Everyone Loses

INTRODUCTION

Western readers of the morning’s headlines in 2014 realised to their surprise and dismay that post-Cold War Europe was at war. The local conflagrations triggered by the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s were bloodier, but the Ukraine crisis occurred long afterwards and revived fears of a clash between major world powers. The United States and the member states of the European Union (EU) adopted positions diametrically opposed to those followed by post-Soviet Russia. Ukraine and its people were caught in between. Today, Europe is divided once again, although the divisions lie farther east than they did before the fall of the Berlin Wall. These new demarcation lines are unstable and reflect neither local affinities nor great-power consensus. There is talk in world capitals of a new cold war, a protracted period of tensions when destabilising and even catastrophic conflict is an ever-present danger.

The troubles in Ukraine began as an essentially internal affair. In November 2013 a crackdown on students demonstrating against the government’s decision not to sign an agreement to link the country more closely with the EU led to a mammoth street protest in the capital city, Kyiv. Several months of clashes between the authorities and the protesters produced, unexpectedly for all, the violent overthrow in February 2014 of a harsh and erratic but democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in what came to be known as the Maidan Revolution. The domestic imbroglio blew up into an international confrontation in March when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered measures taken to occupy and then annex the Crimean peninsula, situated on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.

While the Crimea operation produced few casualties, thousands have died since Moscow supported unrest in the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine, along the land border with Russia. Consisting of the provinces of Donetsk (pre-conflict population 4.4 million) and Luhansk (2.2m), the Donbas hosted a high concentration of the country’s mining and metallurgy and was the political base of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Separatist ‘people’s republics’, with material and moral support from Russia, were declared in both pieces of the Donbas in April 2014. A Ukrainian military operation to quell the rebellion began that spring and within months had forced a rebel retreat. Late that summer, regular Russian units – far better equipped and trained than their Donbas separatist comrades – intervened directly. The resulting setback for Ukrainian forces produced negotiations that led to a ceasefire deal, signed in Minsk, Belarus, on 5 September. It broke down within weeks. A second and more robust pact was signed on 12 February 2015, again in Minsk, following another punishing Russian intervention.

The crumbling of the first of the two Minsk agreements resulted in large part from the battle for control of the airport of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital. This event serves as a powerful reminder of the destructive forces at work. Located ten kilometres northwest of central Donetsk, the facility was officially called Sergei Prokofiev International Airport, in honour of the world-renowned composer, a native of Donetsk province. Prokofiev was born there when it was part of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, but lived and worked from 1936 until his death in 1953 in the USSR, specifically in what is now Russia.[1] While he identified as an ethnic Russian, Prokofiev inserted into his works motifs from the Ukrainian folk songs he had heard as a child. The airfield, first constructed by Soviet engineers in the 1940s, was renovated at great cost in 2011–12 as part of the preparations for the European football championship of 2012, co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. Shiny and modern, the passenger terminal seemed to reflect the relative prosperity the Ukrainian industrial heartland had come to enjoy, as well as the country’s increased international standing.

On 26 May 2014, insurgents loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) seized the airport. By the next evening, the Ukrainian military and pro-government militias had wrested back control. In the months that followed, they used the now-inoperative airport as a base to shell Donetsk city, the rebel stronghold. Accordingly, separatist forces began in late September to try to reverse their earlier defeat. In stages, this monument to inter-ethnic cooperation and the promise of globalisation was demolished. One by one, the air-traffic control tower, the new and old terminals, hangars, fuel-storage tanks, equipment sheds and a hotel were reduced to rubble or to charred hulks. The facility finally fell to the separatists in January 2015, by which time it looked like Second World War-era Stalingrad and was littered with broken glass, booby traps and burned-out vehicles. Sporadic fighting has continued around the defunct airport.

The tragedy of the grinding siege of the Sergei Prokofiev International Airport is that around 700 human beings died over a superfluous asset. The DNR had no air force, and in any event artillery rendered the runways useless during the first round of fighting. Ukrainian ground forces could have fired at the city, if they had so wished, from more readily defensible wooded areas nearby. The September truce had called for the airport to be ceded to the rebels. But Ukrainian soldiers remained encamped there in violation of the terms. They stayed because the glare of the television cameras made retreat to safety politically unattractive for their commanders and the leadership in Kyiv. On national television, these troops were lionised as ‘cyborgs’, super-human fighting machines prepared to battle to the death, as if the airport were a latter-day Alamo. Unlike the Alamo in Texas, however, this site had no military value to speak of. And, unlike the Mexicans who besieged the Alamo in 1836, the rebels here allowed the Ukrainian defenders to rotate in and out for several months, subject to inspection.[2]

