Why did the Ukrainian crisis cause tensions between Russia and the West?

Putin's Russia and the West have fundamentally different views of the Soviet collapse and post-communist global political order. In 2005 President Putin famously referred to the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the cen- tury."² The ideology of the Putin regime is devoid of communist elements, but it valorizes Russia's past as a great power, be it in tsarist or Soviet times.

In this historical mythology, the West is cast as the principal villain. Russian media claim that the West betrayed Russia by alleg­edly promising not to accept the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as members of NATO, but doing just that in 1999-2004.

Russia had strongly opposed the acceptance of the former Soviet satellite states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, but was even more offended in 2004, when the group of seven new NATO members included Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been republics of the Soviet Union and thus part of the Soviet “inner empire." Russian state-run media have been fanning fears that Ukraine would become the next and final step in NATO's en­croachment on the former Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The Russian elites likewise saw the EuroMaidan Revolution in Ukraine, just like the 2004 Orange Revolution before that, as a Western-sponsored coup. In his speech on the occasion of the Crimea's annexation, President Putin spent much time accusing the United States of hypocrisy, disregard of international law, and harming Russia's interests. After enumerating a series of historical wrongs, from the 1999 intervention in Serbia and NATO's east­ward expansion to the bombings of Libya, he concluded that “with Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line."³ Clearly, Putin and his government see Ukraine as a crucial battleground in Russia's historical struggle with the West and as a place where Russia must take the last stand.

Ironically, the West does not share such a millenarian vision. It was only in the late 1990s that the United States realized the strategic importance of independent Ukraine as an impediment to a potential restoration of Russia's influence in Eastern Europe. NATO's rela­tions with Ukraine have been very limited, functioning at a level of undefined “partnership," and the European Union has never offered Ukraine a clear accession path. Western backing for the two popular revolutions in Ukraine (2004-2005 and 2013-2014) came primarily in the form of moral support and diplomatic pressure on Russia, as well as humanitarian assistance and educational programs. The West started introducing meaningful economic sanctions only after the Russian annexation of the Crimea and began tightening them only once clear evidence of Russian complicity in the war in the Donbas had emerged. It is only gradually that the West has come to see the conflict over Ukraine as part of Russia's challenge to the post-Cold War global order and to Western concepts of democracy and human rights more generally.

Although Russian and Western interests have clashed in parts of the globe as distant as Venezuela and Syria, Ukraine's geograph­ical location and its special place in Russian history have much to do with this country becoming the principal site of the escalating tensions between Russia and the West.