Everyone Loses

^{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.

The Ukraine crisis, as we see it, comes out of self-reinforcing adversarial behaviour in the post-Soviet section of the Eurasian macroregion. Stretching over a quarter-century but gathering momentum in the second half of that time span, this contest has given rise to a belt of instability, insecurity and discontent of which Ukraine is but one part. The multidimensional rivalries percolating there encapsulate three ‘geos’ pursued by states and blocs of states: geopolitics, which is standard-issue realpolitik with special attention to attaining influence over particular countries or areas; geo-economics, or the projection of power over territory using economic means, an exercise defined by ‘the logic of war in the grammar of commerce’;[1] and geo-ideas, by which we mean policies to spread normative conceptions of the good and the right beyond national borders.[2]

The current chapter tells the tale of the Cold Peace, in Boris Yeltsin’s evocative phrase. It is bookended by the implosion of the Soviet Union’s zone of external hegemony at the end of the 1980s, which, despite the giddiness of the moment, left some bedrock issues unresolved, and a natural inflection point in 2003–04, the highlight of which was the ‘colour revolutions’ that tore through several post-Soviet states. Later chapters will deal with the more conflictual periods to come.

The Cold War between West and East, centred on if not confined to Europe, came undone with amazing swiftness. The outcome, while an undeniable advancement on the way things were, fell short of the promise of a continent united and democratically governed, as many had hoped. We are still living with the consequences of the unfinished business.

Europe had been cleaved for decades along geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-ideational lines. It hosted two bristling military alliances (NATO to defend Western Europe and North America, and the Warsaw Pact for the Soviet Union and its six-country bloc in East Central Europe); two economic unions (the European Community, or EC, and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or COMECON); and two ideological camps (espousing liberal democracy in the west, and collectivist autocracy in the east). The Berlin Wall, replete with barbed wire, watchtowers and minefields, epitomised the continent’s disunion.

Seismic changes originated with Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary appointed by the Soviet ‘selectorate’ in 1985. Gorbachevian perestroika was about ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy as well as remaking the Soviet Union’s hidebound internal systems. He began a loosening of the ties that bound the USSR’s European vassals – Poland, East Germany (also known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – to Moscow, and nudged them to mount their own perestroikas. Gorbachev’s acknowledgement in March 1988 that all socialist countries had ‘the inalienable right to decide independently their developmental path’ signified the repeal of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ of using all means necessary, including armed intervention, to prevent defection from the bloc.

The Kremlin originally intended for change in its camp to be evolutionary; inadvertently, it opened the floodgates to revolutionary change. Marxist-Leninist governments fell one by one in a tumultuous six-month stretch in 1989, commencing with the electoral victory of the Solidarity labour movement in Poland in June and closing in December with the execution by firing squad of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. The Berlin Wall was sundered on 9 November and chunks of it carted off by jubilant spectators as souvenirs. In 1990 and 1991 came the reunification of Germany (and ipso facto the disappearance of the GDR), the self-liquidation of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, and, most remarkable of all, the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet political-economic system. As the newly minted president of Czechoslovakia, the playwright and ex-dissident Václav Havel, was to tell the US Congress in February 1990, new developments were coming on at such a clip that ‘none of the familiar political speedometers is adequate’.[3]

In Washington, the administration of George H.W. Bush, inaugurated in January 1989, shed its initial scepticism about changes in the area and set a goal ‘to steer the Soviet ejection from Eastern Europe to a peaceful conclusion’, as James Baker, his secretary of state, said candidly in a memoir.[4] For the Soviet Politburo, coping with the vicissitudes of the bloc was but one of a plethora of challenges, not merely to policy objectives but to the governability and very survival of their state. At meetings with the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, Baker found him ‘distracted and a little overwhelmed’ by socio-economic woes and separatism on the home front and a feeling of ‘losing control’ across the board.[5]

The burning question on the security agenda in 1989–90 was what should be done with a post-Cold War Germany. Its front-line status in the Cold War, centrality to the two world wars, and sheer demographic and economic bulk made Germany distinctive. The Soviets were goaded to act by the death throes of their handiwork, the GDR. Leaders of the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany) and the US stewed over the question of how long the opening for progress would last. Gorbachev could be dethroned, resign in exasperation or change his mind and order in the tanks, as the USSR had done against an East German workers’ uprising in June 1953. ‘We were running against a clock’, Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote later, ‘but we did not know how much time was left’.[6]

Gorbachev’s initial goal was to administer German affairs through a revived Allied Control Commission of the occupying powers from 1945: the Soviet Union, the US, the UK and France. In 1989 he came out in favour of a bi-state Germany implanted in a ‘common European home’, a pan-European mansion of many diverse rooms, but with ‘a certain integral whole’.[7] Gorbachev and his aides, notes Mary Sarotte, ‘would never think their ideas through fully, and their plans would remain vague until the end’.[8] Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany gravitated from a confederation of the two Germanys to the approach that was to prevail: outright reunification, and on Western terms.[9] Gorbachev signalled a green light for a merger in talks with Baker and Kohl in February 1990.[10] The details were thrashed out that summer and the deed was done in October (Kohl had first forecast the transition would take ten years). The GDR would be absorbed into the pre-existing structures of the Federal Republic, the consolidated Germany would stay put in the Euro-Atlantic alliance and the EC, force levels on all sides would be drawn down, no non-German NATO troops would be based on the territory of the former GDR and the 400,000 Soviet troops there would depart by 1994.

Gorbachev originally swore that he could never accept the reborn Germany as a member of NATO, the alliance dedicated to containing the USSR. He several times recommended Germany be incorporated into the Warsaw Pact, a non-starter, after which he was briefly enamoured of dual membership of NATO and the Pact. ‘That made no sense to anyone on the American side’, recollects Baker, ‘but Gorbachev made a personal plea to the President [Bush]. “You’re a sailor. You will understand that if one anchor is good, two anchors are better.”’ Bush scoffed at the concept to Kohl, calling it ‘screwy’. Gorbachev’s fallback was German neutrality, an outcome Soviet policy preferred back in the 1950s, but he was also willing to toy with fresh scenarios. With Baker in May 1990 he made the stunning suggestion that if he could not stop Germany from joining NATO, the Soviet Union itself should apply for membership. ‘After all, you said that NATO wasn’t directed against us, you said it was a new Europe, so why shouldn’t we apply?’ It was ‘not some absurdity’, he said, but a serious question. Baker rejoined that a journalist had put the same query to him at a news conference and was otherwise noncommittal, preferring to concentrate on Germany.[11]

Gorbachev was eventually won over to the American position that an amalgamated German state was more of a hazard to Soviet interests if non-aligned (and with the technical capabilities to go nuclear) than if knit into an alliance system. With the Warsaw Pact on the rocks, the sole alliance on offer was NATO. Gorbachev, Scowcroft writes, ‘appeared unable to come up with a better idea than what we were urging on him’. Had he been resolute about German neutrality, ‘he perhaps could have accomplished that’.[12]

The long-standing German problem was thus laid to rest. Two other daunting security questions were not: What would be the new regional order once the Warsaw Pact and COMECON had vanished? And how would its Soviet/Russian metropole relate to the Western camp?

