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.
Russian troops in Crimea are necessary not simply to protect it from a possible invasion by the Ukrainian army, but rather to incorporate Crimea into Russia’s financial infrastructure as soon as possible.
The Crimea referendum, in which the people of the region have massively voted to join Russia, marks a watershed in Russia’s foreign policy: Russia has stopped walking backward and has made a step forward. As for Ukraine, it will be for the foreseeable future a geopolitical battleground.
A second Cold War is emerging because of the mistakes that were made by both Russia and the West at the end of the first Cold War and during the inter-Cold War period.
The Ukrainian crisis has intensified the Kremlin’s crackdown on the Russian media. Nongovernment media simply no longer belong in today’s Russia.
If Vladimir Putin has a new doctrine of intervention, Moldova is vulnerable. But thus far both Chisinau and Transnistria have been quiet, while the crisis rages next door.
The Kremlin’s intervention in Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine exemplifies the Putin Doctrine, part of which is to find ways to reproduce the traditional Russian state.
It seems unlikely that Russian armed forces will move beyond the Crimean peninsula. The softer and more conciliatory tone taken by Putin could be a result of the determination of the United States and Europe to take action against Russia.
It is not clear whether “protection of compatriots” is a new foreign-policy goal Putin intends to apply elsewhere—or whether he is just using any weapon he can to undermine the new authorities in Kyiv. In any case, playing the “compatriot card” is a dangerous game.
Ukraine became the place where the open crisis of the post-Soviet model occurred. This means that the country may become only the first stage in the chain of future collapses. Also, with Russian invasion in Ukraine the entire international system that came into being after 1991 is starting to crumble.
The Kremlin’s intervention in Crimea and direct involvement in the destabilization of the southeast of Ukraine exemplifies Putin’s Doctrine. This concept is based on the premise that Russia can only exist as the center of the galaxy surrounded by the satellite-statelets.