This website is 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.
The Ukraine showdown is even scarier and more dangerous than most people think: President Putin is making it up as he goes along.
If Merkel is synonymous with Germany, then German political and diplomatic weight has certainly risen to the height of true European leadership.
The West should be linking aid to Ukraine to peace rather than war.
Ukraine and the global crisis over it point to the start of a new period in world politics. Great powers—Russia overtly, China covertly—are challenging the U.S.-dominated order. Also, in the foreseeable future, there will be no common security system in Europe.
The Minsk agreements lay the political groundwork for peace in Ukraine. Still, several important questions remain. Moreover, the agreements are likely to be too little too late for the warring parties: they may not settle for anything less than what they consider victory.
The new Minsk agreement will not necessarily prevent further escalation, but it might postpone it. The world should work hard to make sure that the shaky truce does not founder, leading to a broader war.
Western leaders’ recent attempts to assure a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine crisis may come to no avail. Is it possible to restore the peaceful, European status quo amidst such rapidly growing East-West animosity? Eurasia Outlook asked Carnegie’s experts to share their thoughts.
As terrible as it sounds, Kyiv’s endless dysfunction is the Kremlin’s most powerful ally in the current crisis.
When Russian diplomats talk about Ukraine, they are actually speaking to just one man—Vladimir Putin. Moscow does not see any value in reaching out to the broad policy community in the West. The scary thing is that this behavior is not a consequence of the Ukrainian crisis, but one of its major sources.
Through its actions in Ukraine, Russia wants to consolidate its new strategic perimeter without being drawn into a full-scale war.