On question number one, the USSR wagered on a body known as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), to be renamed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1995. A child of the ephemeral East–West detente of the mid-1970s, it functioned as a roundtable for members of both alliances and Europe’s neutral countries. At a CSCE summit in Paris in November 1990, 32 nations initialled a Charter of Paris for a New Europe, saluting as their target the ‘Europe whole and free’ first hailed by Bush in 1989.[13] Soviet delegates talked up the CSCE as a replacement for both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But it was an informal grouping with a tiny staff and budget; it had no collective security mission or integrated military command; and it operated only by consensus. Unlike in NATO, which also has a consensus rule, there was no tradition of deferring to US preferences, which devalued the CSCE in the eyes of the Americans. The CSCE, as Baker summed it up, was ‘an extremely unwieldy and frustrating organization’ whose bylaws ‘give the smaller states of Europe veto power over issues far beyond their standing’.[14]

In another tack, Gorbachev, in several pronouncements after he disowned the Brezhnev Doctrine, advocated the ‘Finlandisation’ of East Central Europe. Post-1945 Finland was neutral in foreign affairs, traded extensively with the Soviet Union and was self-governing in its domestic affairs. Gorbachev lauded Finlandisation during a visit to Helsinki in October 1989: ‘To me, Finland is a model of relations between a big country and a small country, a model of relations between states with different social systems, a model of relations between neighbours.’[15] The former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, weighed in on Gorbachev’s side. ‘In the long run’, he asked in an op-ed, ‘aren’t arrangements in Finland more useful to Soviet security than those in Eastern Europe? Is it possible to devise arrangements that would give the Soviets security guarantees (widely defined) while permitting the peoples of Eastern Europe to choose their own political future?’[16]

Neither recipe could have been implemented unrevised. For the CSCE to be the linchpin, it would have had to be boosted administratively and financially. At some point, it would have had to displace NATO and the EC as the primary regional organisation for collective security and economic integration. As long as the much heartier NATO and EC continued to function at their previous level and did not face challenges to their raison d’être, the West would have little incentive to empower an alternative body, particularly one where the heir to its long-time adversary had an equal say. Many regarded Finlandisation as tarnished by its power asymmetries, and Finnish–Soviet relations since 1945 had fluctuated over time; Finlandisation was not one prototype but several.[17] A more relevant precedent may have been ‘Austrianisation’, harkening back to the imposition of neutrality on post-war Austria by great-power dictate in 1955. It was missing from the conversation, other than a succinct reference by Kissinger in June 1990.[18]

The 22 NATO and Warsaw Pact states in November 1990 signed a Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), delineating ceilings for armaments for what were still the two blocs, and created an inspection and verification regime to build confidence and reinforce stability. A follow-up at Helsinki in 1992 set limits on military personnel. Other than the CFE, which was about hardware and manpower and not about how or against whom they were to be used, no all-encompassing security framework for Europe was given serious consideration in the twilight of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact, the ‘socialist community’ that it shielded having melted away, voted to disband in February 1991; COMECON followed suit that June. The Western duo of NATO and the EC was now the only game in town.

The talks over Germany not only yielded agreement on it remaining within NATO after reunification but also touched upon the future of the Alliance, and by implication of the security architecture of the extended region. This far-ranging issue was to be a future bone of contention. At a sitting with Gorbachev in February 1990, Baker enunciated the United States’ willingness to pledge ‘no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO [sic] one inch to the east’ upon reunification. Baker was addressing the question of whether NATO forces would be barred from the territory of the GDR, as the Soviets were demanding. But this and other diplomatic exchanges left the Soviet negotiators with the distinct impression that the prohibition would transcend East Germany and cover the other five nations stranded in the Warsaw Pact (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania). The latter position, as Joshua Shifrinson has documented, was mooted in some inter-agency memos in Washington and had been spelled out by the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Enlarging NATO beyond Germany was not on the table for anyone at the time; the Soviets, it has to be stressed, now believed that it would never be. The US and West Germany delivered informal assurances on limiting NATO’s geographical reach, on respect for Soviet core interests and on cooperatively figuring out a comprehensive security framework, perchance through a revamped CSCE. As Baker put it in a memo after one confab with Shevardnadze, the process ‘would not yield winners and losers. Instead, [it] would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.’[19]

Gorbachev in particular bought into a broad reading of the spirit of the interchanges with the Americans, and it – plus, one has to think, a dose of wishful thinking – weighed heavily in his acceptance of the reunification scheme. When NATO several years later began preparations to take in new members to the east, he cried foul, as has each successive Russian leader since.[20] In Shifrinson’s judgement, the Russians ‘are essentially correct’ in their grievance. ‘NATO expansion was to violate… the quid pro quo at the heart of the diplomacy that culminated in German reunification within NATO.’[21] The policymakers who subsequently chose to enlarge NATO, to be fair, did not think that such a quid pro quo ever existed. But this divergence in views itself indicates that the overarching issue was not truly resolved. In terms of the politics of it, this ‘settlement-that-wasn’t’ became vulnerable to allegations ex post facto in Moscow, either that the West acted in bad faith, or that Gorbachev should have held out for better terms instead of giving away the store.

An aspect of the German reunification procedure that bears emphasis is the reliance on what Sarotte discerningly couches as ‘prefab’ change, a methodology hinged on the mechanical extension of existing formulas and structures rather than negotiation of mutually acceptable substitutes for them. Not only did the Federal Republic literally absorb the GDR into its pre-existing constitutional and legal order, but the newly reunified state was a full member of NATO and of the EC (to be elevated in 1993 into a European Union) to boot. Prefab had its virtues: it ‘wasted no time on conceptualizing new accords and institutions’, it did not set out to fix what was not broken, and it ‘conferred a strong element of predictability on the chaotic… overhaul of both domestic and international order’.[22] In the case of German reunification, the prefab approach also paid off in almost everyone’s estimation, so much so that it became a template. To join the winners’ club, other countries must change themselves to conform with its existing rules; the institutions do not change in order to take on new members.

The paradox was, as Sarotte notes, ‘the struggle to recast Europe after the momentous upheaval of 1989 resulted in prefabricated structures from before the upheaval moving eastward and securing a future for themselves. Americans and West Germans had successfully entrenched the institutions born of the old geopolitics of the Cold War world – ones that they already dominated, most notably NATO – in the new era.’[23] The counter-scenarios emanating sporadically out of Moscow – great-power condominium, a pan-European home, Finlandisation and so on – were half-baked and were discarded sequentially under the pressure of time and circumstance. Faced with a choice between a leap into the unknown and reliance on a proven model, Western policymakers’ instinct was to shun vague, if high-minded, concepts and stick with the familiar.

Another thorny complication of the settlement-that-wasn’t of 1989–91 bore on the soon-to-be-former Soviet superpower. Absent any act of reconciliation with the West, and any formal agreement to record and enforce it, no one could know where it fit in the new/old scheme of things. The quick fix of prefab did not delineate any definite place for it, not out of conscious malice but because it was too unwieldy to conform to the rigid standards. As a result, to borrow Sarotte’s words, ‘Russia was left on the periphery of a post-Cold War Europe’.[24] The country agent in her sentence is Russia, the Soviet Union having gone extinct at the end of the two years.

A flotilla of successor states, formerly constitutive ‘union republics’ of the USSR, which fell apart as the central government and the Communist Party lost their grip, set sail as 1991 came to a close. In their midst was Russia, formally co-titled the Russian Federation (identified until then as the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), which became the agreed legal successor of the Soviet state, and took over its embassies, its veto-bearing seat in the UN Security Council and the lion’s share of its awesome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This new Russia, its top offices housed in the same midtown Moscow buildings as their Soviet precursors, encompassed 77% of the USSR’s landmass (16.4m square kilometres), 51% of its population (147.4m), 70% of its manufacturing and 91% of the oil pumped. That said, it was no Soviet Union. Territorial contraction and political and economic turmoil (its GDP dropped calamitously by 40% between 1991 and 1998) diminished it in almost every objective respect and in the subjective assessments of onlookers. While the Russian Federation was nominally a brand-new state, and not a rump USSR minus its non-Russian parts, its citizens and elite saw themselves as heirs to the Soviet legacy. Loath as the Americans and Germans were to say it out loud, the unwinding of two quasi-empires – an outer one in East Central Europe, an inner one in post-Soviet Eurasia – amounted to a staggering defeat for the ‘Russian’ state. Trauma stemming from this loss of face was inevitable and would need to be well managed – which it was not, to the detriment of all.

