Has the Ukrainian crisis sparked a new Cold War?

In the wake of the conflict in Ukraine, relations between the West and Russia are at their lowest ebb since the Cold War ended. Escalating political rhetoric on both sides, as well as the mutual use of diplo­matic and economic sanctions, also reminds observers of the inter­national tensions during the Cold War.

First, books and articles about the “new Cold War" between Russia and the West started appearing years before the Ukrainian crisis. The first edition of New Cold War by Edward Lucas came out in 2008, and the Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon published a book under the same title a year earlier.¹⁷ Tensions have been growing since the first decade of the 2000s, when the newly empowered Putin ad­ministration embarked on a course of rebuilding a stronger Russia, which could challenge Western values and the unipolar world order that emerged after the Cold War.

The Kremlin reacted nervously to what it interpreted as US in­volvement in the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. In both countries, the Russian military got involved in supporting separatist movements in 2008 and 2014, respectively. A similar Russian-supported break­away state has existed within another Western-leaning neighbor, Moldova, since 1992: the unrecognized Republic of Transnistria, which still uses a Soviet-style coat of arms decades after the collapse of communism.

The Ukrainian crisis did not spark a new Cold War but, rather, manifested the escalation of tensions simmering ever since the Soviet Union fell apart, which was ultimately connected to that event. A peaceful solution in Ukraine in and of itself would not re­solve the larger tensions between Russia and the West. In fact, peace in Ukraine is not an internal issue but an international one.

Second, the current tensions differ from the original Cold War in that they are neither global nor ideologically driven. The Putin administration is trying to find an ideological foundation for its brand of authoritarian state capitalism, but so far it has not been able to construct a coherent ideology out of Orthodox Christianity and Eurasianism, the latter representing Russia's “manifest destiny” of building a land empire encompassing two continents. The anti­Western rhetoric of the Russian state media is equally incoherent in that it combines attacks on liberal democracy with nostalgia for Soviet great-power status, but not for communism itself. Similarly, Russia can oppose American policies toward Venezuela, Syria, Libya, and Iran, but on geopolitical rather than ideological grounds. Furthermore, Russia does not have the capacity to involve itself in far-flung global conflicts in the way the Soviet Union did. The so- called near abroad, or the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine or Georgia, is a different matter.

Finally, the conflict in Ukraine did not rise to the level of a Cold War-era “proxy war” between the superpowers. Although Russia was involved directly, if covertly, in military actions in Ukraine, the United States was not. In the spring of 2015, when the conflict had been raging for almost a year, the Obama administration was still weighing the option of supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons, pos­sibly hoping that the very discussion of such a possibility would serve as a deterrent to Russia and its clients in the Donbas.

Viewed from a longer historical perspective, it is clear that the crisis in Ukraine is only masquerading as ethnic strife. It is a conflict over what type of a state and society will develop in the post-Soviet political space, and a part of Putin's challenge to the unipolar world order that emerged after the Cold War. As such, the conflict can only be resolved in a wider international framework. Local peacemaking in Ukraine is a global issue.