Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte
82 foreign affairs
goes a long way toward explaining why post–Cold War hopes have
given way to the strife and uncertainty of the world today.
U.S. and other Western policymakers have long skirted hard ques-
tions about both Ukraine’s place in the Eurasian order and its role in
the fraught relationship between Washington and Moscow. Although
the end of the Cold War may have marked the end of one geopolitical
competition, it did not mark the end of geopolitics. Nor did the dis-
solution of the Soviet Union mean the disappearance of Russian anx-
ieties, ambitions, and abilities. The Soviet Union may have ceased to
exist on paper in December 1991, but its influence did not. Empires
do not simply vanish. They die long and messy deaths, denying their
decline when they can, conceding their dominions when they must,
and launching irredentist actions wherever they sense an opening.
And nowhere are the consequences of the still ongoing Soviet collapse
clearer than in Ukraine—a country that has wrecked attempt after at-
tempt at establishing a durable order on the Eurasian continent.
The story of Ukraine over the past quarter century is a story of
magical thinking’s remarkable persistence and ultimate price—paid
not just by Ukrainians but more and more by Americans, too.THE END OF AN ERA
In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent crumbling
of the Warsaw Pact, both the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
and the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, thought that they could
reshape the Soviet Union rather than dissolving it. They promoted
the idea of a new form of union, one that would turn itself into a
looser federation, via treaty, of the 15 republics that had composed the
Soviet Union. They thought they could achieve this without giving
citizens a real choice about whether they wanted to stay within a re-
formed empire or not.
As often happens in an empire’s political center, Gorbachev and
Yeltsin badly misjudged sentiment on their imperial periphery. The
large majority of Ukrainians had no interest in propping up the ves-
tiges of empire; they wanted outright independence. Yet without the
second most populous Slavic republic, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin
could see any viable path forward to a new union—partly because
they did not want the non-Slavic republics gaining greater impor-
tance in a rump union and partly because it would be difficult for
Russia to bankroll and police such a union without Ukraine.