The proliferation of the other offspring of the Soviet Union was no less bewildering than the advent of a downsized Russia. A few had fought for their independence; the rest accepted it when it fell into their laps after the republic leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the December 1991 Belavezha Accords, which declared the end of the USSR. Nine of the 14 were sandwiched between the Russian Federation, East Central Europe and NATO member Turkey; the other five were in faraway Central Asia. Eleven of those 14 assented to join a loose-knit supranational Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) along with Russia.[25] The three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), having declared independence as early as August 1991, boycotted the CIS. It was a mark that they were already positioning themselves in the East Central European category, a move strongly backed by the US and not much resisted by Russia.[26]

The newcomers were internationally recognised and had seats in the UN and the CSCE (membership of which ballooned to 53). They would waste no time acquiring diplomatic services, border posts and national armies, and all the other trappings of statehood.[27]

On what principles was a post-Cold War order in the region to rest? After the dust of 1989–91 had settled, the answer was still unclear, although two of the suite advanced in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe offered clues. On the one hand, the document heralded national ‘freedom of choice’ on security matters. On the other, it nodded to a principle of ‘indivisibility’: ‘Security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others.’ The two tenets pointed in opposing directions, as time was to tell.

At the very start, the post-communist states of East Central Europe advanced incremental security remedies, such as reform of the Warsaw Pact and dialogue with NATO. More ambitiously, Czechoslovakia plugged a CSCE-based European Security Commission to supplant both venerable alliances. The outgoing Bush administration punted, getting NATO to birth a North Atlantic Cooperation Council whose parleys were good for ‘a photo op and an exercise in high political symbolism’ but little else.[28] It also urged the East Central Europeans to get hold of regional security measures on their own. Only in 1993, with the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House, did Western policy planners engage in the process, with the Americans taking the lead.

They did so in part at the behest of the leaders of the erstwhile Soviet satellites who jettisoned their original reticence and pleaded for consideration of what up until then would have seemed an indecently radical response – admission of their nations to the NATO alliance. Motivations in East Central Europe were sundry, but the irreducible one was to find an international anchor – the same analogy Gorbachev employed with Bush in 1990 – in an environment awash in insecurity and unpredictability.

A majority of the players in the US government, including cabinet secretaries, diplomats, military brass and mid-level political appointees, preferred at the outset to leave the composition of NATO as it was, without recruitment of new members. Changes to NATO, it was argued, would subvert other priorities and be of no real benefit to it as a military organisation. More disconcerting was the chance that enlarging NATO would empower revanchist factions within the Russian polity and weaken Yeltsin. As Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s lieutenant for Russian affairs, expressed it, ‘If NATO adopted an anti-Russian rationale for taking in new members, it could tip the balance of forces in Russian politics in exactly the direction that we… most feared.’[29] The sceptics lost the debate to a handful of pro-change policy entrepreneurs, spearheaded by Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, and a bit later by Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant secretary of state.

The Russian response was scattershot. Not surprisingly, a sizeable subset of the Moscow establishment wanted nothing to do with an expanded NATO. The Foreign Intelligence Service spoke for them in late 1993 when it published a report warning that admission of former communist states ‘will be taken by a considerable part of Russian society as “the approach of danger to the Motherland’s borders”’.[30] Yeltsin took a middle position, maintaining that NATO’s growth might be acceptable on one condition – that Russia be included in the process, as Gorbachev had hinted at for the Soviet Union several years before. He set this idea down in a letter to Clinton on 30 September 1993, and mentioned it in public on several occasions in 1994.[31] Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, argued that enlargement was unnecessary since all states concerned, Russia included, were learning how to cooperate with NATO, and vice versa. In a December 1993 interview, he seemed to be asking what the fuss was all about: ‘We say to the [East Central Europeans]: why chomp at the bit to get into NATO when there is no need? Russia cooperates with the alliance, and you can do the same thing. But it’s not worth it to enlarge NATO quantitatively.’[32]

It was in large part in deference to Russia that NATO’s first initiative was a soft-edged Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme approved in December 1993, with eligibility for any member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council interested in working with the Alliance. For a time, PfP seemed to push NATO enlargement off the agenda. The US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, had sold PfP to Yeltsin in October as a transitional device, egalitarian in philosophy and of indeterminate duration. ‘There would be no effort to exclude anyone and there would be no step taken at this time to push anyone ahead of others.’ Yeltsin, with the tenet of indivisibility at the back of his mind, was delighted with the project and got Christopher to agree that the affiliation ‘would… be on an equal footing and there would be a partnership and not a membership’. ‘It would have been an issue for Russia’, Yeltsin went on, if the PfP rulebook ‘left us in a second-class status’, but on these terms he was eager to have Russia put in an oar. Christopher added, ‘we will in due course be looking at the question of membership [in NATO] as a longer term eventuality…. Those who wish to can pursue the idea over time, but that will come later.’[33]

Not long thereafter, however, Clinton proclaimed in Prague that the question about enlargement was ‘no longer whether… but when and how’.[34] Within months, ‘in due course’ and ‘longer-term eventuality’ had flown out the window and the NATO capitals were horse-trading over the details. After a breather so as not to jinx Yeltsin’s re-election chances in the 1996 presidential campaign, the admission process accelerated in late 1996 and invitations to the Czech Republic (having separated from Slovakia in 1993), Hungary and Poland were issued in 1997. They were received into the Alliance at a 50th-jubilee summit in April 1999.

Three considerations tilted the scales in American deliberations and shaped the United States’ general stance toward this part of the world. One, rightly or wrongly, was a guilty conscience over having let down its inhabitants in the past. This sentiment was regularly embodied in historical analogies: to the Munich Agreement of 1938, to the Holocaust, and especially to the Yalta Conference of 1945, where the Big Three (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) decided the fate of post-war Europe over the heads of the countries affected. A second factor was ideological. Clinton, Lake and Holbrooke, as James Goldgeier writes, ‘were intellectual heirs of Woodrow Wilson, believing that the expansion of international institutions and the promotion of freedom in economic and political affairs could increase global peace and prosperity’.[35] The international institutions worthy of this task were those led by or yoked to the US. The third consideration was elementary. A bigger footprint for the Alliance would lock in previous American gains, maximise American power and facilitate American do-gooding.

US policymakers, to quote Stephen Sestanovich, ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union in Clinton’s second term, sought a new world order erected on shared values. ‘But they also sought to preserve and strengthen America’s place in the post-Cold War balance of power. The two goals seemed inseparable. Washington saw no other way to make its hopeful world order a reality. NATO enlargement was part and parcel of this reality.’[36] It exemplified, in other words, geopolitics married to geo-ideas. Justification was found in the principle of freedom of choice, one of the two keystones of the Charter of Paris. Individual countries, and they alone, should decide on what security alignments were to their liking. If any or all of the post-communist nations of East Central Europe threw in their lot with the US-shepherded Euro-Atlantic alliance, no other state – the United States included, ironically – could question that choice.

Not only were there benefits to be reaped, but the costs were largely seen as negligible. Popular interest in the enlargement issue, pro and con, was thin in the US and other NATO member states. ‘Many opponents bemoaned the lack of visible public debate for such a major foreign policy initiative’, writes Goldgeier. ‘But why would the public be interested in what appeared to be a low-cost extension of a defense commitment in a benign strategic environment?’[37] Potential censure from Moscow, the only real obstacle, was deemed surmountable by American and European officials. They reckoned, correctly, that Russia was so enervated by its post-communist transformation that it could not block enlargement, and their Western-leaning counterparts like Kozyrev did not seem overly bothered by it.

Nor were the analytical costs prohibitive. No soul-searching or intellectual heavy lifting was required. German reunification offered a convenient template. Its prefab logic required aspirants to membership of the club to demonstrate a zeal for admission and proof of their credentials under a pre-existing formula. Prefab change by definition did not allow for adjustment of the formula or give-and-take among current and prospective members about its design, thus excluding countries (like Russia) that demanded a say in such matters.

There were no genuine negotiations with Russia on the central issue of the merits of NATO’s extension, let alone the details of the process. Attitudinal openness in Moscow gradually dissipated as awareness dawned that a joint search for a solution was not on the cards. Yeltsin grounded his early receptivity to talking about Russia-in-NATO in indivisibility, the second of the pillars of the Charter of Paris. Russia was comfortable inside a revised security framework only so long as its prerogatives and stature were taken into account, with all that connoted for the US having to share control. Change without Moscow’s participation and consent was doomed to be interpreted as ‘a sign that we were not welcome’, as several former ranking Russian functionaries put it in interviews.

