Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

Jonathan Masters (Council on foreign relations) @css-with-waqas

Summary:
• A former Soviet republic.
• It has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Russia.
• In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, a part of Ukraine.
• As Moscow saw it becoming more closely aligned with Western institutions, chiefly the
EU and NATO.
• Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is viewed by some experts as part of a
renewed geopolitical rivalry between great powers.

Introduction:
• Ukraine has long played an important, role in the global security order.
• Today, the country is on the front lines of a renewed great-power rivalry.
• That will dominate international relations in the decades ahead.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a dramatic escalation of the eight-year-old
conflict.
• A historic turning point for European security.
• With expanding Western aid, Ukraine has managed to frustrate many aspects of Russia’s
attack.
• Many of its cities have been pulverized.
• One-quarter of its citizens are now refugees or have been displaced
• Remains unclear if and how a diplomatic resolution could emerge.
• Ukraine’s place in the world, including its future alignment with institutions.
• The European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hangs in the
balance.

Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point?

• It was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union.
• The archrival of the U.S during the Cold War.
• Behind only Russia.
• It was the second-most-populous and powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics.
• Home too much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries, and military,
including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal.
• Ukraine was so vital to the union.
• Its decision to sever ties in 1991 proved to be a coup de grace for the ailing superpower.
 • Its three decades of independence, has sought to forge its own path as a sovereign state.
• Looking to align more closely with Western institutions, including the EU and NATO.
• Kyiv struggled to balance its foreign relations and to bridge deep internal divisions.
• More nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking population in western parts of the country generally
supported greater integration with Europe,
• While a mostly Russian-speaking community in the east favored closer ties with Russia.

Ukraine at glance:
Area 603,550 square kilometers (largest
country in Europe, excluding Russia).
Population 44 million

Religions Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism,

Protestantism.
Primary Ukrainian (official), Russian.
Languages

Form of Semi presidential republic.

Government
GDP $155.5 billion
2020
GDP Per Capita $3,725
2020
 • Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea.
• It arming and abetting separatists in the Donbas region in the country’s southeast.
• Russia’s seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II.
• A European state annexed the territory of another.
• More than fourteen thousand people died in the fighting in the Donbas between 2014 and 2021.
• The bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
• A clear shift in the global security environment from a unipolar period of U.S.
• Dominance to one defined by renewed competition between great powers.
• In February 2022, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• With the aim of toppling the Western-aligned government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy..

What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine?

• Russia has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Ukraine.
• Ukraine is central to Russia’s identity and vision for itself in the world.
a) Family ties:
➢ Both have strong familial bonds that go back centuries.
➢ Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is sometimes referred to as “the mother of
Russian cities,”
➢ On par in terms of cultural influence with Moscow and St. Petersburg.
➢ It was in Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries that Christianity was
brought from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples.
➢ The early Slavic state from which modern Russians, Ukrainians, and
Belarussians draw their lineage.
b) Russian diaspora:
➢ Approximately eight million ethnic Russians were living in Ukraine as 2001
➢ According to a census taken that year, mostly in the south and east.
➢ Moscow claimed a duty to protect these people.
➢ A pretext for its actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.
c) Superpower image:
➢ After the Soviet collapse.
➢ Losing a permanent hold on Ukraine
➢ Letting it fall into the Western orbit.
➢ Would be seen by many as a major blow to Russia’s international prestige.
d) Crimea:
➢ Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine
in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and
Russian peoples.”
➢ However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both
Russia and Crimea longed for a return of the peninsula.
➢ The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the
dominant maritime force in the region.
 e) Trade:
➢ Russia was for a long time Ukraine’s largest trading partner.
➢ This link withered dramatically in recent years.
➢ China eventually surpassed Russia in trade with Ukraine.
➢ Prior to its invasion of Crimea, Russia had hoped to pull Ukraine into its
single market.
➢ The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which today includes Armenia,
Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
f) Energy:
➢ Russia has relied on Ukrainian pipelines to pump its gas to customers in
Central and Eastern Europe for decades,
➢ It pays billions of dollars per year in transit fees to Kyiv.
➢ The flow of Russian gas through Ukraine continued in early 2022 despite
the outbreak of wider hostilities between the two countries.
➢ Russia had planned to transport more gas to Europe via its new Nord
Stream 2 pipeline.
➢ Which runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany, but Berlin froze regulatory
approval of the project after Russia’s invasion.
g) Political sway:
➢ Russia has been keen to preserve its political influence in Ukraine.
➢ Throughout the former Soviet Union.
➢ particularly, it preferred candidate for Ukrainian president in 2004, Viktor
Yanukovych,
➢ Lost to a reformist competitor as part of the Orange Revolution popular
movement.
➢ This shock to Russia’s interests in Ukraine came after a similar electoral defeat
for the Kremlin in Georgia in 2003, known as the Rose Revolution.
➢ It was followed by another—the Tulip Revolution—in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.
➢ Yanukovych later became president of Ukraine, in 2010, amid voter discontent
with the Orange government.

