Everyone Loses

^{CHAPTER TWO} Contestation entrenched

A decade and a half after the settlement-that-wasn’t marked the end of the Cold War, the best opportunity to forge a new, inclusive order for Europe and Eurasia had passed. The year 2004 brought the ‘big bang’ enlargement of Euro-Atlantic institutions, ushering the Baltic states and several adjacent countries into NATO and the EU.[1] The Western umbrella now extended deep into the former imperium of the Soviet Union. But at that time one could find only hints of the ferociously adversarial behaviour that yielded a hot war in Ukraine a decade later. Russia was far from happy with what had transpired since 1989, and often exuded resentment. Yet it had a multilayered and interdependent relationship with the EU and its member states, a functional dialogue with the US and even some cooperation with NATO. Although Moscow was on guard about Western activity in post-Soviet Eurasia, the competition was still low-grade in comparison with today.

A few short years after the colour revolutions, tensions over geopolitics and geo-ideas reached unheard-of levels, a process that culminated in a five-day war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. The focus then moved to geo-economics, as the EU became more active and Russia finally got serious about its plans for regional economic integration. While contingent factors temporarily eased tensions during the ‘reset’ interval, contestation had now been entrenched.

The tenuous and mostly informal arrangement in post-Soviet Eurasia that emerged from the 1990s had reflected Russia’s relative dominance in the region, constraints on Russia–West competition, and a shared sense that Russian institutions and practices were gradually converging with Western ones. Vladimir Putin, in his first few years in power, subscribed, at least rhetorically, to the logic of convergence, but by 2003–04 he was moving the Russian political system down a more authoritarian path. The ponderings of officials and intellectuals (Western and Russian alike) about the eventual drawing of Russia into the West’s institutional web had not yet died out, but they were looking more and more implausible.

But it was the colour revolutions of 2003–05, and most of all Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, that truly kicked off the unravelling of the Cold Peace. Breakdowns of regimes that were part of the status quo order in the region testified to a waning of Russian influence. The instinct of Russia and the West to respond to these breakdowns in opposite and opposing ways also pointed to more hard-hitting competition on the horizon.

The colour revolutions solidified linkages between geopolitics and geo-ideas in the region. Moscow came around to the interpretation that the uprisings next door were a tool of Western, and pointedly of American, policy. The tool was deployed, many in positions of authority argued, in order to remove sitting governments that pursued policies counter to US interests, replace them with figures who would do the Americans’ bidding, or conceivably, if all else failed, to sow sheer disorder. According to this view, colour revolutions were particularly insidious because they furthered power objectives under the cover of devotion to universal principles of democracy and human rights – what the Russians call maskirovka (camouflage). The West’s geo-ideas, in short, were geopolitics in disguise.[2] The Russian military developed a detailed schematic for this purported policy, beginning with Western government sponsorship of efforts to train opposition movements, moving to the process of delegitimising sitting governments, sparking protests and so on until the final act of installation of a puppet regime.[3]

Incongruities abounded in the Russian narrative. We mention just three here. Firstly, the popular uprisings in question originated predominantly in domestic outrage about poor governance, not intrigues by foreigners. Secondly, they occurred under a tangle of circumstances and led to very different outcomes. In Georgia, Russia was far more involved in mediating the political crisis than any Western country. In Kyrgyzstan, the successor government under Kurmanbek Bakiev behaved no differently toward Russia or the West than the ancien régime. In Ukraine (see below), Western-sounding rhetoric outpaced Western-tending policy. Thirdly, the degree of Western involvement in the uprisings and the extent to which Washington in particular guided the aftermath was grossly overstated.

The blemishes and blinkers in the Russian narrative are beside the point. Threat perceptions do not need to be logically consistent; they matter to the extent that they are widely held in a country’s political establishment. It became a consensus view in Moscow that the West, beginning with the United States, was fomenting colour revolutions in post-Soviet Eurasia as a non-kinetic means of engineering the same result as Operation Iraqi Freedom did in Iraq: regime change. And, to be fair, there were kernels of truth in the Russian narrative. The US and the EU did provide training to some of the activists and parties that came to power as a result of the revolutions, and often were involved in brokering political compromises.[4] Moreover, some US officials did claim credit for these events, although sometimes the very same individuals would also downplay the American role.[5] And in the cases of the Rose and Orange revolutions, as well as in later upheavals in the region, the governments that emerged were indisputably more pro-Western, loosely speaking, than their predecessors. In Ukraine, president Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, his co-revolutionary prime minister, had for some time been proponents of NATO and EU membership and opposed closer ties with Russia. When they came to power, there truly was a swing in Ukrainian foreign policy. Kuchma had attempted to balance between Russia and the West so as to maximise benefits; the new government tacked sharply toward the West.

Domestic politics in the region had thus become an arena of Russia–West contestation. It was a matter of geo-ideas as much as geopolitics. For Moscow, the struggle was linked to preservation of domestic stability, since it was widely taken as gospel truth that political change in the neighbourhood could be used to undermine the foundations of the Russian government. For the West, the colour revolutions also solidified a linkage between geopolitics and geo-ideas. ‘Pro-Western’ became synonymous with ‘democratic’ as a descriptor of local political forces. Democratic political change and geopolitical gain went hand in hand, and many saw Russia as an impediment to both.

This mode of thinking was quite familiar to many Western policymakers: in East Central Europe, democratisation and market reforms had coincided with geopolitical realignment in their favour. The circumstances of post-Soviet Eurasia were markedly different, and the assumed linkage with geo-ideas often led Western policy astray. In the end, none of the colour revolutions was a genuine democratic breakthrough.[6] Kyrgyzstan, which was little involved in the Russia–West tussle, was more repressive under Bakiev than it had been under Akaev, and in 2010 Bakiev was to be overthrown much like his predecessor. Post-Orange Revolution Ukraine was less repressive than under Kuchma, but its leaders were anything but democratic exemplars, often behaving quite similarly to their predecessors. Many corrupt practices continued unabated, and precious little was done to establish the rule of law. In Georgia, governance under Saakashvili’s administration did make impressive strides, especially in terms of anti-corruption policy, but pluralism and human rights did not. Any illusions should have been put to rest by a crackdown on protesters and subsequent takeover of the country’s main independent television station in November 2007. While the West often claimed to be shunning authoritarian regimes for their authoritarianism, not infrequently, as with Georgia in 2007, it overlooked the democratic shortcomings of governments that vowed their loyalty.[7]

In the years following the colour revolutions, Russia moved towards a counter-revolutionary regional policy. This has been widely misconstrued as a drive to sabotage democratic norms.[8] The evidence to support such claims is thin. Russian policymakers, whose cynicism often seems to know no bounds, do not see their neighbourhood principally through an ideological lens. Their objective instead is to have druzhestvennye (friendly) neighbours, that is, states whose leaders are not hostile to Russia. How these leaders get to power and how their political institutions function is of little concern. As one of us has written, ‘Russia has been more indifferent to authoritarianism in its former empire – homegrown, for the most part – than avidly supportive of it. There is no systematic correspondence between regime type and the relationship with Russia.’[9] Moscow’s counter-revolutionary turn was driven by the notion that revolutionary change had become a Western implement to undermine Russian interests. Moscow could no longer distinguish (what the West couched as) democratic change from loss of influence. Geopolitics and geo-ideas were now hopelessly entangled. As events were to demonstrate, the mix was highly combustible.