The wrecked airport serves as an apt symbol for the gestalt we observe in the Ukraine crisis. Game theorists classify the result of a dispute or negotiation in one of three main categories. In a zero-sum game, one party gains from the interaction and the other correspondingly loses, with the respective winnings and losses adding up to zero. Hypothetical illustrations would be a competition between two unemployed persons over a single desirable job, or between two passengers in a sinking yacht over the one available life raft. In a positive-sum game, both actors benefit. For instance, negotiations over shares in a fixed pie of resources could produce insights into how to enlarge the pie so that both parties get more valuable slices than before, or the yacht passengers could find a way to activate a second life raft so that both of them survive. In a negative-sum interaction, by contrast, the pie or pool of available benefits shrinks, because of contextual changes or choices made by the parties involved, and each of them ends up worse off at the end of the day. In the theory of games, negative-sum interactions are appreciated as the ones that will generate the most severe discomfort and discord as the players work their way through them.

In our estimation, the best metaphor for the conflict in and over Ukraine is that of the negative-sum game, a ruinous scenario in which every major player loses.[3]

As far as Ukraine is concerned, its overall condition has degraded markedly since the crisis erupted in 2014. No one can be sure exactly how many Ukrainians have died in the fighting in the Donbas. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs puts the toll at about 10,000 as of August 2016. Almost 3m people have been forced from their homes. Much of the Donbas’s vaunted stock of mines and industrial assets has been destroyed. Countless dwellings in the towns and cities of the region have been razed or smashed by indiscriminate shelling, as have electricity, water, sewage and other utilities.

Nationwide, the country has a new president (Petro Poroshenko, elected in May 2014) and a new parliament (elected in October 2014). But politics have become radicalised, and the state has been weakened, including by loss to volunteer paramilitary battalions of its monopoly over the use of force. The authorities are committed rhetorically to economic and political reform; results have been dilatory and quarrels over policy and patronage have abounded. Ukraine did sign the agreement with the EU that Yanukovych put on ice in 2013, but any pay-offs lie well in the future and there is no possibility of Ukraine becoming a full member of the bloc for many years to come, if ever. Ukrainian GDP slid by 7% in 2014 and another 10% in 2015, and that is counting production in areas no longer controlled by the central government.

The other actors in the ongoing saga have suffered less, but are certainly worse off than they were before the crisis began. Russia has gained some territory, true, but has paid dearly in economic terms and in international standing. The war footing and Western sanctions have weakened liberal impulses and strengthened conformist pressures within the polity while adding to the hyper-personalisation of political life around Putin. The economic downturn that has ensued, while not an exclusive result of Ukraine-related turbulence and Western sanctions (falling oil prices have been more debilitating), has only made things worse. Russia shows no inclination to annex the Donbas but has had to shell out tens of billions of roubles to ease its misery. Crimea, now de facto incorporated into the Russian state, will burden the treasury in the coming years, and Western sanctions and cut-offs in trade with and supply of irrigation water and electric power from the Ukrainian mainland have made life difficult for inhabitants of the peninsula.

The EU and the US, while less acutely affected, have not come out unscathed. For Europe, the crisis is possibly a direct threat to its security and is a very real, and very costly, policy quagmire. The EU’s Eastern Partnership, of which the agreement with Ukraine is an integral component, was intended to create a band of stable and prosperous countries along the Union’s borders. Ukraine, the largest neighbour, is today anything but stable and prosperous, and the EU has felt compelled to sink billions of euros into keeping it afloat. The sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions have hit European economies at a time when they can ill afford it. And the Ukraine gas-transit corridor is under perpetual threat of shut-off, jeopardising much of the broader EU–Russia gas trade. Washington for its part has felt required to bolster deployments and military expenditures in Europe in the context of tight budgets and competing demands from the ‘pivot’ toward the Asia-Pacific and the turmoil in the Middle East. The complete breakdown in US–Russia relations, which were bad to begin with, stands in the way of efforts to address all manner of global challenges.

In sum, the Ukraine crisis has catalysed a negative-sum political interaction. All of the parties to it, in our view, are worse off than before it began.

The central claim of this book is that the negative-sum outcome we behold today is a product of zero-sum policies pursued by Russia, the US and the EU. These developed fitfully in the first decade and a half after the Cold War but dramatically intensified thereafter. Russia and the West implemented policies toward the states of post-Soviet Eurasia that aimed to extract gains at the other side’s expense, without regard for overlapping or shared interests. Neither invested serious effort in the task of outlining or even contemplating a cooperative regional order that all parties could accept. The result has been not only a deepening east–west divide, but also dysfunction in the politics of the region’s states, where elites seek to milk this contestation to suit their own narrow, often pecuniary, interests.