What triggered Russia’s moves in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014?

• Ukraine’s ties with the EU brought tensions to a head with Russia in 2013–14.
• In late 2013, President Yanukovych, acting under pressure from his supporters in Moscow,
scrapped plans to formalize a closer economic relationship with the EU.
• Russia had at the same time been pressing Ukraine to join the not-yet-formed EAEU.
Many Ukrainians perceived Yanukovych’s decision as a betrayal by a deeply corrupt.
• And incompetent government, and it ignited countrywide protests known as Euromaidan.
 • That endangered the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea.
• In response, Putin ordered a covert invasion of Crimea that he later justified as a rescue
operation. “There is a limit to everything.
• And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line,” Putin said in a March 2014
address formalizing the annexation.

• Putin employed a similar narrative to justify his support for separatists in

southeastern Ukraine, another region home to large numbers of ethnic Russians
and Russian speakers.
• He famously referred to the area as Novorossiya (New Russia), a term dating back
to eighteenth-century imperial Russia.
• Armed Russian provocateurs, including some agents of Russian security services,
are believed to have played a central role in stirring the anti-Euromaidan
secessionist movements in the region into a rebellion.
• However, unlike Crimea, Russia continued to officially deny its involvement in the
Donbas conflict until it launched its wider invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Why did Russia launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

• Russia’s 2022 invasion as the culmination of the Kremlin’s growing resentment toward
NATO’s post–Cold War expansion into the former Soviet sphere of influence.
• Russian leaders, including Putin, have alleged that the United States and NATO repeatedly
violated pledges they made in the early 1990s to not expand the alliance into the former
Soviet bloc.
• They view NATO’s enlargement during this tumultuous period for Russia as a humiliating
imposition about which they could do little but watch.
 Founding members Cold War expansion Post–Cold War expansion
1949: 1952: 1990:
Belgium, Canada Greece, Turkey Germany*
Denmark ,France 1955: 1999:
Iceland, Italy West Germany Czech Republic, Hungary,
Luxembourg, 1982: Poland
Netherlands Spain 2004:
Norway, Portugal,U.K Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia
United State
Lithuania,Romania,Slovakia
Slovenia.
2009:
Albania, Croatia
2017:
Montenegro
2020:
Germany*

• In the weeks leading up to NATO’s 2008 summit, President Vladimir Putin warned U.S.
diplomats that steps to bring Ukraine into the alliance “would be a hostile act toward
Russia.”
• Months later, Russia went to war with Georgia, seemingly showcasing Putin’s willingness
to use force to secure his country’s interests.
• Despite remaining a nonmember, Ukraine grew its ties with NATO in the years leading
up to the 2022 invasion.
• Ukraine held annual military exercises with the alliance and, in 2020, became one of just
six enhanced opportunity partners, a special status for the bloc’s closest nonmember
allies.
• In the weeks leading up to its invasion, Russia made several major security demands of
the United States and NATO, including that they cease expanding the alliance, seek
Russian consent for certain NATO deployments, and remove U.S. nuclear weapons from
Europe.
• Kyiv affirmed its goal to eventually gain full NATO membership.
 • Alliance leaders responded that they were open to new diplomacy but were unwilling to
discuss shutting NATO’s doors to new members.
• “While in the United States we talk about a Ukraine crisis, from the Russian standpoint
this is a crisis in European security architecture,”
CFR’s Thomas Graham told Arms Control Today in February 2022;
“And the fundamental issue they want to negotiate is the revision of European security
architecture as it now stands to something that is more favorable to Russian interests.”
• The most important motivating factor for Putin was his fear that Ukraine would continue
to develop into a modern.
• Western-style democracy that would inevitably undermine his autocratic regime in
Russia and dash his hopes of rebuilding a Russia-led sphere of influence in Eastern Europe

What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?

• Keen to regain its former power and prestige.
• According to Gerard Toal, an international affairs professor at Virginia Tech, he wrote in
his book Near Abroad.
“It was always Putin’s goal to restore Russia to the status of a great power in northern

Eurasia “.
He also stated that:
“The end goal was not to re-create the Soviet Union but to make Russia great again.”