But Moscow does not have an authoritarianism-promotion agenda, an analogue to EU and US democracy promotion. Any policy of norm promotion is predicated not only on affirmative preferences but on deployment of the means to achieve them. Russia demonstrates neither.[10] The broader point here is that a simple dichotomy between a West altruistically promoting democratic norms and a Russia deliberately supporting authoritarianism does not match reality. By this period, a three-front regional competition – in geopolitics, geo-economics and geo-ideas – was central to decision-making on both sides.

Moscow’s immediate reaction to the Orange Revolution was relatively mild. Clearly, it was not pleased either by the revolutionary form of political change or by the ascendance of a leadership with an inimical policy agenda. But Putin did not attempt to isolate the Orange leaders. Yushchenko was invited to visit Moscow in February 2005, and Putin reciprocated with a trip to Kyiv the next month, meeting both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, who seemed to be jostling for his favour.[11] The presidential meeting produced an agreement to create a Putin–Yushchenko Commission to oversee various mid-level working groups, and approval of a work plan for the year.

The new government in Kyiv did not pull out of Russia’s favoured integration format of the moment, the SES, continuing Kuchma’s approach of protracted talks with minimal firm commitments. At the time, Russia held out the prospect that joining the SES and pursuing European integration need not be irreconcilable. As Putin said during his visit to Kyiv in March 2005, ‘The statement that the SES involves movement in one direction, while cooperation with the EU entails movement in the opposite direction, is totally false.’ He went on to describe the plans for creating the Four Common Spaces with the EU, one of which was a common economic space – ‘essentially, the harmonisation of Russian and EU laws’, as Putin put it. If Moscow and Kyiv work together toward that end, that would ‘create the preconditions’ for Ukraine’s ‘movement toward Europe’.[12] Indeed, at that time Russia’s economic coordination with the EU was more advanced than Ukraine’s. The EU had much more of a donor–recipient relationship with Kyiv; a 2004 European Commission report highlights the EU’s status as the largest donor to Ukraine and discusses future integration only notionally.[13] An analogous Commission document on the relationship with Russia describes a plan to create a shared ‘open and integrated market’ between the two, specifying a range of steps including common standardisation for industrial products, intellectual-property regulation, competition policies and regulatory convergence.[14]

Yet the Kremlin was not prepared to subsidise a Ukrainian government that was now actively pursuing NATO and EU membership, while only paying lip service to Russia’s integration agenda. World oil prices were hitting new highs at the time, driving up the price European customers paid to Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant, for natural gas. The real value of the implicit subsidy Russia provided to Ukraine shot up as a result, and with it the opportunity cost of maintaining the practice. By the end of 2005, Ukraine was paying up to four times less for gas than Gazprom’s European customers.[15]

Without an incentive to do favours for the new government in Kyiv, the Kremlin was unwilling to order Gazprom to forfeit market prices on exports to Ukraine. During the negotiations over renewal of the supply contract in late 2005, Gazprom accordingly sought to cancel subsidised pricing unless Kyiv agreed to a consortium arrangement for its pipeline network. Kyiv turned Gazprom down, and threatened to divert to Ukrainian consumers gas meant for Europe if no compromise were to be found. On 1 January 2006, Russia interrupted supplies to Ukraine after the deadline had passed; it back-pedalled quickly after Ukraine started siphoning off gas meant for the EU and pressure dropped in several European countries. An arrangement was reached empowering a shady intermediary, RosUkrEnergo, to manage the bilateral gas relationship, which enriched well-connected elites in Moscow and Kyiv alike.

Breathless press coverage at the time portrayed Russia’s actions as the use of gas as a political weapon. The reality was more complex. Ending munificent subsidies can scarcely be portrayed as punishment, and it was unclear what political objective Russia might have been pursuing, besides alienating EU and Ukrainian publics and elites. A more cogent explanation is that Russia was moving to a two-pronged approach to the issue of gas exports to its neighbours: cheap gas only for countries willing to participate in its integration projects and to share ownership of gas assets; unsentimental commercial terms for the rest. In early 2006 only Belarus, which joined every Russia-led grouping and ceded control of its gas monopoly to Gazprom, avoided a price hike.

The first Russia–Ukraine gas war was a demonstration of Moscow’s quickness to resort to economic duress whenever it perceives a neighbour to be misbehaving. More often than not, such tactics have boomeranged. Even when they induced short-term compliance, the long-term cost of loss of trust and goodwill, especially given historically conditioned threat perceptions, outweighed the gains. Russian policy toward the region has rarely taken into account such sensitivities.

Moscow continued its coercive economic diplomacy in the region throughout the subsequent years. The motives, as far as one can divine from the circumstances, ranged from punishment for perceived bad behaviour to strong-arming concessions during unrelated negotiations. Moscow rarely announced its objectives openly, instead airing ludicrous cover stories for public consumption. In 2006 alone, allegations of hygiene violations led to import bans on dairy, meat and poultry products from Ukraine (January); Georgian and Moldovan wine (March); and Georgian mineral water (May). Later that year, in retaliation for the Georgians’ public arrest of four suspected Russian spies, Moscow suspended all transportation links with Georgia, and deported migrant workers amidst what seemed to be a campaign of intimidation against ethnic Georgians in Russia. There were two energy disputes with Belarus in 2006–07, including an oil cut-off. Little by way of grand design seems to have been involved. As Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk note, Moscow had developed a reflex of ‘deploying selective, targeted sanctions toward any states which pursued a policy that Russia regarded as unfriendly’.[16] The tactical goals varied in these scattered episodes. Taken together, the Russian actions did not amount to much, let alone a strategy for regional domination.

What is often called Russian soft power in its neighbourhood became a focus in the period following the colour revolutions. But Joseph Nye’s classic definition of soft power – the ‘ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion’ – never quite fit the Russian case. Less than two months after the Orange Revolution, Putin established a ‘department for inter-regional and cultural ties with foreign countries’ in the presidential administration, with a mission to solidify the bonds with former Soviet neighbours. Its first director was Modest Kolerov, the founder of the news site Regnum, which had a well-honed anti-Western bent and a focus on those same neighbours. Pro-Russian NGOs sprouted across the region, including in sensitive areas like Transnistria and Crimea. Groups of this ilk organised protests that disrupted a planned NATO–Ukraine exercise in the Crimean port of Feodosia in 2006. Assertions of Russian government funding for the NGOs throughout the region were ubiquitous in Western analysis. The evidence offered was circumstantial at best. A dearth of hard data is part of the problem: some groups certainly received financing from Russia, but the very opacity of these arrangements suggested a sinister intent, sharpening threat perceptions. Even though Moscow’s actions bore some likeness to common Western soft-power instruments, they lacked transparency and featured ominous undertones. It was more like ‘soft coercion’, as James Sherr puts it, than soft power.[17] Even efforts to engage Russian co-ethnics in the region seemed underhanded.[18]