Clinton was agreeable to the theoretical possibility of Russian admission. In his administration, however, it was scripture that entry for Russia could be concretely entertained only after other countries had been dealt with. As Ronald Asmus, who ran enlargement policy in the Department of State in 1997–2000, testified later:

Christopher’s ‘no one ahead of others’ had morphed into ‘everyone ahead of Russia’. By now even whispers of a hypothetical Russian membership bid fuelled antagonism. Asmus reports American trepidation that Moscow ‘might try… to create mischief by actually applying for membership’. When Kozyrev’s hard-nosed successor as foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, mooted an application in 1996, the response from Talbott was terse: ‘Russia would have to get into the same queue and meet the same criteria as other candidates.’ Primakov suspected the Americans of trying to trick the Russians into a premature statement of intent, which could then be used to refute any objections to other applications.[38]

At work under the surface was the bare-knuckled calculus of security. NATO spokespersons trumpeted that their policy was not anti-Russian. That may have been true, but the leaders of the aspirants to membership seldom concealed the fact that they considered it more than anything else a hedge against revanchism by Russia, a point echoed by a number of Western strategists. Even if the policy was not expressly anti-Russian, Russia was for all practical purposes disqualified from partaking and had no guarantees whatsoever against future encroachment on its interests. Where the diplomacy of the late 1980s had rested on an amorphous dream of assimilation into Western and global systems, ‘the 1990s were marked by the steady atrophy of serious efforts to integrate Russia’.[39]

Yeltsin and his government for some time continued their late Soviet predecessors’ touting of the CSCE/OSCE as an alternative to a widened NATO. In May 1994 they proposed to outfit it with ‘a leadership organ of restricted composition’, a compact executive board modelled on the UN Security Council whose members – one of them Russia – would have veto rights. This was in a sense the Russian edition of prefab institutional design, applying an antecedent model to current problems. But no sympathy for its version of OSCE reform was forthcoming from the West, from aspirants to NATO or from the smaller countries that felt they would lose from a potent executive.[40]

The best Moscow could manage by way of damage limitation and a consolation prize was the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation, an agreement signed in Paris in May 1997. As Primakov stated in his memoirs, the Russian aim was ‘not to drop our negative position on NATO expansion’ and at the same time to work out ways to ‘minimise the consequences that were most threatening to our security and most inconsistent with our interests’. In conversations in the wings, Primakov warned that admission of any ex-Soviet republic hereafter was ‘unacceptable’ and would traverse a ‘red line’ for Russia.[41] The Founding Act stated that NATO and Russia ‘do not consider each other as adversaries’ and ‘share the goal of overcoming the vestiges of earlier confrontation and competition and of strengthening mutual trust and cooperation’.[42]

Any goodwill emanating from the Founding Act was dispelled by a bitter controversy over the 1999 NATO air war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslav government, which had forcibly repressed a revolt by the Kosovar Albanian minority. It was the first major intervention in the history of the Alliance and the first to implement revisions of NATO’s strategic concept that allowed for military actions other than territorial defence. Incensed over the bombing campaign, Moscow broke off liaison with NATO and made the risky decision to send airborne troops into Pristina, Kosovo, ahead of the allied forces. Although cooler heads eventually prevailed and Russia contributed to the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, official suspicion hit new heights and Russian popular opinion was agitated. The episode underscored the growing gap between Russia and NATO over the Alliance’s post-Cold War modus operandi, particularly its enlargement and ‘out-of-area’ actions like Kosovo. Talk of Russia’s potential membership had almost ceased.

A parallel geo-economic dynamic took shape in the form of the European Union’s growth ambitions and the beginning of its enlargement process to take in the East Central European countries in the mid-1990s. EU enlargement followed its own prefab logic: the main qualification for membership was wholesale adoption of the acquis communautaire, the EU’s manual of laws and regulations. Russia signed a much less ambitious Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with the EU in June 1994, and took a mostly benign attitude toward the Union. Individual member states and not the EU bureaucracy in Brussels called the shots in the relationship at this time. The EU member-state governments were mostly interested in commercial diplomacy, notably Germany with its booming export-oriented industries. Moscow and Brussels agreed a Four Common Spaces programme in 2005 as a framework to substitute for the EU–Russia PCA after its expected expiration in 2007, and conducted biannual summits.

But trouble was brewing in the background. The EU based its enlargement process on ‘insistence on the universal applicability of its internal mode of governance [i.e., the acquis]’, claiming what has been termed ‘normative hegemony’ over its neighbourhood. The pretence was to something like a geo-ideational unipolar moment on the continent. Brussels evinced a patronising attitude in its dealings with proximate countries: it did not give them ‘any meaningful input in setting the normative agenda… it is only willing to give its neighbors a say on when they will implement its demands, not how’, as the Finnish scholar Hiski Haukkala puts it.[43] This was all well and good for the East Central Europeans, who were willing to do whatever was asked of them to get into the club. But Moscow would not adopt such prefab Western solutions without any say in their content.

Even if Russia had sought membership of NATO or the EU, the organisations would not have been able to absorb such a large country with the multiplicity of economic, social and security problems that would have come with it – unless they were to change dramatically to accommodate that challenge. But the basic premise of the prefab approach was that the rules were not negotiable. The institutions do not change to accommodate aspirants; the aspirants change themselves in order to become members. Russian officials, who still saw their country as a great power, never had this ‘normal’ membership process in mind when they broached the idea. As Sestanovich writes, ‘Russian officials would have had to endure insufferable Western bossiness, high-handed and irritating Western lectures, and insulting Western reviews of whether Russia was abiding by its “Membership Action Plan”. NATO didn’t want to start down that road any more than the Russians did.’[44] The same could have been said about the EU. The Russians wanted to be at the table as equals, and were mystified as to why the West would not waive the usual requirements for the sake of partnership.

The psychological fallout from the heir to a superpower being denied an authentic voice in shaping the regional order and told to wait its turn to get in – Gulliver standing in line behind the Lilliputians — was evident to sophisticated observers.[45] Its significance was grievously underestimated by those in positions to do something about it.

Western and Russian policies come across in retrospect as unimaginative and incommensurate with the magnitude of the possibilities unlocked by the termination of the Cold War, and thereby as complicit in sowing the anger and mistrust that soon took hold. It was in a speech at Budapest in December 1994, as the direction things were taking was becoming clear, that Yeltsin famously dubbed the new normal the Cold Peace – not warlike, but not friendly or deeply collaborative either.

The West fancied the comfort of prefab change over original design. The prioritisation of NATO and EU enlargement relegated the OSCE to the backwaters of European security and integration efforts. Dangling the possibility of Russia partaking in its alliance system, the West consigned the practicalities to some Neverland, long after present company were dead. It drew the false lesson from Moscow’s inability to stop the enlargement process that future Russian complaints could also be dismissed without consequence.[46] As for Russia, time and again it seemed to sink more effort into critiquing Western schemes than into fleshing out its own. It broached a CIS–NATO alliance without setting the idea to paper or discussing it with its CIS associates. It flirted with asking for NATO membership (as Gorbachev had done), yet never got around to doing so or to voicing an opinion on what would need to change to make it feasible.

Working away all along were the self-interested country scripts that realist theories of international relations would predict. For the countries of East Central Europe, once emancipated by the Soviet collapse, affiliations with the Western clubs were unsurpassed aids for balancing against the time-honoured Soviet/Russian hegemon. The overnight dissolution of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR itself licensed them to migrate from balancing to bandwagoning with the triumphant Western alliance, and then to jump from the bandwagon right into playing trombone in the band.

