Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte
92 foreign affairs
Bucharest to sanction the start of accession procedures for Georgia
and Ukraine. But after last-minute interventions, especially on the
part of French and German policymakers, the summit instead merely
announced that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of
nato”—keeping the promise of membership alive but the door to the
alliance closed. Yet the damage was done.
Shortly afterward, Putin decided to invade Georgia, a signal whose
full significance the West failed to recognize at the time. The invasion
was not a one-off, caused by Georgian recklessness; rather, it showed
the extent of Russian trauma resulting from both the ongoing impe-
rial collapse and resentment of the United States and its policies in
the region. But in its own instance of magical thinking, most of the
political class in Kyiv agreed with Westerners that such a fate could
not befall Ukraine, since war between the two largest post-Soviet
states had (they thought) become a virtual impossibility in the post–
Cold War world. Given the historical and cultural ties between the
two Slavic nations, few people in Kyiv could imagine Russians and
Ukrainians shooting at each other.
The Russo-Georgian war was viewed at the time as a mere bump
on the road to a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations under a new Russian
president, Dmitry Medvedev. Relations briefly improved, making
possible the signing of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or
New start, under President Barack Obama in 2010. Yet this new
agreement, like the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, while promoting
nonproliferation generally, contributed little to the security situation
in the post-Soviet space specifically.RUSSIA RESURGENT
In 2014, 20 years after the signing of the Budapest Memorandum,
violence resulted again when Kyiv, its nato ambitions dashed, tried
to strengthen its relations with the eu instead by negotiating a trade
agreement. This renewed effort by Ukraine to assert its indepen-
dence once again angered Putin. Russia also sought to preserve a
sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space by stopping nato and
eu expansion at the western border of Ukraine. Putin successfully
pressed Ukraine’s president, the pro-Russian politician Viktor Ya-
nukovych, to reject the proposed trade association—only to be
shocked by the virulence of the Ukrainian people’s response: the
Maidan protests of late 2013 and early 2014.