The colour revolutions helped catalyse a tough Western, particularly American, approach to the region. In Washington, a well-placed faction within and around the Bush administration was determined to continue the enlargement of Euro-Atlantic institutions. Its most high-ranking member was then-vice president Dick Cheney, who, as he was to write in his memoir, ‘had long believed that the United States should play a more active role in integrating Ukraine and other former Soviet states into the West’.[19] It also included some figures who had been at the forefront of the first round of NATO enlargement. One of them, Ronald Asmus, explicitly argued in 2005 that:

He anticipated that Ukraine could be granted a NATO Membership Action Plan ‘no later than the next NATO summit in 2006’.[20] For this group, expanding NATO’s writ had become intimately linked to democracy promotion. Bush himself writes in his memoir, ‘I viewed NATO expansion as a powerful tool to advance the freedom agenda.’[21]

The period of largely unchallenged Russian predominance among the outside actors in the region had clearly come to an end. The fuse had thus been lit for an explosion. An ambitious agenda to seize the moment following the colour revolutions was taking hold in certain Western capitals. This agenda – and the conflation of nominal democratisation, as touted by geo-ideas, with geopolitical gain – was amplified by the new leaders in Kyiv and Tbilisi, who were far more savvy about getting their message across in the West than their predecessors. Incendiary rhetoric heightened Russian paranoia about Western intentions. In May 2006, Cheney delivered a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which he said: ‘The system that has brought such great hope to the shores of the Baltic can bring the same hope to the far shores of the Black Sea, and beyond. What is true in Vilnius is also true in Tbilisi and Kiev, and true in Minsk, and true in Moscow.’[22] One can only conjecture the reaction to such statements in the Kremlin.

Yet there was no consensus in the West about extending offers of formal membership to the new aspirants in post-Soviet Eurasia. In NATO, one of the reasons cited by those member states opposed to such a step for Ukraine was the lack of popular support for membership.[23] So the Bush administration pushed the Ukrainian authorities ‘to become more actively involved in the public outreach and education campaign about NATO and why it is in Ukraine’s national interest to join the Alliance’.[24] Washington was thus going far beyond support for Ukraine’s aspirations, as it often claimed. It was selectively reading those aspirations, focusing on parts of the elite and not the public, and attempting to alter them.

The Bush administration also threw more support than before behind the GUAM enterprise. It came in the form of high-level participation in US–GUAM meetings and a significant hike in financial support.[25] It is hard not to read US assistance to the grouping as anything other than an attempt to strengthen intra-regional ties that did not involve Russia.

The accumulated tensions began to take their toll on the regional security architecture. At the OSCE summit in Istanbul in November 1999, an Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (A/CFE) had been signed, modernising the 1990 treaty as a confidence- and security-building measure for the post-Cold War environment. At the same summit, Moscow made commitments to withdraw its remaining military units in Georgia (in stages) and Moldova (by the end of 2002). Moscow ratified the new treaty, which it much preferred to the original, but slow-rolled the withdrawal commitments. NATO member states in 2002 adopted a policy of formally linking their ratification of A/CFE to Russia’s following through on its commitments. By 2003, the annual OSCE summits, the NATO–Russia Council (a consultative body established in 2002) and CFE implementation meetings were marred by polemics between Russia and the West about what came to be known as the Istanbul Commitments. The removal of troops from Moldova came to a halt in March 2004 and has never resumed. Russian forces had left Georgia by November 2007.[26] By that time, though, the CFE regime at large was on the verge of implosion.

Russia had dug in its heels in Moldova following the collapse of the Kozak Memorandum and Russian-inspired settlement efforts in 2003. But the West, and particularly the US, seemed intent on using the linkage between A/CFE ratification and the Istanbul Commitments to drive Russia’s army out of the region and force settlements to the protracted conflicts. In Moldova, Russia’s military presence was twofold: remnants of the 14th Army guarding weapons stockpiles, and the Russian component of the peacekeeping force (PKF), created via the ceasefire deal that terminated the fighting in Transnistria in 1992. Within NATO, no ally questioned that the Istanbul Commitments governed the former, but the latter was the subject of dispute. The US insisted there was a link and proposed to replace the PKF with a multinational EU–Russia force.[27] Washington’s position on this issue seemed designed to compel Moscow to accept terms regarding the Transnistria conflict and its presence there by holding back on A/CFE ratification, which Moscow was eager to achieve. The gambit backfired.

In April 2007, Putin, in his annual address to parliament, declared a moratorium on Russia’s implementation of the original CFE agreement, evidently in order to force NATO to ratify A/CFE. He denounced Western ‘attempts to gain unilateral advantages’ by ‘making use of an invented pretext for not ratifying [A/CFE]’ while ‘build[ing] up their own system of military bases along our borders’.[28] In December of that year, Russia suspended its implementation of CFE, while no NATO member state moved to ratify A/CFE.[29]

This incident epitomised the ruinous character of the hardening regional contestation. Both Russia and the West adopted inflexible zero-sum stances regarding a dispute on regional security and were prepared to cling to them rather than negotiate a compromise solution. In the end, Russia’s attempt to force NATO member states to ratify A/CFE had failed, and the West had made no progress on the frozen conflicts. Everyone lost the transparency and accountability of the original CFE, and Moldova missed a chance to rid itself of an unwanted Russian military presence.

The demise of the conventional arms-control regime fed an upsurge in tensions between Russia and the West in 2007–08. Putin’s speech at the Munich security conference in February 2007, in which he pilloried various aspects of US foreign policy, set the tone. The tensions deepened in February 2008 when Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia and was recognised by the US and most of its European allies. Russia was bitterly opposed, and warned that diplomatic acknowledgement of Kosovo’s independence would have ramifications for the unrecognised entities in post-Soviet Eurasia. In the interim, another dispute had broken out regarding the prospect of a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia.

Introduced in 1999, MAP was an obscure bureaucratic step for aspirants to NATO membership, setting down the conditions required to join. A MAP did not imply automatic membership of NATO, as the final decision on a candidate nation’s accession was to be a political one, requiring a unanimous vote among the allies. In the heat of the tensions of 2008, though, both Russian and Western officials treated MAP as tantamount to NATO membership and adopted equally inflexible positions. In February 2008, a Russian deputy foreign minister warned the US ambassador in Moscow that ‘Russia would not consider a MAP offer as a “technical” step. It would be a strategic challenge with serious strategic consequences…. [It] would affect not only Russia–Ukraine and Russia–Georgia relations but also Russia’s partnership with the US.’[30] Such statements fed the pro-MAP drive in Washington. As then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice recalls, ‘For the West, given the pressures that Moscow had been placing on Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government had a good claim for the MAP as a counterweight to Russia.’[31] MAP had become the primary gauge of the larger contestation in the region.

