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.
To understand the crisis in Ukraine, it is necessary to look at the region the way its residents see it. Contrary to the Western narrative of Russia aggression, the real story is much more complicated.
After the end of the Cold War, the West neglected the task of solving the “Russia problem” through integration. Trying to solve it now through economic warfare is not going to work.
It would be better for Russia to reach an agreement with the West on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, coupled with an assurance of its permanent neutrality and a simultaneous accession by Ukraine to the Association Agreement with the EU and to the Russia-led Customs Union.
Ukraine’s Jews are, for now, not a central part of the political drama, but the repeated use of anti-Semitism as a tool in the country’s full-contact politics sends a worrying signal nonetheless.
Ukraine is facing a serious threat which appears to lie within the country’s own domestic politics.
Putin’s rhetorical shift toward calm and congeniality shows that now Putin is presenting himself as a victor who has formulated and applied the new rules of the game.
The video bulletins from the conflict zone in Ukraine produced by Simon Ostrovsky demonstrate that this country is a perfect trial bed for new forms of journalism.
The current situation in Ukraine has intensified the long-simmering debate in Finland about joining NATO.
The European Union continues to be in the back seat of a process that threatens Ukraine and which fundamentally affects the EU’s relations with Moscow.
A counter-insurgency strategy from Iraq and Afghanistan may be proving effective as a tool of Russian or pro-Russian insurgency in Eastern Ukraine.