But another script was also unfolding. Although there has been some backsliding in recent years, on the whole NATO and particularly EU enlargement undergirded the development of secure and pluralistic market democracies. The prefab model empowered both organisations to reshape institutions of governance and impose Western rules on countries eager to ‘rejoin Europe’, as the saying went. The success of the transition from communism was no foregone conclusion in the early 1990s. As the Arab Spring has recently demonstrated, shifts from authoritarianism on this scale are often violent and inconclusive. The prefab model was a quintessential factor in the transformation of a wide swath of post-communist Europe.[47]

The lack of an inclusive regional order did not prevent many non-trivial acts of cooperation and benevolence across the old East–West fault line after 1991. But the foreign-policy realm Russia scrutinised most diligently was its neighbourhood, where the political map had been profoundly reshaped since Gorbachev opened Pandora’s box. Given the fait accompli of an ever-larger NATO and, with a slight lag, an ever-larger EU, the countries of East Central Europe, including the Baltic trio, were fully absorbed into Western systems. Even hardliners in Moscow recognised that they were gone for good.

In another category entirely were the quintet of ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia. Landlocked and secluded from the European theatre, they were in no danger of decamping to the West; in fact, China soon became a much more palpable force there than Western governments or institutions. Two of them (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) owned shoreline on the Caspian Sea but did not share a land border with a member or prospective member of NATO or the EU. The Central Asians have thus played a secondary role in our story. Their importance as a great-power playground temporarily grew during the US-led operation in Afghanistan following 9/11 but faded following the exit of most combat troops in 2014.[48]

The critical area of interest for our story consists of six ‘In-Betweens’, that is, former Soviet republics flanked by Russia and East Central Europe. Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova were situated to Russia’s west and southwest; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan constituted the South Caucasus, a mountainous area lying between the Black and the Caspian seas. Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan bordered Russia; Moldova and Armenia were separated from it by a few hundred kilometres. Their combined 962,762 sq km was 6% of Russia’s land area, but their population, 82.1m, was 56% of that of the erstwhile imperial metropole. They varied on characteristic after characteristic: cartographic location, climate, size, economic conditions, language, religious tradition, past association with Russia. Still, they shared much history, remote and recent, Russian as a lingua franca, a multitude of informal practices and norms, and a visceral reaction to – and propensity to manoeuvre around – any foreign policy made in Moscow.

Ukraine, the state with which Russia’s relations were to be the rockiest, held custody of 63% of the In-Betweens’ population (51.8m) and 58% of their landmass (579,330 sq km). Russia had a latent territorial grievance against Ukraine over the Crimean peninsula, which had been reassigned from RSFSR to Ukrainian jurisdiction by Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership in 1954. Acrimony flared up over proprietorship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, headquartered in Sevastopol, Crimea, which had 100,000 personnel and 835 ships in 1991. A treaty of ‘friendship, cooperation and partnership’ sealed by Yeltsin and the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in May 1997 set aside the territorial issue. Separate agreements partitioned the fleet, with Moscow buying out much of the Ukrainians’ share in exchange for debt relief, and provided Russia a 20-year lease on the naval base in Sevastopol and the right to billet 25,000 sailors, aviators and marines there.

Taken together, Russia, the Central Asians and the In-Betweens formed a unique post-imperial landscape. Unlike the lost overseas empires of Britain and France or the exploded empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, in this case the former empire is arrayed around the ex-metropole physically. Russia’s central location gives it immense advantages in dealing with its neighbours. Centrality also begets a sense of vulnerability. A regime change in Pakistan or a shift in Australian foreign policy would have limited direct consequences for the UK. The same cannot be said about Georgia or Kazakhstan from the Kremlin vantage point, gazing out from the Moscow hub to spokes and rim. It can be no mystery why Russia, from Yeltsin onwards, has assiduously identified itself as having ‘vital interests’ in its post-Soviet Eurasian environs.

Using the standard measurements, the prerequisites of national power in post-Soviet Eurasia are more asymmetrically distributed than in any comparable global region other than the Americas.[49] Consider the raw facts about population magnitude and economic strength. In 2015, the ratio of Russia’s population to that of its neighbours ranged from about three to one (for Ukraine) to more than 50 to one (for Armenia). In 2013 economic output, the range is much greater, from a ratio of ten to one (for Kazakhstan) to countries producing a fraction of 1% of Russia’s output (Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan).

The legacy of Soviet planning augmented Russia’s latent centripetal power. Gosplan (the economic-planning agency) had strewn production assets about Soviet territory with no regard for republic borders; without some degree of reintegration, or major alternative sources of growth, individual states would be stuck with a surfeit of inefficiencies. In a prescient paper written in the late 1990s, David A. Lake argued that it would be a mistake to assume that the demise of the USSR would be followed by an age of equality and disconnectedness between the neo-states:

Given the power asymmetries, there would be only one candidate for originator and coordinator of a programme of partial reintegration – Russia.

As with the relationship in toto, it would stretch the truth to say that Russian–Western cooperation in post-Soviet Eurasia was non-existent in the 1990s. The outstanding case was the conjoint effort to counteract the dispersal of weapons from the USSR’s nuclear storehouse. When the hammer-and-sickle was run down the Kremlin flagpole on 25 December 1991, 3,200 strategic warheads were located in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in storage or on intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber aircraft, as were 4,000 of the less destructive tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons. All of the tactical weapons were transported without incident to Russia by 1992. The Lisbon Protocol, brokered and co-signed by the Western powers the same year, bound Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to send their strategic warheads to Russia as well, where the fissile materials were to be converted into fuel for civilian reactors. There were no hiccups with Belarus and Kazakhstan; Ukraine resisted handing over its arsenal of 2,250 warheads, the third largest after Russia and the US. American pressure and aid were central to incentivising Ukraine to denuclearise. In November 1994 Ukraine relented and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state. The next month, Russia (with the US and Britain) gave its assent to a Budapest Memorandum solemnly obligating it ‘to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine’. The last nuclear weapons were shipped to depots in Russia in May 1996. Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme put forth by senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the American taxpayer footed much of the bill for deactivating the weapons, reprocessing the fissile material into reactor fuel and purchasing it for US power plants.[51]

Yet what typified the Cold Peace was not cooperation but the chilly disinterest insinuated by the catchphrase and the rise of competition in and over the In-Betweens, and to a lesser degree Central Asia. The competition was low-grade and muffled by situational factors, but competition all the same.

A starting point was the new Russia’s avowal of geopolitical supremacy in post-Soviet Eurasia. Contrary to myth, this sense of entitlement was not the invention of Vladimir Putin after 1999. His more forward-thinking predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, laid it out unapologetically in a presidential decree on ‘The Strategic Course of the Russian Federation with Respect to the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States’, dated 14 September 1995. The decree is in force to the present day. ‘On the territory of the CIS’, it was affirmed, ‘are concentrated Russia’s most vital interests in the domains of economics, defence, security, and defence of [its citizens’] rights’. Russia was envisaged as a ‘leading force in forming a new system of international… relations in the post-USSR space’, and integral to this effort as acting ‘to foster integrative processes in the CIS’. In a sharply worded section on security, Yeltsin stipulated that Russian policy ‘obtain from the CIS states performance of their obligations to desist from alliances and blocs directed against any of these states’. NATO should stay at arm’s length, and the CIS countries should be in unison with Russia in waving a ‘No Trespassing!’ sign at interlopers. The decree allowed for cooperation with international organisations like the UN and the OSCE in regulating intra-regional conflicts, but underscored the need ‘to get them to understand that this region is first of all Russia’s zone of influence’.[52] The text on the face of it was a classic example of zero-sum geopolitics.

Russian attitudes towards the former Soviet republics were in flux in the 1990s. It was a decade of rampant uncertainty for all these countries, both domestically and in terms of their foreign relations. For the greenhorn Russian elite, many of whom had been in the Soviet, ‘all-union’, institutions just a few years earlier, acceptance of the other progeny of the USSR as fully sovereign countries did not come easily. For example, Vladimir Lukin, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, blithely told Talbott in 1993 that relations between Russia and Ukraine were to be ‘identical to those between New York and New Jersey’.[53] Lukin was something of a liberal on the Russian political spectrum; Russian nationalists, who were well represented in parliament, were more menacing. One lawmaker warned in October 1992 against ‘absolutising’ the new borders dividing the former republics, since they were ‘artificial’ and ‘arbitrary’.[54] Even Yeltsin, when he needed to protect his right flank, would indulge; for example, in March 1993 he called for ‘international organisations’ to grant Russia ‘special authority as guarantor of peace and stability on the territory of the former USSR’.[55] The statement was not backed up by action, but it did inflame sensibilities across the region, eliciting angry retorts from several of the neighbours.