The denouement would come at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in April 2008. In the months leading up to that meeting, the MAP question had become highly contentious within NATO; allies were divided between opponents, led by Germany and France, and ardent supporters, including East Central European states and the US. For supporters, the issue had become a litmus test for willingness to take on Russia’s influence in Georgia, Ukraine and post-Soviet Eurasia more broadly. As Asmus writes, advocates of MAP were ‘not necessarily interested in the details of whether Georgia had or had not successfully completed all of its reforms’. Instead, ‘they believed it was necessary to embrace and reassure Georgia at this critical moment when so much seemed to hang in the balance, and to send a message to Moscow to back off.’[32]

The Bush administration pressed the case for MAP publicly during the president’s visit to Ukraine, en route to Bucharest. At a joint press conference with Yushchenko, Bush said, ‘Your nation has made a bold decision [to request a MAP], and the United States strongly supports your request. In Bucharest this week, I will continue to make America’s position clear: We support MAP for Ukraine and Georgia.’ He added that he had recently said the same to Putin in a phone conversation, telling him, ‘you shouldn’t fear that, Mr President. I mean, after all, NATO is [an] organization that’s peaceful, or NATO is an organization that helps democracies flourish. Democracies are good things to have on your border.’[33] Putin and his advisers did not view this development in similarly rosy geo-ideational terms.

It is rare that NATO summits involve substantive negotiations over important issues. Working-level officials in allied governments usually hash out all the agreements weeks beforehand, making the summits largely ceremonial occasions at which the leaders provide their blessing to the already-agreed texts. Bucharest was different; there was no consensus on MAP for Georgia and Ukraine. The debate at the foreign-minister level demonstrated changes to the intra-Alliance dynamic from a particular source – admission of the ten new members from East Central Europe in 1999 and 2004. When the German foreign minister voiced reservations about MAP, he was shouted down by his Polish colleague, who said that ‘[MAP] is a matter of national security for us. And now you come and tell us you are more worried for Moscow than for your allies.’[34] In the end, heads of state and government negotiated an ad hoc compromise: no MAP, but the summit communiqué declared that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become’ members of NATO at some unspecified future point.[35] Never before had NATO promised membership to aspirant states. The beleaguered leaders were making a necessary compromise to avoid a diplomatic meltdown. But once the parley was over it became clear that the decision was the worst of all worlds: while providing no increased security to Ukraine and Georgia, the Bucharest Declaration reinforced the view in Moscow that NATO was determined to incorporate them at any cost.

Bucharest also marked the breakdown of NATO’s dual-track approach to enlargement and relations with Russia: pursuing new members while also fashioning a more wide-ranging partnership with Moscow, as enshrined in the 1997 Founding Act. The evening following the release of the declaration, Putin arrived in the Romanian capital for a scheduled NATO–Russia summit. His public comments made clear Russia’s bottom line: ‘the appearance of a powerful military bloc’ on its borders was ‘a direct threat’ to its security. ‘The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice.’[36] The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, was soon to pass a resolution urging the abrogation of the 1997 Russia–Ukraine treaty, which had reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity, if Kyiv received a MAP.

In remarks to the NATO leaders behind closed doors, Putin made clear that Russia still did not consider its neighbours to be real countries entitled to their own policies. Georgia, he said, was foolhardy to think that NATO membership would resolve its separatist conflicts. He also called Ukraine an artificial creation of capricious Soviet leaders.[37] (Putin’s characterisation, of course, was by the same token true of post-Soviet Russia, which had never existed in its current borders before 1991.)

Such statements increasingly made it taboo for Western governments to hold any discussions with Moscow about post-Soviet Eurasia. Partly this came out of the Bush administration’s (and its supporters’) peculiar reading of mid-twentieth-century diplomacy. In his maiden speech in Europe in June 2001, Bush said, ‘We will not trade away the fate of free European peoples. No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.’[38] He was equating the Yalta accord, signed by the Big Three at the end of the Second World War, with Munich in 1938, the archetype of a sell-out of helpless countries to odious regimes. It should be noted that this characterisation is tendentious if not ahistorical; the Red Army had occupied most of East Central Europe when the Yalta agreement was signed.[39] Whatever the historical accuracy, Yalta now signified the granting of carte blanche to Stalin to impose tyrannical regimes fashioned in the Soviet image on the states of East Central Europe – a Western sin that must never be repeated. The invocation of the Yalta analogy implied that cooperation with Moscow would necessitate imposing decisions on Russia’s neighbours against their will, depriving them of democracy, independence and so on. When the East Central European states that had experienced the trauma of Yalta joined Euro-Atlantic institutions, this idea gained broader currency. But it was Putin’s words, and Russian policy broadly speaking, that crystallised that view into conventional wisdom.

Another geo-ideational conflict was brewing. Bush said in his June 2001 speech that it was not just immoral to find common ground with Russia on the regional order, as per the ‘no more Yaltas’ maxim; additionally, the president reinterpreted ‘what my father called a Europe whole and free’ as a concrete policy agenda. ‘All of Europe’s new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and all that lie between, should have the same chance for security and freedom and the same chance to join the institutions of Europe as Europe’s old democracies have.’ Suddenly, for the continent to be ‘whole and free’ (for good measure, ‘at peace’ soon became part of the trope), every country had to join the Western club. To be precise, every country save one: ‘Europe’s great institutions – NATO and the European Union – can and should build partnerships with Russia’, but not more than that.[40] As Russia gained seriousness of purpose about its regional-integration agenda, thus giving the In-Betweens alternative club membership options, the geo-idea of a ‘Europe whole, free and at peace’ began to collide with the other Western favourite: freedom to choose. If a country were to choose to join a Russia-led club, presumably Europe would not be whole or free, and maybe not even at peace.

As the politicians huddled in Bucharest, the security situation in the South Caucasus was going downhill. In the weeks following the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, Moscow publicly reached out to the small, unrecognised breakaway entities within Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, seemingly in order to demonstrate its pique at the Kosovo decision. Between early March and mid-April, the government announced it would no longer be bound by a 1996 CIS decision limiting trade with Abkhazia; the Duma passed a non-binding resolution calling for recognition of the enclaves’ independence; and Putin issued a decree opening up greater trade, transportation and political links with both places. These steps were primarily symbolic; the CIS sanctions had never been enforced, and links between Russia and the two separatist regions had always existed. But they caused panic in Tbilisi, leading many there to assume that Russia was marching toward annexation.[41]

The Georgian government responded by bolstering its military presence near Abkhazia and conducting more drone flights over the region. In hectic succession, a Russian MiG-29 shot down several drones, there was a rancorous UN Security Council meeting on the issue and Russia boosted its peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia. Communication had broken down, and political will to defuse the situation was absent. When the chief of the Russian general staff warned his NATO counterparts in May that there would be a war in Georgia that summer unless steps were taken to nip it in the bud, ‘NATO thought it was just standard Russian bluster and political posturing’.[42]

