Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia by Samuel Charap, Timothy J. Colton (review)

Nearly four years after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine, there is no resolution in sight. Fighting continues, and the February 2015 Minsk agreement brokered by Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine that was intended to end the conflict remains in limbo. Each side accuses the other of not fulfilling its obligations under the agreement. In this prolonged standoff between Russia and the West, everyone loses, argue Samuel Charap and Timothy J. Colton. Ukraine is at war with Russian-backed separatists and the peaceful post–Cold War European order the European Union (EU) has worked so hard to construct has been broken. The authors’ purpose in this book is to answer the two essential questions that have been asked over and over in Russia for the past two centuries: Who is guilty? What is to be done?

The authors assign much of the blame to the United States and its allies, who, they claim, failed to take into account Russia’s interests in the 1990s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they claim, the West adopted a “prefab” strategy of extending existing institutions—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the EU—to Central Europe instead of starting from scratch to create a new post–Cold War Euro-Atlantic security order. This left only two choices for Central Europe and the “in-betweens,” the post-Soviet states. They could aspire either to join NATO and the EU or to enter one of the Russia-dominated institutions that emerged in the 1990s. The West, the authors insist, should have worked harder to create a new Euro-Atlantic security architecture in which Russia had a stake.

This line of argument may sound reasonable but is in fact problematic. If we are to judge the issue realistically, we must return to the period immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late 1991 and understand what was actually possible at the time. The Warsaw Pact was no more, whereas NATO endured as the most successful alliance in history. The United States and its allies were faced with the unprecedented challenge of creating a new security order with a group of newly liberated Central European states in which the nativist and irredentist ghosts of the interwar years were reappearing. The former Warsaw Pact countries believed their chief security threat was the danger of revived Russian imperial designs on them. Russian generals, on the other hand, viewed as their main security threat the prospect of NATO coming closer to Russia’s borders. At that point, it was impossible for the West to assuage both sets of concerns, and so it chose to focus on including Central Europe and later the Baltic states in an alliance that required them to renounce irredentist claims on one another.

The West, Charap and Colton argue, underestimated Russia’s preoccupation with its “vital interests” in the post-Soviet space. After all, Boris Yeltsin’s 1995 decree on the Commonwealth of Independent States clearly states, “This region is first of all Russia’s zone of influence” (p. 56). By the time Putin came into office, the West’s relationship with Russia in the post-Soviet space had become a zero-sum competitive game.

The authors also blame the West for hypocrisy in its dealings with the post-Soviet states. After all, neither NATO nor EU membership has ever been on offer for any of them beyond the Baltics. “It is not tenable for the West to insist on the right of all countries to make their own choices while at the same time being unable or unwilling to grant them those choices (like NATO and EU membership) or to take responsibility for the consequences of choosing” (p. 179). Charap and Colton correctly point out that neither the United States nor Europe has been willing to provide the post-Soviet states with the military or...