To have its way in post-Soviet Eurasia, the Russian Federation relied on a range of tools. It meddled persistently, though without a master plan, in the internal politics of the successor states, providing moral and media support, and from time to time funding, for groups receptive to Russian policy. In Ukraine, Russia threw its weight behind Yuri Meshkov, the head of the Crimean provincial government, who was a proponent of holding a referendum on secession of the peninsula from the rest of the country. When the national parliament dismissed him in 1995, he was granted asylum in Moscow. In most of the In-Betweens, Moscow’s agencies maintained relations with representatives of diaspora Russian communities. Even moderates like Kozyrev spoke out for defence of the rights of Russians and Russian speakers in the former republics and their ‘voluntary reintegration’ with the Russian Federation.[56] A nationalist faction around Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, were for a more venturesome policy and took a special interest in Crimea.

Russia kept military forces stationed in all of the In-Betweens and, for some time, in the Central Asian republics. Some of these garrisons resulted from its role as pacifier and mediator in the range of ethnic and political conflicts that broke out as the Soviet Union splintered. In Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, the Soviet and then Russian 14th Army defended the breakaway Transnistria in its conflict with Chisinau in 1990–92. Although unrecognised by any member of the United Nations, Transnistria has had self-rule ever since, and Russian peacekeepers and remnants of the 14th Army are still in place. In Georgia, Moscow brokered an end to two ethno-national wars between the Georgians and the South Ossetians (1991–92) and Abkhaz (1992–94), groups that had eponymous semi-autonomous provinces within the Georgian republic of the USSR. In Abkhazia, Russia’s ‘policy of divide and rule included military support to both sides in the conflict, which, over the course of the conflict, increasingly favored the [Abkhaz]’, ministering to them with weapons, training and the odd airstrike on their Georgian adversaries.[57] The ceasefire agreements created Russian-dominated peacekeeping forces in both areas, along with diminutive international observer missions. Russia kept its army out of Nagorno-Karabakh, the breakaway province of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians that was the locus of a six-year-long succession of clashes, but it at one and the same time brokered a 1994 armistice in the fighting there, manned its Gyumri base in Armenia (thus warding off intervention by the Turks, ethnic cousins of the Azeris), promised to safeguard Yerevan’s security and happily peddled arms all around. Moscow also intervened to put an end to the civil war of 1992–97 in Tajikistan, which had left more than 50,000 people dead.

In the early 1990s, Moscow’s involvement in these crises was necessary (no other power was prepared to step in) and productive, in that it put a stop to bloodshed. Despite some misgivings in Washington, the US was generally empathetic; Clinton said in Moscow in January 1994, ‘I think there will be times when you will be involved… in some of these areas near you, just like the United States has been involved in the last several years in Panama and Grenada near our area.’[58] The problems emerged after the guns had been silenced. With the exception of Tajikistan, all of the post-conflict arrangements Moscow brokered became mired in stalemate, earning these conflicts the ‘frozen’ label. The lack of political settlements provided a convenient rationalisation for maintaining Russian troops as peacekeepers in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, along with the bases in Armenia and Tajikistan, which the host governments welcomed. And Moscow had direct dealings with both recognised national governments and the separatist enclaves themselves. In Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia even began issuing passports to locals. Russian officials were often seconded, so to speak, to the separatist governments.

Economic instruments filled out the Russian toolbox. They were most often used to twist arms on particulars and to produce prosaic commercial advantage for Russian companies, but at times they did rise to the level of geo-economics. Centrality, purchasing power, resource endowment and the hardwired legacy of the Soviet economy gave Moscow substantial advantages. Even though Russia’s economy was in contraction until the late 1990s, there was enough capital accumulation to facilitate investment abroad, including in disputed territories like Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.[59] Energy afforded a special abundance of opportunities. Russia was the primary purveyor of oil and natural gas to all but the four other former Soviet republics that had their own hydrocarbon resources (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and, to a lesser extent, Uzbekistan); it routinely sold on credit and at below-market prices, making for buyer dependence. It also initially controlled all of the former USSR’s export pipelines, including those leading to the profitable European gas market, giving it a financial lever with its four fellow exporters. At one time or another, it bullied uncooperative partners by raising energy prices or suspending deliveries, calling in debts, slapping tariffs on imports or excise taxes on exports, and restricting access for non-Russian oil and gas exporters to its pipelines. The scholar Daniel Drezner recorded 39 occasions when the Kremlin had recourse to such tactics between 1992 and 1997. It produced concessions in 15 cases, or 38%, a respectable rate of success by the standards of political economists.[60] Even success came at a price. By resorting to ham-fisted tactics whenever one of its neighbours did not behave to its liking, Russia aroused threat perceptions throughout the region and came to be more feared than trusted by local elites. The bullying also convinced hawks in Washington and European capitals that, if not reinforced, the independence of the post-Soviet states could be a passing phenomenon.

Russia did not limit itself to bilateral knobs and switches. It also operated through a bevy of multilateral institutions, of which the paramount in theory was the umbrella CIS. In the five years after its establishment in December 1991, the CIS stood up an executive secretariat in Minsk, an inter-parliamentary assembly and 12 coordinating councils (for heads of state, heads of government and ministers). It also spawned a flock of around 50 specialised bodies, dedicated to everything from patents to meteorology, civil aviation and plant breeding. All told, the CIS Council of Heads of State had adopted 500 documents by 2004, and the Council of Heads of Government more than 900; the vast majority of these agreements ‘involved a relatively formal bureaucratic framework’.[61] Russian efforts were also devoted to more focused schemes for coordination of trade and development that smacked of geo-economics. In September 1993, a convocation of CIS heads of state adopted an Economic Union Treaty, featuring plans for a free-trade zone, a payments union and a monetary union. Subsidiary agreements on trade and tariffs, payments, legal harmonisation and rail transport ensued in 1994, 1995 and 1996. Steering power in the union was to be in proportion to economic output, so that Russia was in the driver’s seat.

Russia inspired virtually all of the agreements inked. But cold realities belied ringing declarations of intent and the facade of teamwork. Not a few of the centrifugal forces unleashed by the disintegration of the USSR raged on unabated, making lofty goals, reports and guidelines all but unfulfillable. The parliament of Ukraine, a co-author of and the second-ranking member of the CIS, refused to ratify its charter. Ukrainian presidents dutifully attended CIS summit meetings while doing their best to ‘derail Russian ideas as early on as at the level of experts, ministers, and prime ministers’.[62] In the ambit of economic coordination, the provisions of the 1993 treaty were honoured in the breach. Protectionism, national currencies (following the collapse of the short-lived rouble zone in 1993) and cumbersome banking rules were put in its place and intra-regional trade plummeted by two-thirds. The centrality of the CIS accord was undercut by the decision of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 1995 to forge a trilateral customs union, which later garnered two more Central Asian adherents and the lofty title of the Eurasian Economic Community.[63] This entity, too, made little headway. Yet another geo-economic structure, the Single Economic Space (SES) among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, was announced in September 2003.[64] In keeping with the trend, it proved to be another paper tiger.

Entropy was, if anything, more manifest in the security sphere. Six CIS members – Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – had signed onto the Tashkent Treaty on collective security in 1992; three others (Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia) did so in 1993 and the treaty came into force in 1994. Lacking a common external enemy, the treaty had no practical consequences in the 1990s, particularly since several of its members were for all intents and purposes at war with each other. An institutional arm to carry out its provisions did not exist until the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was created in 2002, ten years after the pact. Membership by that point was down to six: Russia, two of six In-Betweens (Armenia and Belarus) and three of five Central Asians (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan).[65] The CSTO operates out of a Moscow headquarters and conducts exercises among its members; in theory it has even had a rapid-reaction force at its disposal since 2009. In practice, the ‘collective’ element of its mission has, given power asymmetries, always been lacking; it functions mostly as a Russian security blanket for the smaller neighbours.