As the summer arrived, South Ossetia became the eye of the storm, with numerous skirmishes between Georgian and separatist forces, while Russia conducted a 10,000-man military exercise just across the border, ending on 2 August. What came next has been well documented by an international fact-finding mission on the conflict.[43] Following an intensification of fighting, on the night of 7 August Saakashvili took the fateful decision to unleash an all-out assault on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian provincial capital. The Russian peacekeepers there also came under direct attack. Russia, after being caught flat-footed, launched a massive counter-offensive, not only driving the Georgians (both armed forces and ethnic Georgian civilians) out of South Ossetia but pushing deep into Tbilisi-governed territory, gratuitously sinking several of Georgia’s naval vessels after the fighting had ended (and hauling off patrol boats as trophies), and destroying much of the hardware of the country’s ground forces. Russian forces also invaded across the administrative boundary with Abkhazia, which Georgia had not attacked, and dismantled or destroyed a number of military facilities. In five days, the war was over; Saakashvili had been routed. An estimated 500 people had been killed, and tens of thousands had been displaced. On 26 August, the recently instated Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Prevailing interpretations of the conflict – either Saakashvili fell into an elaborate Russian trap or he launched a murderous Reconquista war with a tacit green light from Washington – are equally fallacious. Both assume premeditation and planning that the facts do not corroborate. It does look as if the Georgian government had been gearing up for a war, but earlier in the summer, and in Abkhazia, not South Ossetia.[44] In the hours leading up to the decision to attack, the Georgian leadership seemed to have come to believe that a Russian invasion was in motion.[45] Russia may well have been trying to provoke Saakashvili, and it was certainly employing heavy-handed deterrence, particularly with its large military exercise that ended in early August.[46] But on 7 August, Russia had only minimal forces present near the Roki Tunnel leading from Russia to South Ossetia. Medvedev was on a cruise on the Volga; Putin, now prime minister, was at the Beijing Olympic Games; and the defence minister was on vacation on the Black Sea coast. In short, both sides were preparing for a war, but neither was planning for the war that actually happened.

The war itself should thus be seen as a classic security dilemma, in which escalation spirals spark conflict despite a lack of aggressive intent. That said, tensions between Russia and Georgia had grown that spring and summer in part because of the zero-sum approach of some Western countries, particularly the US under the Bush administration. With the exception of Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, no visible effort was made at preventative diplomacy involving Moscow. Indeed, the Bucharest misadventure did not cause Washington to give up the push for MAP; after the summit, and even after the war, it still pressed its reluctant allies on this point.[47] The Bush administration concluded that ‘Russia interpreted the denial of MAP as a green light for action against Georgia’.[48] On that twisted logic, granting MAP would have been a deterrent to future bellicosity. With much of Georgia still smouldering, the idea that now was the time for NATO to antagonise Russia once again found few adherents in Brussels.

Moscow, for its part, could not resist coercing Tbilisi in the run-up to the August war. While it doubtless had to respond to the attack on Tskhinvali, in the event its response was disproportionate and punitive. Not only did the Russian military devastate the Georgian armed forces’ capabilities, but it and its South Ossetian confederates expelled more than 25,000 ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia. It might have gained primacy over 20% of Georgia’s territory, but it lost the hearts and minds of the rest of the country. By recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow may have avenged the West’s move in Kosovo, but it created a range of problems for itself. Russia seemed to have taken the opportunity to implement several objectives once the shooting began, particularly ruling out MAP and NATO membership. In this sense, Georgia suffered more from the Russia–West tug of war than it would have under other circumstances. As Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center writes, ‘For Moscow, the war was not about Georgia as much as about the United States, with Georgia no more than a proxy.’[49]

In the wake of the Georgia war, the West came to view Russia in far more adversarial terms. The US response included cutting off all contact between Pentagon officials and the Russian military; pushing for the suspension of the NATO–Russia relationship; and pulling a civil nuclear agreement from Congress. We now know that a far more drastic response was considered at the highest levels of the Bush administration during the war itself. The president, vice president and other senior officials held a meeting to consider the possibility of using military force to prevent Russia from continuing its military assault on Georgia. Bombardment of the Roki Tunnel that Russian troops used to move into South Ossetia and other ‘surgical strikes’ were among the options discussed. Upon consideration, the group ruled out any military response.[50] In an interview 18 months later, a Cheney aide said he remained unsure ‘whether or not [use of force] should have been more seriously considered’. He went on: ‘If Russia continues to assert itself either militarily or through other coercive means to claim a sphere of influence, we will look back at this as a time that they were able to change boundaries in Europe without much reaction. And then we’ll say we should have considered harder options.’[51] The US, it was implied, should have gone to war with Russia to rebuff its assertive actions in the region. Without question, the messy equilibrium regarding the regional order that had emerged following the Soviet collapse had been upset.

The European Union, with its institutional hub in Brussels now taking precedence over member-state governments, began to play a more active role in post-Soviet Eurasia after the Georgia war. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, then holder of the rotating EU presidency, was the chief negotiator of the ceasefire agreement that helped end the conflict. The EU fielded a monitoring mission in Georgia to keep the peace, which has remained in place ever since. Along with the UN and the OSCE, the EU was appointed a co-chair of the Geneva International Discussions, the negotiating format for Georgia’s conflicts.

But the instruments for an enlarged EU role were more geo-ideational and geo-economic than geopolitical. The EU first formalised a policy toward the region in 2004. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provided a framework for the Union’s efforts in its southern and eastern adjacencies with the objective of establishing a stable, prosperous, secure and democratic ‘ring of friends’. It set about realising this objective through policy instruments that were ‘rule-oriented, non-militarized, and technocratic’, claiming the mantle of a ‘normative power’, not a great power.[52] The ENP strategy paper proposed a straightforward trade to the EU’s neighbours: ‘In return for concrete progress demonstrating shared values and effective implementation of political, economic, and institutional reforms, including in aligning legislation with the acquis, the EU’s neighbourhood should benefit from the prospect of closer economic integration with the EU.’[53] This outwardly innocuous approach belied both the emerging zero-sum intentions of some member states and the zero-sum impact of the EU’s normative instruments – an exercise par excellence in geo-ideational politics with geo-economic consequences.

Although, as noted above, Russia’s regulatory- and trade-policy convergence efforts with Brussels were still more advanced than those of its neighbours in 2005, that balance shifted briskly as its relationship with the EU deteriorated. Solana recalls ‘holes’ emerging in the Four Common Spaces programme ‘very soon’ after its adoption, and notes that within two years relations were at an impasse.[54] At the same time, the EU’s relations with some of the In-Betweens, particularly Ukraine, grew closer. The 2004 big-bang enlargement, adding ten new member states with 80m citizens, was a factor. Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine (particularly after Romania’s EU accession in 2007) now bordered EU members to the west. This subjected them to the ‘shadow effect’, as Tom Casier calls it, that the EU has on its neighbours: both through the externalisation of internal policies (e.g., product standards imposed on imported goods) and through the ‘gravitational pull’ of its prosperity and good governance, the EU unintentionally has a bearing on proximate states ‘because of its mere existence’.[55] The EU had also just launched the ENP, and was intentionally acting to influence the political economy of its neighbours. As was the case with NATO, the new East Central European members altered the balance within the Union’s bureaucracy and political bodies in favour of more interaction with the neighbours and more distance from Russia.

