To most American policymakers, Ukraine has represented a brave young country—one that, despite the burden of history, successfully launched itself on a path of democratic development as part of a new world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To the Kremlin, meanwhile, it has remained an indispensable part of a long-standing sphere of influence, one that operates largely according to old rules of power. The difference between these two views goes a long way toward explaining why post–Cold War hopes have given way to the strife and uncertainty of the world today.
U.S. and other Western policymakers have long skirted hard questions about both Ukraine’s place in the Eurasian order and its role in the fraught relationship between Washington and Moscow. Although the end of the Cold War may have marked the end of one geopolitical competition, it did not mark the end of geopolitics. Nor did the dissolution of the Soviet Union mean the disappearance of Russian anxieties, ambitions, and abilities. The Soviet Union may have ceased to exist on paper in December 1991, but its influence did not. Empires do not simply vanish. They die long and messy deaths, denying their decline when they can, conceding their dominions when they must, and launching irredentist actions wherever they sense an opening. And nowhere are the consequences of the still ongoing Soviet collapse clearer than in Ukraine—a country that has wrecked attempt after attempt at establishing a durable order on the Eurasian continent.
The story of Ukraine over the past quarter century is a story of magical thinking’s remarkable persistence and ultimate price—paid not just by Ukrainians but more and more by Americans, too.
THE END OF AN ERA
In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent crumbling of the Warsaw Pact, both the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, thought that they could reshape the Soviet Union rather than dissolving it. They promoted the idea of a new form of union, one that would turn itself into a looser federation, via treaty, of the 15 republics that had composed the Soviet Union. They thought they could achieve this without giving citizens a real choice about whether they wanted to stay within a reformed empire or not.
As often happens in an empire’s political center, Gorbachev and Yeltsin badly misjudged sentiment on their imperial periphery. The large majority of Ukrainians had no interest in propping up the vestiges of empire; they wanted outright independence. Yet without the second most populous Slavic republic, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin could see any viable path forward to a new union—partly because they did not want the non-Slavic republics gaining greater importance in a rump union and partly because it would be difficult for Russia to bankroll and police such a union without Ukraine.