A close study of both security-and economic-policy fields by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found in 1999 that ‘all of the post-Soviet states, including Russia, are too weak, distracted, and poor to be able to integrate’. ‘Even the few common undertakings to which the CIS states have been able to agree have either been carried out shoddily or not at all, because neither Russia nor the other CIS states have the money to pay for them.’[66]

Nor did Russia have the organisational arena to itself. In October 1997 four In-Between abstainers or dropouts from the CSTO and the Economic Union Treaty formed a rival group known as GUAM, after the founding parties of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. GUAM was a talk shop about how to keep the Russians at bay and open up channels to the West (doing the talking in Russian, its official language). It gained observer status at the UN General Assembly in 2003, but would wait until 2006 to organise a secretariat (with all of eight staffers) in Kyiv. The member governments announced a free-trade area in July 2002 and signed a sprinkling of joint statements, installed a parliamentary assembly and working groups, and discussed at length a Europe–Caucasus–Asia Transport Corridor and a GUAM peacekeeping brigade. Little of substance came of these initiatives, which can be attributed to the same constellation of factors that plagued the Russia-led projects.[67] GUAM tried but was ultimately unable to widen its membership: Uzbekistan, which signed on in 2001 (making it GUUAM), ceased to participate in 2002 and abandoned it in 2005.

In the first decade or so after the Soviet collapse, the role of Western governments in these meanderings was modest. The 1999 Carnegie Endowment study concluded that no CIS member state was a serious candidate for NATO admission, and that PfP was mostly of ‘no more than a marginal influence’, attuned to bland endeavours like search-and-rescue training rather than hard geopolitics.[68] The EU approach to post-Soviet Eurasia until 2004 was ‘Russia first’, other than allowing the three Baltics to apply for accession. As with NATO’s efforts, the In-Betweens were involved only tangentially. Between 1995 and 1999, all six went for PCAs that provided for political dialogue and economic advice. Words almost universally outpaced deeds. Moldova may serve as an illustration: it ‘repeatedly heralded European integration but did little to honor its obligations, and Europe remained only marginally interested in the small country’.[69]

American diplomats who served at the time recount that Washington’s prime aim was to craft a ‘presence’ in every capital – an embassy, a military attaché, trade and aid missions, and so on – and to forge working relationships with the fledgling countries. Russian diplomats will say the Americans and less so the Europeans bad-mouthed all Russian integrationist moves as neo-Soviet. As one of them put it in an interview, ‘They were constantly throwing a spanner in the works…. Any action we took was considered an attempt to bring back the Soviet Union.’[70]

There is some truth to the Russian allegation. Inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US national security adviser who warned in 1994 of Russia’s ‘proto-imperial’ leanings, some policymakers did see Russia as bent on re-establishing an anti-Western bloc with the In-Betweens and the Central Asians.[71] The ritualistic endorsements of these states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity intimated that Russia represented a threat to both. As then-US secretary of state Christopher brusquely put it, ‘Russia must avoid any attempt to reconstitute the U.S.S.R.’[72] But the push to show the flag and the finger-pointing at an alleged Soviet-style approach to the region did not beget a Western eagerness to get tangled in local conflicts or to act systematically to thwart Russian policy. As one former practitioner recalls, ‘Despite loud warnings from political and academic critics that Moscow was seeking to restore… control, many Western European states, and even the United States, accepted and at times welcomed Russian actions to stop the fighting and try to manage the conflicts on its periphery.’[73] In the early and mid-1990s, crises in the Persian Gulf and strife-torn Somalia and the Balkans seemed more salient, and absorption of the one-time Warsaw Pact states and the three Baltic countries was mission enough for even the most evangelical NATO supporters.[74] Primakov took pride in Russia’s having made a place for OSCE and UN observers in its peacekeeping missions in Georgia, and remarked wryly that ‘no one was in any hurry to replace the Russians, let alone to repeat what NATO had done in Bosnia’.[75]

Russia’s economic woes spurred its neighbours to diversify their trade ties. The total exports of the 11 non-Russian CIS countries to the EU overtook the volume of their exports to Russia by 1998. The most prominent Western geo-economic incursion was occasioned by the bounteous petroleum reserves of the Caspian Sea basin. Oil- and gas-rich Azerbaijan, on the western coast, and Kazakhstan on the eastern, began to clamour for the liberty to deal with multinational oil companies without hindrance from Moscow even before December 1991. Multi-cornered wrangling in subsequent years produced a cavalcade of deals and joint ventures, many of them dead letters. The pinch point was transportation: getting the fuel to outside markets. Russia strived to monopolise this function through its pipeline network. Shevardnadze, now the Georgian president, and his counterpart Heydar Aliev of Azerbaijan lobbied for a route originating in Azerbaijan and stretching through Georgia to Ceyhan, a Turkish marine terminal on the Mediterranean. It was their brainchild that was eventually built, much to Russia’s chagrin. A bureaucratic faction in Washington brought the US into the loop, on the grounds that ‘it was incumbent upon the American government to come to the aid of the Caspian republics – in effect, to run interference for them against Russia’.[76] The geopolitical and geo-economic logic was that by breaking Russia’s export monopoly, the new pipeline would provide both producer and transit countries with independent revenue streams, thus limiting Russian influence over their affairs. But the Clinton administration was also accommodating toward a second pipeline through Russia, and Moscow was restrained in its reaction to the setback. Russia had other fish to fry, the Caspian was a low priority for Yeltsin, and he was averse to the use of force to have his way, despite Shevardnadze’s taking fright that the Russian military would ‘blow me up’ if he persisted.[77] Russia stayed out of the consortium but was free to lay down more pipe itself, which it did in later years. Agreement in principle on the 1,768km Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Pipeline was reached in November 1998, ground was broken in 2003 and the first crude was pumped in 2005.

A frontal altercation over the allegiance of the In-Betweens did not materialise at this juncture. But this did not mean that all was sweetness and light. Stresses and strains grew in both significance and frequency in the late 1990s.

Unlike the East Central Europeans, the In-Betweens had diverse partialities and taller hurdles to clear – greater exposure to Moscow’s hard and soft power, no historical memory of being part of Europe or national mission to ‘return’ to it, Western caution about taking on burdens to the east, and these countries’ poor track record on reform. In-Betweens Armenia and Belarus, along with Kazakhstan, opted to throw in more or less wholeheartedly with Russia. For the other In-Betweens, the unpalatability of sticking with Moscow, and the lack of an option of prompt entry into the Western tent, reduced them to coexisting with Russia and, when practicable, balancing against it, even in cases when segments of their elites would have been happier following the East Central Europeans and bandwagoning with an ascendant West. The elites as a rule had no appetite, however, for decisive market reform and democratic governance, Polish-style, or for relinquishing the political monopoly and lucrative economic rents that went with the status quo. Public opinion, which did not always mimic elite opinion, was still another constraint. In Ukraine, for example, citizens in 2000 had a much warmer view of Russia than of the US or NATO, and 60% approved of an East Slavic confederation with Russia and Belarus.[78]

In practice, restrained balancing against Russia could work in an assortment of tangible ways, rarely earth-shaking. In expeditions to the post-Soviet capitals, Western envoys got used to hearing pleas to intercede with Moscow on their behalf, on points both petty and consequential. Few meetings passed without requests for public manifestations of solidarity with the locals. Governments enrolled in all available international organisations, signed declarations of good wishes ad infinitum with the Americans and Europeans, garnered invitations to Brussels, Berlin and Washington, showed up at protocol events and celebrations staged by the West, and dragged their feet on the implementation of CIS agreements. They could also accept or solicit sometimes-generous Western foreign-aid programmes. These were ostensibly apolitical measures but they reflected the realities of the time: Western prosperity and Russia’s relative lack of resources. From 1995 onwards, the US had a declared policy to give the In-Betweens and the Central Asians a bigger collective slice of the assistance pie for the former Soviet region than Russia’s share. By 1998, Russia received only 17% of the total aid for the 12 post-Soviet Eurasian countries, while Ukraine, with less than one-third of Russia’s population, got more and was now the third-largest recipient after Israel and Egypt globally. ‘In part, strategic considerations – including the desire to fortify the security and independence of Ukraine and Uzbekistan and the goal of establishing better relations with the oil-rich states of the Caspian region – pushed aid in this non-Russian direction.’[79] Pocketing favours from one side was not seen as incompatible with doing the same from the other. Some of the In-Between leaders of the time – Kuchma of Ukraine and Shevardnadze of Georgia come to mind – were virtuosos at playing the West and Russia off each other in order to wring concessions from both.