The geo-economic form of EU engagement with the In-Betweens set the stage for a clash with Russia. After the PCAs of the 1990s expired (most had a lifespan of ten years), Brussels settled on Association Agreements (AAs) as the framework for drawing in those states in the region that aspired to integrate with the EU. The AAs feature Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area agreements (DCFTAs) at their core. The AA was explicitly an alternative to full EU membership, but it was nonetheless based on the core bargain of the accession process. The EU opens itself to aspirant countries (via visa-free travel, lowered trade barriers, access to internal preferences for everything from education to government procurement) in return for their conformity to the three Copenhagen Criteria (named for the city where they were agreed in 1993): consolidation of democratic institutions and protection of human rights, a market economy, and adoption of the acquis, the body of EU laws and regulations. In practice, the emphasis has always been on the third of these.

It should be stressed that fully fledged accession has never been an option for the In-Betweens. But the geo-economic distinction between full membership and the AA/DCFTA model is less ironclad on closer inspection. The AA obliges aspirant countries to change a vast array of standards, regulations and laws to conform with those enshrined in the EU acquis. It further prescribes that their future legislation be compatible with the acquis; future EU decisions regarding issues covered by the AA must be enforced by the aspirant country. Over time, the AAs would, if implemented, fold these countries into the EU’s geo-economic space.

The AA also has shades of geopolitics, even if of the dull, procedure-obsessed EU variety. It creates a ministerial-level Association Council, which gathers regularly and is invested with the power to make decisions regarding AA implementation; a senior-official-level Association Committee; a Parliamentary Association Committee, composed of parliamentarians from the EU and the partner; a Civil Society Platform; and sector-specific committees. All these bodies have equal EU and partner-state representation. In the case of Ukraine, there are also summit meetings at the presidential level.

As Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission, put it, the AA/DCFTA model provides these countries with ‘everything but the institutions’, full integration with the Union but no direct participation in the decision-making bodies in Brussels.[56] A country that fully implements the AA would become like Norway, which remains outside the EU but as a member of the European Economic Area (the EU’s single market) must comply with the acquis. The main practical difference is that Oslo, unlike member-state capitals, cannot take part in EU policymaking.

The requirement to adopt the acquis was a powerful lever for reforming the domestic political economies of the new EU members in East Central Europe. So it was perfectly understandable that the EU chose to make this same compendium of rules its primary means of engagement with the In-Betweens, all of which are urgently in need of reform. But the AA does not just spur reform; it is also a geo-economic and geo-ideational exercise. On the macro level, the DCFTA precludes membership of any other customs union (including, as we shall see, the one Russia began ginning up in the same period); put differently, membership of a customs union precludes signing the DCFTA. Classic customs unions oblige members to relinquish national decision-making on tariffs and related matters to a supranational body; the DCFTA by definition requires signatories to maintain such prerogatives for themselves. The inherent take-it-or-leave-it and one-size-fits-all nature of the DCFTA also eliminates the intermediate option many states pursued before: some meshing with both Russia and the EU. It would leave states highly integrated with the EU, while commercial links to Russia (and other CIS countries) would attenuate over time. All 12 non-EU former Soviet republics had, since 1992, shared the same regulatory and technical standards, measurements and certification formats.[57] If one of them were to replace these with (more rigorous) EU standards, its trade with the EU would be facilitated, while trade with other CIS countries could be hindered relative to the status quo ante. And given the nature of the agreement, AA signatories would have to adapt to many EU economic-policy decisions in the future. Brussels would gain pre-eminent influence over policymaking in signatory countries, displacing the influence of any other outside actor. The EU operated on the assumption that its normative hegemony was unassailable.

Russia was anything but welcoming of this new EU activism. But Brussels acted as if Russia did not exist. There were no consultations with Moscow, even though Russian officials had begun to object stridently. The hypersensitivity over steps that could evoke the ghosts of Yalta effectively ruled out conversing with Russia about Ukraine or any other In-Between. In fact, doing so would not have been unprecedented. On the eve of the admission of the Baltics and five other ex-communist countries in 2004, extensive trilateral negotiations had taken place among the EU, Russia and the soon-to-be members. Adjustments were made to accommodate Russian concerns, ranging from an extended adjustment period on aluminium exports to Hungary to special transit arrangements between the exclave of Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia.[58]

Even if Russia had welcomed the EU’s involvement with the In-Betweens, the AA/DCFTA model might not have been the right policy instrument for the region. Better formal laws and regulations cannot cure basic pathologies of governance in these countries, which stem from corrupt informal political-economic practices and feeble and often imitative democratic institutions. As we will see, no hard evidence to date has shown that the agreements produced positive changes in governance in the three countries that eventually signed up: Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.

In May 2009, EU policies toward the six In-Betweens were enhanced and grouped under the banner of the Eastern Partnership. The Commission described it as ‘a real step change in relations with our Eastern neighbours, with a significant upgrading of political, economic and trade relations. The goal is to strengthen the prosperity and stability of these countries, and thus the security of the EU.’[59] Notwithstanding these lofty ambitions, the Eastern Partnership exacerbated the regional contestation. Although some differentiation was to emerge years later, the policy was initially the same for all the In-Betweens – regardless of their level of involvement in Russia-led institutions, or their adherence to the first two Copenhagen Criteria of democracy and market reform. For example, the decision to include Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, and arguably the most authoritarian government in the region, created a strong impression that geopolitics was driving EU decision-making.

Russia was not pleased. To Solana, it was apparent almost instantly that the initiative was raising eyebrows, and worse, in Moscow.[60] As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it in 2009, ‘We are accused of having spheres of influence. But what is the Eastern Partnership, if not an attempt to extend the EU’s sphere of influence, including to Belarus?’[61] It did not help that prominent European politicians and commentators viewed the programme in precisely these terms. As one German analyst wrote in response to Lavrov’s question, ‘The answer, of course, is yes…. In the post-Soviet space, neutrality is not an option for Europe…. We must face up to the fact that we are engaged in a systemic competition [with Russia].’[62]

Russia’s negative reaction to the EU’s foray into the In-Between countries thus was apparent several years before the Ukraine crisis began. So too was the reality that many members of the EU, particularly the new ones, always regarded the Eastern Partnership as an initiative intended to wrest their neighbours from Moscow’s grasp. Russia, in turn, rejected EU efforts on principle; if Brussels wanted to proceed, it would have to come to the Kremlin and kiss the ring. As the Russian analyst Andrei Zagorski puts it, ‘Moscow specifically underlines that no attempt at regional cooperation in this part of Europe is possible if it does not involve the Russian Federation.’[63] Russia’s dogged pursuit of a say in other countries’ decisions made the EU more determined to proceed with its plans and less inclined to discuss them with Moscow. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament in November 2013, ‘To put it unequivocally – the countries must decide themselves on their future direction. Third parties cannot have the right of veto.’[64] The regional elites had incentives to stoke this competition since they knew that their clout would be maximised if multiple external patrons were in competition with one another.

