of a “single economic space,” was designed to give the new compact the critical mass of 200 million consumers, of which Ukraine would supply almost a quarter. Yet at the same time, Putin remained wedded to his master concept of a “Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” which he first outlined in 2010 and has reiterated since.

Thus, Brussels and Moscow each saw Ukraine as an important element of their own geopolitical project. The Russians have also made an effort to explore the possibility of associating Ukraine with both economic units and in this way keeping the country’s international and domestic balance. Yet, for the Europeans there was no chance of talking to a third country about Ukraine’s association. Eventually, both Russia and the EU came to see Ukraine’s choice as a zero-sum game and worked hard to influence the outcome.

Ukraine itself, ruled from 2010 to 2014 by the then president Viktor Yanukovych and his supporters from the eastern region of Donetsk, was habitually maneuvering between the EU and Russia, always in search of a better deal. Yanukovych, for domestic political reasons, raised high hopes for the EU link, on which he was ostensibly working. However, the Ukrainian president was never able to secure reasonable financial relief from Brussels to compensate for the severe blow to Ukrainian industry that would have resulted from closer economic association with the EU. In the run-up to presidential elections originally due in early 2015, the need for such a cushion became crucial.

At the same time, Yanukovych had to factor in the pressure exercised by Russia. Moscow first showed Ukraine, in the form of trade barriers, what it would lose from choosing the EU over Russia and, later, in the form of an aid package, what it would gain if it made the “right” choice. As a result, Yanukovych in November 2013 suddenly suspended a political and economic association agreement that Kiev had been due to sign with the EU. The following month, he instead accepted a generous financial and economic package from Russia’s Putin.

The November 2013 decision led to mass protests in central Kiev, which almost immediately turned into a permanent standoff on the capital’s Independence Square. Most protesters were ordinary people who suffered from poverty and were deeply incensed by runaway official corruption, including in Yanukovych’s family. To those people, EU association appeared as a way out of this undignified situation, and the abrupt and unexpected closure of that door produced a painful and powerful shock.

This essentially civic protest, which became known as the Maidan, was joined by nationalist groups, hailing mainly from western Ukraine, who always insisted on a Ukrainian national identity that was clearly separate from, and even inimical to Russia. To them, Yanukovych, an easterner, was hijacking the country to merge with Russia, which many in the country’s west viewed with deep suspicion and outright hostility. Finally, the Maidan protests were supported, funded, and exploited by Ukraine’s oligarchic clans, which were unhappy with Yanukovych and his Donetsk allies wielding too much power and aggressively expanding their business interests at other oligarchs’ expense. To them, the Maidan was a means to force early presidential elections and unseat Yanukovych.

In the United States, the top echelons in the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama were not initially focused on the Ukrainian developments. Ukraine was not a foreign policy priority for the U.S. president, who was heavily preoccupied with wars and revolutions in the Middle East, Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, America’s relations with China, and developments in East Asia. However, the United States had long supported pro-Western democratic movements in Ukraine, for both ideological and geopolitical reasons, and it looked with a wary eye on the Kremlin’s attempts at Eurasian integration. Washington abhorred the idea of Ukraine becoming part of the Russian sphere of influence. To stymie that, it was working on helping pro-Western opposition leaders hold on to power in Kiev and openly encouraging them in their efforts.

In mid-February 2014, the situation in central Kiev degenerated into violence and reached a denouement. It first appeared that Yanukovych was resolved to win by using force to disperse the Maidan, which by that time had formed a capable fighting force built around a nationalist organization called the Right Sector. However, Yanukovych stopped the police advance in its tracks and opened talks with the opposition leaders. Those talks soon became negotiations about the concessions his government was prepared to make and ended on February 21, 2014, with the president’s de facto capitulation, which was to be delayed by a few months. The foreign ministers of EU member states France, Germany, and Poland co-signed an agreement with the Ukrainian government and opposition leaders to that effect. No sooner than it had been signed, the deal was rejected by the Maidan, whose more radical members demanded the president’s immediate resignation. Yanukovych fled from Kiev, the police disappeared from its streets, and the Maidan revolution could celebrate victory.

Russia’s Policies

These dramatic developments were most traumatic for Moscow. From a Russian perspective, Ukraine had for two decades been a weak, fragile, and often unreliable state, chronically creating problems for Russian energy giant Gazprom’s transit to Europe. However, to most Russians, the country was anything but foreign. Now, Ukraine was suddenly turning into a country led by a coalition of pro-Western elites in Kiev and anti-Russian western Ukrainian nationalists. This shift, in the Kremlin’s eyes, carried a dual danger of Kiev clamping down on the Russian language, culture, and identity inside Ukraine and of the country itself joining NATO in short order. Putin reacted immediately by apparently putting in motion contingency plans that Moscow had drafted for the eventuality of Kiev seeking membership in the Atlantic alliance.