Analysis done in the midst of a crisis generally tends to shed more heat than light. Much of what has been said and written about the Ukraine crisis is no exception. The roots of the crisis extend far beyond the political earthquake in Kyiv and Russia’s jarring response. This volume seeks to understand those events as an outcome of the recent, post-Soviet past. Its purpose is analytical, not normative. We do not seek to assign blame or to provide justification for any party’s actions, not only because making such judgements is not our role but also because no party to this chain of events has clean hands. Indeed, this book will demonstrate that constructive, considered policy and actions in this region were the exception, not the norm, for all sides.

Several alternative explanations of the Ukraine crisis – and particularly of Russia’s actions – have emerged since the watershed of early 2014.[4] The most prominent describes the crisis as a result of Russia’s nefarious ambitions toward its neighbours. Through this optic, Moscow harbours the long-term strategic objective of subjugating all former Soviet lands. The latest manifestation of this strategy is said to be the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), a Moscow-led regional economic-integration bloc, which Russia purportedly sought to compel Ukraine to join. As Serhy Yekelchyk writes, ‘The [Maidan Revolution] frustrated Russia’s political leaders, who had just forced the Yanukovych regime to turn its back on the West. The Kremlin could not undo the overthrow of its ally in Kyiv, but it could cripple the new Ukraine while at the same time asserting Russia’s greater geopolitical role.’[5] According to Andrew Wilson, it was ‘Russia’s addiction to dangerous myths’, including ‘that the former USSR was the “lost territory” of historical Russia’, that explains the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in eastern Ukraine that followed.[6]

It should astonish no one that a country of Russia’s capabilities and ambitions will seek influence over its periphery; the US or China are no different in that respect. And it is clear that early in Yanukovych’s presidency Russia wanted to bring him around to joining the EEU, and between late 2013 and early 2014 wielded sticks and carrots to keep Ukraine from signing an Association Agreement (AA) with the EU. But to begin and end our understanding of the Ukraine crisis with Moscow’s supposed grand strategy of regional hegemony assumes that Russian actions in Ukraine in 2014 (and in the broader region) occurred in a vacuum, which, as this book will demonstrate, is contrary to the record.

The converse argument – that the Ukraine crisis resulted primarily from the West’s policies toward the region – has been made by several prominent international-relations scholars of the realist school, as well as some Russia experts. Writing in Foreign Affairs, John Mearsheimer posited that ‘Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory.’[7] The threat, he and others have argued, was a Western intent to bring Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and shatter Russia’s position there, a plan that accelerated toward implementation with the Maidan Revolution. The West, says Andrei Tsygankov, ‘made Russia’s conflict with Ukraine possible, even inevitable’, by not recognising ‘Russia’s values and interests in Eurasia’.[8] Yet just as Russian policies were not formulated in a vacuum, neither were Western ones; without examining their dynamic interaction (the ‘game’) we cannot gain full purchase on the Ukraine crisis. Moreover, to decry Western policy as deliberately hostile and portray Russian actions as having a ‘rational and empirical basis’, as Richard Sakwa does, obscures that interaction almost completely.[9]

Other explanations have turned the lens from the international level to the domestic. The events of 2014, accordingly, are said to have flowed from changes inside the perpetrator, Russia, and the Kremlin’s response to them. As Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss write, ‘Russia’s foreign policy, including specifically the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine, did not change in response to [Western policy]. Rather, Russian foreign policy changed in large measure as a result of Putin’s response to new domestic political and economic challenges inside Russia.’[10] Specifically, Putin’s approval ratings slackened following the flawed 2011–12 election cycle, there were street protests in Russian cities in that period, and economic growth slowed, casting doubt on the previous social contract. The Kremlin decided to fashion a new contract based on protecting the Russian people from external threats. ‘To maintain his argument for legitimacy at home, Putin needs perpetual conflict with external enemies.’[11]

To be sure, the Ukraine crisis provided a domestic political windfall for Putin; his approval ratings hit stratospheric highs after the annexation of Crimea, peaking at nearly 90%. But we should be wary of confusing cause and effect. By the time Yanukovych’s government fell, Putin had effectively addressed the challenges of 2011–12. He had squelched organised opposition through targeted repression; opened new release valves for discontent through measures like a return to gubernatorial elections; and reinforced the loyalty of his coterie through a drive for ‘nationalisation of the elite’. In other words, as the Maidan Revolution unfolded in Ukraine, Putin faced no serious threat to his rule in the short to medium term, enjoying prodigious popular support and elite fealty. It seems far-fetched that under these circumstances he would have taken so disruptive and risky a set of actions purely in order to prop himself up politically at home.

Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer, in Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, rightly point our attention to the regional context. They argue that ‘what has happened is a symptom of a much larger and more complicated problem’, namely that ‘the entire post-Cold War European political and security architecture was built on the foundation of two institutions – the European Union and NATO – which did not include Russia’.[12] The West, they note, gambled that Russia would accept these institutions, which proved to be a bad wager. Instead, more thought should have been given to a new post-Cold War regional order that Russia could have joined.

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.