Less than a month after the Eastern Partnership was launched, Russia countered with its own initiative, and Moscow-led integration in post-Soviet Eurasia finally gained traction after almost 20 years of dithering. In June 2009, Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to form an institutionalised Customs Union effective from 1 January 2010.[65] While any number of past geo-economic efforts had been stillborn, this for once was a concrete step. The failure of previous initiatives had led Moscow to trim down its ambitions for membership of the Customs Union, starting with only the two states most willing to move forward.

In form, the Customs Union was a significant departure from past post-Soviet practices and was closer to the early stages of the EU than to the moribund CIS. Under the 2009 agreement, a Customs Union Commission was to function as a permanent decision-making and adjudicative mechanism; it, and not the national governments, had the authority to set tariffs. The three founders quickly moved to create something more substantial, progressing from the creation of a single market in 2012 to the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2015. With the forming of the EEU, a Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), a fully fledged institution with its own bureaucracy, replaced the Customs Union Commission and a court was created to resolve trade disputes.

In its initial stages, this project should be graded as a guarded success.[66] Customs posts were removed on the borders between Russia and the two other members. EEC data shows a large increase in intra-Customs Union trade in 2010–12. Once Russia became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2012, the Customs Union had to adopt a system of rules in line with WTO standards, hence exporting international norms to other members that did not belong to the WTO (Kazakhstan joined in 2015). Decision-making is conducted by consensus at the level of Council of the EEC, a body comprising deputy prime ministers from all member states with a rotating presidency. While there is evidence of Russia’s using political, economic and security instruments to keep other members in line, the need to achieve unanimous votes on major decisions has at times forced it to compromise. This requirement also gave the smaller member states a voice on policy decisions that were previously Russia’s exclusive prerogative. EEU officials professed an aspiration to emulate the best practices of the EU.

The EEU began as a technocratic, if geo-economic, endeavour, even though some outsiders have had doubts about the economic logic behind it. Be that as it may, Russia’s great-power aspirations and the intensifying zero-sum dynamic in the region between it and the EU soon began to shape Eurasian economic integration and to link it to geopolitics. In an article in the daily Izvestiya written in October 2011, as he was beginning his campaign to return to the presidency, then-prime minister Putin laid out his vision for the future of the bloc. He envisioned a ‘model of a powerful supranational association, capable of becoming one of the poles of the modern world and of playing the role of an effective inter-linkage between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region’.[67] What was then just a customs union – focused on mundane work like tariff unification and food-safety standards – had been given the geopolitical mission of ensuring Russia’s international heft for the twenty-first century. In the article, Putin called this future entity the ‘Eurasian Union’.

He had not cleared the rebranding with Nursultan Nazarbaev, the president of Kazakhstan, who was incensed, and demanded that ‘Economic’ be inserted into the name. The tiff with Putin was about far more than just word choice. Neither Nazarbaev nor Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was interested in more than economics, and they were particularly skittish about any effort to impinge on their political independence. Furthermore, they had not signed up for Moscow’s omnibus geopolitical vision for the EEU.[68] A few weeks after Putin published his article, Nazarbaev wrote his own piece for Izvestiya, in which he stressed that ‘economic interests, and not abstract geopolitical ideas and slogans, are the main driver of the integration process’.[69] That he was victorious on the name issue demonstrates that the EEU does give the non-Russian members some influence over important decisions.

In his Izvestiya article, Putin had noted that while ‘we welcome other CIS partners’ joining [the Union]… we do not plan to rush or compel anyone [to do so]’. He claimed that joining the Union need not contradict others’ ‘European choice’, because in the future, there would be bloc-to-bloc rapprochement talks. ‘So joining the Eurasian Union… will allow each of its members to integrate with Europe faster and on more advantageous terms.’[70] Unlike Putin’s 2005 comments in Kyiv, when he said that the approximation of Russian and EU legislation would allow its neighbours to integrate with both simultaneously, he now envisioned two separate blocs in Europe that would cut deals with one another but remain distinct. Under these circumstances, bandwagoning with Russia would be the only sensible option for CIS countries. The unspoken message to the In-Betweens was clear: Moscow wants to determine the extent and pace of their integration with the EU. Dealing directly with Brussels was not advisable.

The geo-economic dimension of the regional contestation had now taken on more significance, with both sides pursuing zero-sum policies. Russia, reverting to its coercive instincts, put pressure on the four In-Betweens that were flirting with the EU to block their Association Agreements and in some cases also to join the EEU. In the Georgian case, Moscow’s pull was limited; diplomatic ties had been severed in 2008 and Russia was no longer Georgia’s main trading partner. Moscow threatened to raise tariffs if Tbilisi signed the AA, but never followed through. In this case, the threat failed to sway Tbilisi; its AA was inked in June 2014.

Moscow did resort to economic coercion with Moldova. In September 2013, two months before Chisinau planned to initial its AA, Moldovan wine exports to Russia were banned on public-health grounds. Further sanitary restrictions were imposed in April and July 2014 and the next month Russia suspended tariff-free imports for 19 categories of goods.[71] Russia’s economic bullying failed to affect Moldova’s choice to proceed with the AA, which it signed at the same time as Georgia in June 2014.

Russia also turned the screws on Armenia, and here it worked. Armenia had been negotiating an AA with the EU for three years, and the two sides planned to initial the document in November 2013. However, in September 2013 Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan abruptly changed course and announced his country’s intention to drop the AA and join the EEU. He was widely reported to have been put under significant pressure from Moscow to do so.

Armenia’s about-face reflected its deep dependence on Russia not only for economic prosperity but also for security. Russian state firms own most of its utilities, including the railway and the natural-gas distributor, while private financial-industrial groups from Russia dominate other strategic sectors. And, given Armenia’s economic isolation – its borders with hostile Azerbaijan and Turkey have been closed off for 20 years – and resulting poverty, Yerevan has no alternative to Moscow’s patronage. It also relies on Russian security guarantees and military assistance in its conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. After a year of talks that led to a number of concessions, including on import duties and gas prices, Armenia signed the EEU treaty in October 2014, becoming a rare case of a trade-bloc participant that shares no borders with its fellow members. Talks on membership for Kyrgyzstan, which shares borders with Kazakhstan (and China) but not with Russia, also began in 2014, and Bishkek joined in August 2015.