Russia’s Ukraine policy, which until then had been publicly low-key and heavily focused on top-level interaction with the Ukrainian president, immediately went into high gear. Defense and maneuvering stopped, to be replaced by a counteroffensive. The main goal became to keep Ukraine from joining NATO and, ideally, to win back the country for the Eurasian integration project, whose core element is the reunification of what Moscow sees as the “Russian world.” In pursuing its new, proactive approach, Russia had two main objectives.

The first was to make Crimea off limits to the new post-Yanukovych authorities in Kiev. This was executed by means of Russian special forces physically insulating the peninsula from mainland Ukraine, neutralizing the Ukrainian garrison in Crimea, and helping Crimea’s pro-Russian elements take control of the local government, parliament, and law enforcement agencies. Russia also encouraged those elements to hold a referendum on Crimea’s status and pursued an all-out campaign in favor of Crimea’s reunification with Russia. The vote, held on March 16, 2014, overwhelmingly endorsed such a union. Two days later, a treaty was signed in Moscow to incorporate Crimea and the city of Sevastopol into Russia.

Moscow’s second objective was to achieve a new federal settlement in Ukraine, which would forestall complete domination of the country by Kiev and western Ukraine and thus make any move toward NATO structurally impossible. On March 1, 2014, Putin had already sought and received powers from the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, to use Russian armed forces inside Ukraine. Russian forces began exercising along the Ukrainian border, appearing ready to invade, but no crossborder invasion happened. The Kremlin was putting pressure on the new authorities in Kiev, making them nervous and indecisive; deterring Washington and Brussels from intervening by dramatically raising the stakes; and encouraging Moscow’s political friends in the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

Indeed, in the largely Russophone eastern and southern Ukraine, mass rallies began to demand regional autonomy, including rights for the Russian language. These rallies were later followed by reasonably well-organized militant groups seizing government buildings, arming themselves, and taking over towns. In the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, the militants held regional referendums in early May and proclaimed their own “republics” independent from Kiev. Moscow did not hide its sympathy and support for these separatists, but it refrained from either recognizing them or sending the Russian forces to protect them.

However, Russia failed in rousing resistance to Kiev across the entire southeast of Ukraine. The hope that predominantly Russian-speaking Novorossia, “New Russia” encompassing Ukraine’s entire south-east, would break away from the new revolutionary authorities and form a federation, did not materialize. Only Donetsk and Luhansk held referendums in support of regional sovereignty. The key cities of Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odessa, and Zaporizhia, however, remained under the central government’s control. Moreover, the interim government launched an “antiterrorist operation” in Donetsk and Luhansk, which led to numerous casualties on both sides, and provoked a humanitarian crisis. Moscow gave the militants there moral, political, and material support but stopped short of recognizing their “people’s republics” and outright military intervention.

Moscow refused to recognize the Maidan-backed government as legitimate, even though it dealt with its officials. It also branded the revolutionary regime in Kiev as ultranationalist, even “fascist,” with reference to the role the Ukrainian radicals had played in the ouster of Yanukovych. The United States, by contrast, gave well-publicized political support to Kiev, as evidenced by the visits there by Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, and a number of other U.S. officials. Russian media claimed that Washington was directing the Ukrainian authorities’ actions.

Russia attempted a number of diplomatic steps to manage the crisis next door and achieve its goals. However, telephone diplomacy between Presidents Putin and Obama produced no solution, and the channel between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary Kerry yielded little. The Geneva statement of April 17, 2014, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s road map of May 8 were stillborn. Moscow got far more attention by sending forces to the Ukrainian border for military drills, which looked like a preparation for invasion. The idea was to deter Kiev from going too hard against its opponents in eastern Ukraine and to raise the stakes in Washington by demonstrating Russia’s resolve to defend its vital interests.

On May 25, 2014, Ukraine successfully held early presidential elections that led to the clear victory of Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch and the principal sponsor of the Maidan. The radicals received little support, just like Yanukovych’s former party. Putin decided he could not ignore the choice of many millions of Ukrainians and agreed to resume top-level contacts with Kiev. With the move, the Kremlin, which knew Poroshenko well, was likely getting ready to reengage with the Ukrainian elite, albeit under new circumstances.