• By seizing Crimea in 2014, Russia solidified its control of a strategic foothold on the Black
Sea. But with large military presence there, Russia can project power deeper into the
Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa, where it has traditionally had limited
influence.
• Analysts argue that Western powers failed to impose meaningful costs on Russia in
response to its annexation of Crimea, which they say only increased Putin’s willingness to
use military force in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives.
• Until its invasion in 2022, Russia’s strategic gains in the Donbas were more fragile.
Supporting the separatists had, at least temporarily, increased its bargaining power vis-à-
vis Ukraine.
• In July 2021, Putin explaining his controversial views of the shared history between Russia
and Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” who effectively occupy “the same
historical and spiritual space.”
• Throughout that year, Russia amassed tens of thousands of troops along the border with
Ukraine and later in allied Belarus under the auspices of military exercises.
• In February 2022, Putin said the broad goals were to “de-Nazify” and “de-militarize”
Ukraine. He ordered a full-scale invasion, crossing a force of some two hundred thousand
 troops into Ukrainian territory from the south (Crimea), east (Russia), and north (Belarus),
in an attempt to seize major cities, including the capital Kyiv, and depose the government.
• Ukrainian forces marshaled a stalwart resistance that succeeded in bogging down the
Russian military in many areas, including in Kyiv.
• Many defense analysts say that Russian forces have suffered from low morale, poor
logistics, and an ill-conceived military strategy that assumed Ukraine would fall quickly
and easily.
• By March, some Western observers said that, given unexpected setbacks it incurred on
the battlefield, Moscow could curtail its aims and try to carve out portions of southern
Ukraine, such as the Kherson region, like it did in the Donbas in 2014.
• Russia could try to use these newly occupied territories as bargaining chips in peace
negotiations with Ukraine, which might include stipulations about Kyiv’s prospects for
membership in the EU and NATO.
• Others warned that continued attacks on Kyiv belied any of Moscow’s claims of a shift in
military operations away from the capital.

What have been U.S. priorities in Ukraine?

• After Soviet collapse, Washington’s priority was pushing Ukraine—along with Belarus
and Kazakhstan to forfeit its nuclear arsenal.
• Only Russia would retain the former union’s weapons.
• At the same time, the United States rushed to bolster the shaky democracy in Russia.
• The United States was premature in this courtship with Russia.
• It should have worked more on fostering geopolitical pluralism in the rest of the former
Soviet Union.
• according to former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski;
“It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an
empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically
becomes an empire,”
• He also wrote in Brzezinski’s article;
“The United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia pledged via the Budapest
Referendum to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty in return for it
becoming a nonnuclear state.”
• Twenty years later, Russian forces seized Crimea.
• Restoring and strengthening Ukraine’s sovereignty reemerged as a top U.S. and EU
foreign policy priority.
• After 2022 invasion, U.S. and NATO allies dramatically increased defense, economic, and
humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
• They ramped up their sanctions on Russia.
• Western leaders have been careful to avoid actions.
 • They believe will draw their countries into the war or otherwise escalate it, which could,
in the extreme, pose a nuclear threat.

What are U.S. and EU policy in Ukraine?

• The United States remains committed to the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity
and sovereignty.
• It does not recognize Russia’s claims to Crimea or to the Donetsk and Luhansk republics,
• And it encourages a diplomatic resolution to the war.
• Prior to the 2022 invasion, the United States supported a settlement of the Donbas
conflict via the Minsk agreements
• The United States provided Ukraine with more than $1 billion in emergency security
assistance in early 2022
• It passed a supplemental law that includes several billion more dollars in aid.
• The U.S. military has trained closely with Ukrainian forces in recent years,
• it is providing them with various equipment, including sniper rifles, grenade launchers,
night-vision gear, radars, Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, patrol
vessels, and unmanned aerial systems (drones).
• Several NATO allies are providing similar security aid.

Effects on Russia:
• Meanwhile, the international sanctions on Russia have vastly expanded.
• Now covering much of its financial, energy, defense, and tech sectors and targeting the
assets of wealthy oligarchs and other individuals.
• The U.S. and some European governments banned some Russian banks from the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
• A financial messaging system known as SWIFT; placed restrictions on Russia’s ability to
access its vast foreign reserves; and blacklisted Russia’s central bank.
• Many influential Western companies have shuttered or suspended operations in Russia.
• The Group of Eight, now known as the Group of Seven, suspended Russia from its ranks
indefinitely in 2014.
• The invasion also looks to have cost Russia its long-awaited Nord Stream 2.after Germany
suspended its regulatory approval.
• Many critics, including U.S. and Ukrainian officials, opposed the natural gas pipeline.
• It would give Russia greater political leverage over Ukraine and the European gas market.

What do Ukrainians want?

• Russia’s aggression in recent years has galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Westward
leanings.
• In the wake of Euromaidan, the country elected as president the billionaire businessman
Petro Poroshenko
• A staunch proponent of EU and NATO integration.
• In 2019, Zelensky defeated Poroshenko in a sign of the public’s deep dissatisfaction with
the political establishment
• It’s halting battle against corruption and an oligarchic economy.
• Before the 2022 offensive, polls indicated mix views on NATO and EU membership.
• More than half of those surveyed (excluding Crimea and the contested regions in the east)
supported EU membership
• 40 to 50 percent were in favor of joining NATO.
• after the invasion, a public opinion poll found that large majorities of Ukrainians surveyed
supported the armed resistance against Russia
• rejected Russia’s claims to Crimea
• And it’s backing of the breakaway republics in the Donbas.
• Ukraine should not concede future NATO membership to end the war.