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

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

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

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

All three leadership changes facilitated the ‘reset’ in US–Russia relations and the improvement in Russia–Europe relations in 2009–12. There was some positive spillover into West–Russia interaction in post-Soviet Eurasia. The US facility at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas airport, a stopping point for US soldiers and materiel on the way to Afghanistan, was a good example. In February 2009, Russia offered US$2 billion in assistance to Bakiev, Kyrgyzstan’s strongman, in return for evicting the US from Manas. Toward the end of its time in office, the Bush administration had treated the basing arrangements as an exclusively bilateral issue with the Kyrgyzstanis, which had led Moscow to conclude that the US intended to stay there indeterminately and/or to use Manas as part of a strategy to encircle Russia. Rather than trying to outbid Moscow, the Obama administration sought Russian buy-in. As Michael McFaul, architect of the reset who served as senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from Obama’s inauguration until he became ambassador to Moscow in November 2011, recalled, Obama used his first meeting with Medvedev to make clear that he did not care to engage in zero-sum rivalry in the region: ‘He said, “Help me understand[,] President Medvedev[,] why you want us to leave Manas. [B]ecause what are our soldiers doing? They are flying into Afghanistan after a short amount of time in Kyrgyzstan and they are fighting people that if we weren’t fighting them you would have to be fighting them.”’[74] Medvedev responded positively, and not only stopped attempts to dislodge the US from Manas but agreed to shipments across Russia by rail for materiel needed by American forces in Afghanistan and even to military overflights for getting troops to the theatre. This route via Russia to Afghanistan would prove indispensable when Pakistan barred the US from using the Khyber Pass following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

When Kyrgyzstan descended into anarchy after Bakiev was ousted by angry crowds in April 2010, most observers assumed that Moscow had orchestrated the unrest as revenge for Bakiev reneging on a promise to shut down the base. But instead of indulging in zero-sum games as usual, Russia and the US worked in concert, pursuing back-channel talks that facilitated Bakiev’s safe escape into exile in Belarus. Consultations between Moscow and Washington not only prevented conflict between them – in the one country where both had military outposts – but also led to the coordination of humanitarian assistance. Obama and Medvedev went so far as to issue a joint statement on Kyrgyzstan in June 2010.[75] Kyrgyzstan was an easy case – it is small, remote and impoverished, a non-candidate for NATO or EU integration – but US–Russia comity following political unrest in the region was extraordinary nonetheless.

The EU and Russia had their own reset of sorts in this period, leading to a new framework called the Partnership for Modernization in 2010. Even the NATO–Russia Council came to life, with collaboration on concrete issues ranging from Afghanistan to theatre missile defence. Medvedev attended the Lisbon NATO summit in November 2010 to hold a leader-level meeting of the Council. The 29 heads of state and government issued a statement that ‘we have embarked on a new stage of cooperation towards a true strategic partnership’.[76] The atmospherics of Russia’s relations with the West were significantly better than they had been in the wake of the 2008 war. As Vyacheslav Nikonov, a hawkish foreign-policy analyst and government adviser, said, ‘The overall climate is better than it has been since the time of perestroika.’[77]

But the fundamental conflict relating to the region had not been addressed and therefore remained a landmine that could detonate at any time if activated. As one of us wrote at the time, ‘the current pause in unconstructive US–Russia rivalry in post-Soviet Eurasia is highly contingent and unlikely to be sustained by inertia’.[78] Even during this more relaxed period, no tangible progress was made on dealing with the problem at its roots.

Russia did try to begin a conversation on the subject. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev proposed negotiations on a new European security treaty. He elaborated on what its general contents might be in a speech in France in October 2008, after the August war:

Harking back to Gorbachev’s ‘common European home’, he emphasised the concept of ‘indivisibility of security’ that was a cornerstone of the 1990 Charter of Paris.

At the same time, Medvedev was also articulating a starkly divergent foreign-policy priority. Moscow, he said, had demarcated its neighbourhood as ‘a traditional sphere of Russian interests’.[80] ‘For Russia, as for other countries, there are regions in which it has privileged interests.’[81] The geo-idea was clear: Russia has a natural right to pre-eminence in its proximate environs. The problem is that if Russia has a sphere, the countries in it have to be insecure (or spoken for) in order for Russia to be secure, which would suggest that security is divisible after all. Medvedev’s use of the phrase, particularly after the war with Georgia, set off sirens in the region and the West. US Vice President Joe Biden felt the need to rebut it in his speech that launched the US–Russia reset: ‘We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence.’[82]

After Western partners demanded specifics regarding Medvedev’s proposal, Russia published a draft treaty in November 2009.[83] The document, while grounded in widely accepted principles like respect for territorial integrity and political independence, and the renunciation of the use of force, was deeply flawed. It was a legally binding treaty, the most weighty of all international agreements, which tend to come after a build-up of less formal arrangements that help generate support among domestic constituencies needed for ratification. It tackled core disagreements by creating new bureaucracies and crisis-response mechanisms. It also included provisions that would have obliged all states and existing organisations (including the EU and NATO) to ensure that their decisions ‘do not affect significantly the security of any Party or Parties to the Treaty’. Given the state of relations among countries in the region, the draft was dead on arrival.

The text was also a distraction from the opening that Medvedev’s initiative could have been: to begin much-needed dialogue on the regional order. Western governments focused on the objectionable elements in the text and declined the call for high-level talks. In a speech in Paris in early 2010, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, delivered the official US response: ‘common goals are best pursued in the context of existing institutions, such as the OSCE and the NATO–Russia Council, rather than by negotiating new treaties, as Russia has suggested’.[84] To put it in plain language, the regional order did not need any rethinking. The West was unwilling even to begin a conversation on the subject. The only dialogue to take place was at the working level in the OSCE – named the ‘Corfu Process’ for the Greek island where it began – that led nowhere.

Warning signs cropped up repeatedly. When meeting Russian counterparts in late 2009, a senior US official ‘emphasized that Russia’s efforts to assert a regional sphere of influence posed a threat to the reset in bilateral relations’.[85] In the same period, the US opposed any dealings between NATO and the CSTO, out of the conviction that ‘validation of the CSTO could further strengthen Moscow’s influence over our Central Asian [partners]’.[86] In June 2010, a German–Russian initiative to move forward on resolving the Transnistria frozen conflict while creating a new consultation mechanism between Russia and the EU on regional security not only failed to deliver on both counts, but also generated accusations that Berlin had offered Moscow a veto over EU decision-making.[87]

Even when interests overlapped, Russia and the West often failed to cooperate. In the months before the December 2010 re-election of Belarusian President Lukashenko, the US and the EU offered Minsk incentives to conduct a free and fair vote, and threatened further sanctions if not. Moscow sent strong signals that it had lost patience with Lukashenko (for backtracking on economic integration, among other gripes) and threatened not to recognise the results of the poll. But neither the West nor Russia made an effort to consult about Belarus or in any way to coordinate their efforts. The Kremlin seems to have grown apprehensive that the only alternative to the incumbent was the ostensibly pro-Western opposition candidate, and decided to throw its support behind Lukashenko in the final days before the poll. The result – an election of dubious legitimacy that was marred by violence against unarmed protesters during unrest that followed the vote – served no one’s interests but his. In short, even at a time of unusually calm Russia–West ties, the zero-sum dynamic in post-Soviet Eurasia persisted, albeit at a lower pitch.

In late 2011 and 2012, the fleeting reset of the broader relationship came to an end. The US and Russia were divided by a string of bitter disputes over crises in other regions, particularly in Libya and Syria. Putin’s return to the Kremlin and the protests in Moscow and other cities in late 2011 and 2012 further poisoned the well. In 2013 Russia sheltered the former American intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, who had leaked thousands of secret documents, compounding mistrust. EU–Russia relations also soured as the regional geo-economic tussle intensified. By the time the Ukraine crisis hit, the climate was far less conducive to handling a contingency without severe conflict than it had been at the height of the reset.