The Western Response

Within a few weeks, measures taken in response to Russia’s actions abruptly reversed the twenty-five-year-old trend toward expanding contacts between former Cold War adversaries. Moscow’s policies met with immediate, strong negative reaction from the United States and its allies. Seen as an aggressor, Russia was effectively expelled from the G8 group of leading industrialized nations, which returned to being the G7. The EU downgraded its relations with Russia, while NATO froze its cooperation with Moscow. Western leaders suspended their bilateral summits with Putin, even though they soon started to make exceptions. In a United Nations (UN) General Assembly vote on the Crimean referendum in late March, 100 nations refused to recognize the outcome, against only eleven that did.⁴ Faced with near-universal condemnation, Russian delegates had to suspend their participation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Russia’s accession process to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was also put on hold. High-level international meetings in Russia, such as the annual security conference in Moscow and the economic forum in St. Petersburg, lost many Western delegates.

In material terms, the United States led its allies in imposing sanctions against Russian officials, companies, and potentially whole sectors of industry. The goal is to hurt Russia so much that it backs down on Ukraine, ideally creating enough pain within Russia to effect a regime change—that is, Putin’s ouster, either as a result of a palace coup or through a popular revolt. Successive waves of sanctions, in conjunction with efforts to isolate Russia politically, immediately caused a deep plunge of the Russian stock market, a massive capital flight out of Russia, and a further weakening of the ruble. Potential new investors were turned off. Even though the energy relationship between Russia and Europe is too vital to many EU economies for it to be wound down immediately, there is now a much stronger trend toward energy diversification away from Russia. High-technology imports by Russia became more difficult. Russian finance was also put on notice about the potential dire consequences of a deepening confrontation with the United States.

In military terms, Russia has been redesignated as an adversary of the West. NATO is becoming reenergized around its original late-1940s mission of “keeping the Russians out.” The temporary deployments of relatively small Western contingents in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states are likely to turn into a permanent basing of NATO’s forces—including U.S. troops—along the alliance’s eastern border. NATO’s ballistic missile defenses, which are now being installed in Europe, will be openly targeting Russia’s nuclear forces. Neutral countries such as Sweden and Finland are considering joining NATO and would be welcome there should they decide to pursue membership. A major NATO summit in September 2014 in Wales is thus likely to present a “new old face” of the alliance. Barely out of Afghanistan, NATO is pivoting back to Russia.

In military terms, Russia has been redesignated as an adversary of the West.

In political, economic, and military terms, the European continent is again divided—with Russia to the east, NATO and the EU to the west, and the “lands in between” of Ukraine, Moldova, and the countries of the South Caucasus as the battleground. Great-power war in Europe, thought to be safely consigned to the history books since the start of the 1990s, has made a stunning comeback as a possibility, however remote. Economic sanctions, a political equivalent of war, have again been applied. Information warfare has been in full swing. Even though Russia and the United States had a close brush with confrontation in 2008 in Georgia, that episode was too brief, too peripheral, and very soon overshadowed by the global crisis and the change of administration in Washington to leave lasting traces. Georgia did not change post–Cold War history. Ukraine did.

A History of Unsuccessful Rapprochement

The sharp turn in Russian-Western relations comes after a quarter century of halfhearted efforts on both sides to build an inclusive relationship. Early on, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s last two years as Soviet leader, Moscow hoped for a “common European home” and a joint global leadership with the United States.⁵ Both notions soon turned out to be illusions. Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, then tried to fully integrate the country by joining NATO and forging a direct alliance with the United States. This did not work either.

Putin, soon after succeeding Yeltsin in the Kremlin, privately sounded out the West about Russia’s NATO membership, announced a de facto alliance relationship with the United States, and publicly proclaimed Russia’s European choice—in a 2001 speech in the German parliament, delivered in German.⁶ Russia’s third president, Dmitry Medvedev, with Putin’s support, called for a European security treaty,⁷ suggested a joint defense perimeter for Russia and NATO, and actively sought “modernization alliances” with the advanced economies of the West.

These efforts by the last Soviet leader and Russia’s first three presidents have fallen far short of their expectations. Western leaders showed no real interest in integrating Russia. They had good reasons for this. Russia was too big for such an exercise—particularly in terms of the economic assistance it would have needed to bring it closer to Western European levels. Russia, despite the loss of its superpower status, was also too independent-minded, with a huge nuclear-weapons arsenal and an elite that still reasoned in great-power terms and craved equality with the United States. As such, it would have made a strong-headed and thus awkward ally for Washington. Finally and crucially, there was no outside threat to the West that made it imperative for Russia to be secured to the U.S.-led alliance system.

