This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
Russia’s efforts to find an acceptable place for itself in the U.S.-led Western system have ended in a bitter disappointment. The changing trading patterns point to a new era in Moscow’s foreign relations, in which Sino-Russian relations will be taking center stage.
While Kiev is desperate to achieve a full military victory almost at any cost, Moscow is reaching out with humanitarian aid, confusing and confounding its opponents. As to the war there, it still continues.
While European mainstream media’s focus has been on the developments in Gaza and in northern Iraq, they have been giving only scant attention recently to the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine.
Prudence dictates that Russia should not invade Ukraine. However, if Putin decides differently, the Ukraine crisis will immediately become a Russia crisis, and then a European one.
Going to war in 1914 was suicidal for the Russian state. Today, a Russian military invasion of Ukraine might well lead to a catastrophe with dire consequences for Russia itself, or to an all-out conflict between Russia and NATO.
China will study U.S. strategy toward Russia and draw its own conclusions. Its interests are in keeping Russia as its stable strategic hinterland and a natural-resource base.
The Ukraine crisis has ended the period in Russian-Western relations that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has opened a new period of heightened rivalry, even confrontation, between former Cold War adversaries.
Russia is learning to live in a new harsh environment of U.S.-led economic sanctions and political confrontation with the United States.
The Kremlin now sees the U.S. goal as the toppling of the Putin regime. That said, expecting Putin to back off betrays a lack of understanding of the gravity of the situation. It is no longer just a struggle for Ukraine, but a battle for Russia.
The MH17 crisis within the larger Ukraine crisis is likely to lead to the politicization of the conflict.