An oft-heard explanation of the turbulence between Russia and the West that eventually surfaced is the coming to power of a new Russian president: Vladimir Putin, inaugurated in May 2000 after serving four months as acting president following Yeltsin’s early retirement. In fact, Putin’s arrival corresponded with several years of an upturn, generally speaking, in Russian interaction with the West. The new man in the Kremlin revived the NATO–Russia relationship and received the NATO secretary-general, George Robertson, soon after taking office. The latter opined that things had crept ‘from the permafrost into slightly softer ground’.[80] Putin’s public statements recalled Yeltsin’s and Gorbachev’s musings about Russia finding a home in the Western community. ‘Russia’, he said in an interview with David Frost of the BBC in 2000, ‘is part of the European culture’, and he could not picture it ‘in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world’. He was against demonising NATO as a perpetual enemy; ‘even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world’. ‘Could Russia ever join NATO?’, Frost wanted to know. ‘I don’t see why not’, replied Putin. ‘I would not rule out such a possibility… if and when Russia’s views are taken into account as those of an equal partner.’[81] He raised the issue of Russia’s potential NATO membership when he first met an American president, Bill Clinton, in June 2000. Clinton was non-committal, but Kremlin staffers were instructed to investigate the nuts and bolts of Russian accession.[82] Putin hit it off personally with several Western leaders, including Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush. After meeting the Russian in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush legendarily exclaimed that he had caught a glimpse of Putin’s ‘soul’.

Putin telephoned Bush with condolences over the 9/11 attacks before any other world leader, and asked CIS governments in Central Asia to satisfy US basing needs for the onslaught against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Russia filled intelligence gaps before the American invasion and there was some cooperation with the American services in the field. This led to talk of a new US–Russia alliance in the war on terror. In the months after 9/11, Putin again raised the possibility of a Russian place in NATO with Robertson. The NATO secretary-general reportedly gave him the standard line about formal procedures and practices. Putin undoubtedly heard: ‘get in line behind Estonia and Bulgaria’.

A decidedly more forward American posture in post-Soviet Eurasia – in part a by-product of the Bush administration’s global prioritisation of counter-terrorism and democracy promotion – chipped away at the Clinton-era tradition of self-imposed restraints and consideration of Russian sensitivities. In the spring of 2002, for example, Washington embarked on the Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP), spending some US$65m and sending in several hundred US special forces to participate. It was designed to modernise the Georgian military and get into shape four battle-ready battalions that could do their bit in the war on terror. The immediate assignment was to pacify the restive Pankisi Gorge abutting the Russian republic of Chechnya, where a war against separatists was raging. Putin mouthed tentative support (his government had long complained about Chechen rebels taking refuge in Pankisi), but Russian attitudes cooled once new projects replaced GTEP and Georgian forces were enlisted in the American adventure in Iraq. ‘The minuscule U.S. presence in Georgia had a symbolic significance far greater than was warranted by its size, and presaged a trend that became increasingly visible during the decade and increasingly worrisome to Moscow.’[83]

Also reflective of lowered inhibitions was the American decision to build a bridge to the Russo-sceptic GUAM group. In December 2002 the US and the GUAM foreign ministers entered into a framework programme ‘of trade and transport facilitation, ensuring border and customs control, combating terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking’. The centrepiece was a US-bankrolled GUAM Virtual Center designed to conduct activities along these lines. The financial commitment was trifling, and the impact even more so, but that did not keep Russia from seeing it as a suspicious probe.[84]

One effect of this US policy shift was to embolden Russia’s neighbours to bid more overtly for Western support and for inclusion in Western institutions. A pair of In-Betweens blazed a declaratory trail toward the EU and even NATO, where Russian tolerance for deviation from the status quo would certainly be scantiest. In 1998 Ukraine’s president Kuchma asserted EU membership as a strategic objective, and in 2002 let it be known that he wanted his country sooner or later to join the NATO alliance; Shevardnadze staked similar claims for Georgia in 1999 and 2002, respectively.

In a third country, Moldova, a bruising scandal broke out in 2003 over resolution of the Transnistria conflict. At the invitation of the Moldovan president, Vladimir Voronin, a senior adviser to Putin, Dmitry Kozak, drafted with local allies a plan to bring the mutinous district back into the fold by adopting a new federal constitution for the country. The Kozak Memorandum would have resulted in an asymmetric federation; Transnistria and Gagauzia (the small homeland of a Turkic-speaking people) were to be granted considerable autonomy along with a veto over some central decisions via a new upper house of parliament. In a late addition, Russian peacekeepers, and not the multinational force the Moldovan authorities preferred, were to be stationed in Transnistria until 2020. Western officials, prominently Javier Solana, the EU’s high representative for common foreign and security policy, were vehemently against the plan, while OSCE mediators could not arrive at a position. Voronin, having given preliminary approval to the scheme, torpedoed it in November 2003. His decision came as a Kremlin airplane was preparing to ferry Putin to Chisinau to witness the signing. As William Hill, then the head of the OSCE mission to Moldova, later recalled, ‘What was for most Western capitals a relatively minor incident for the Russians was a personal affront to their president and a denial of Russia’s right to play an independent political and diplomatic role in a part of the world that had once been theirs exclusively.’[85]

For Moscow, unease over Western involvement in the debacle in Moldova turned into alarm when taken together with trends in several other nearby states. Georgia, Ukraine – the premier In-Between, and Kyrgyzstan were rattled around this time by ‘colour revolutions’ propelled by mass protest and civil resistance. The three revolutions came within 18 months: the Rose Revolution in Georgia in November 2003, which unseated Shevardnadze; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in December 2004, after a disputed national election to replace Kuchma, which denied the presidency to Kuchma’s associate, Viktor Yanukovych; and, in April 2005, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in which perennial leader Askar Akaev fell from power. The events in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, were reminiscent of those in Tbilisi and Kyiv but otherwise had scant international resonance. The same could not be said of the Rose and Orange revolutions. Shevardnadze and Kuchma had thumbed their noses at Russia on NATO, but they had been senior members of the Soviet nomenklatura, and Kuchma had played along with Russia’s SES initiative. Their replacements – Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko – were pro-Western nationalists who would necessarily be more of a handful for Moscow. Russia played go-between in Georgia but in Ukraine unabashedly took Yanukovych’s side, with Putin making two well-publicised visits to Kyiv during the election campaign, the Kremlin paying for pro-Yanukovych polling and electoral activities, and a premature congratulatory phone call from Putin to Yanukovych after the disputed second-round vote. American and European democracy-promotion programmes had funded some of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and movements that swept Saakashvili and Yushchenko into office; Western governments and media effusively embraced the new governments. That was enough for Russian officials to dismiss them as lapdogs of the West, and above all of the US, which Putin indicted for a high-handed foreign policy boxed in ‘beautiful, pseudo-democratic phraseology’.[86]

The interactions described hitherto added up to a messy equilibrium among the main external actors in post-Soviet Eurasia. In time, the equilibrium was revealed to be fragile. The Cold Peace got colder and the interaction in the region more and more unmistakably adversarial. Discord erupted with greater frequency, at a shriller pitch and with more animosity.