Rather than integrating Russia within its own international system of institutions, the West tried to help Russia establish domestic political, economic, and social institutions that would make it closer to the West in qualitative terms. Western governments supported programs to relay democratic and market practices to Russia, hoping that it would soon become part of a globalized open society. Before Russia defaulted on its domestic debt in 1998, the country had been on life support from the International Monetary Fund for six years. Western advisers functioned at many levels in the Russian government, particularly its economic wing. Western governments backed Yeltsin at crucial moments, such as during a violent conflict in 1993 with the Russian parliament and his controversial reelection in 1996.

Yet, Russia disappointed the West. Its economy only started to pick up after the default, buoyed by the rising oil prices, and then it became dependent on them. Its political system was first chaotic, then dominated by the oligarchs, and later turned authoritarian. Its society absorbed the shock of dramatic changes, survived misery, and even acquired a taste for affluence, but it did not generate a powerful demand for democracy. Instead, the people came to appreciate stability and, having had enough of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, embraced Putin. Liberals, the only opposition in Russia that the West cared about, remained a small, even if vocal minority. Most important, Moscow insisted on keeping its great-power status, which many in the West considered obsolete.

Russia was by no means isolated; it was welcome to become a junior partner of the United States, the EU, and NATO. It was allowed to keep the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN Security Council in 1991, and it was granted membership in the Council of Europe in 1996 and in the G8 in 1998. A NATO-Russia Council for military cooperation was established in 2002, and Moscow was engaged in a close partnership with the EU, which was reinforced in 2003 by the concept of four “common spaces.”⁸ Moscow was accepted into the World Trade Organization in 2012 and was put on track to join the OECD. Successive Russian leaders held frequent and often quite informal meetings with their U.S. and other Western counterparts.

At the same time, there was no chance that Russia would be recognized as a “co-equal” of either the United States or the EU. The Russian Federation was certainly viewed in the West as a lesser international actor, whose power and importance were also declining. There was absolutely no question of letting Russia enjoy any special postimperial privileges such as a zone of influence, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Moscow’s policies in its neighborhood, for example toward the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the South Caucasus countries, and Central Asia, were closely inspected for elements of “neoimperialism.” Since the early 1990s, the West has watched Moscow’s handling of the separatist region of Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus as an indicator of human rights abuses, potential relapse into colonial-era practices, and the excessive influence of the Russian military and security services.

NATO enlargement constituted, in Russian eyes, a major breach of faith on behalf of the West.

Russia was also expected to accept the decision of its former Warsaw Pact allies to join NATO. This was particularly hard for Moscow for two reasons. One was that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, which joined in 1999, and Slovakia, the Baltic states, Romania, and Bulgaria, which acceded in 2004, were allowed to do something from which Russia was expressly barred. The second reason was that the enlargement of NATO ran counter to what many Russians believed were promises by Western leaders to Gorbachev in 1990 that they would not expand the alliance after the end of the Cold War if a reunited Germany were able to stay in NATO. (East Germany was integrated into NATO as it was reunified with West Germany in 1990.) Western governments, however, never accepted those claims and treated the Russian protests against NATO enlargement as evidence of Moscow’s phantom imperial pain or even surviving designs on Central and Eastern Europe. In retrospect, NATO enlargement constituted, in Russian eyes, a major breach of faith on behalf of the West.

Like NATO’s enlargement, the color revolutions in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) performed the task, in Western eyes, of expanding the space of freedom and democracy in the former Communist world. To the Kremlin, by contrast, the uprisings constituted a political challenge of regime change at home atop the geopolitical challenge of reducing Russia’s influence beyond its borders. Moscow’s concerns were heightened when, in 2008, Ukraine’s “Orange” government and Georgia’s “Rose” leadership asked NATO for a Membership Action Plan, a program of advice and assistance for countries wishing to join the alliance. In February 2014, the fear was exactly the same: that the Maidan would revive antigovernment protests in Moscow that had died down after a spike in 2011–2012, and that the victorious revolutionaries in Kiev would lead Ukraine into NATO. To the West, the Kremlin’s authoritarianism was offensive, and its attempts to include neighboring countries in the Moscow-led integration scheme smacked of an effort to restore the Soviet Union.

These opposing interpretations do not suggest a misunderstanding between the West and Russia. The West was maximizing its spectacular success