Russia — Ukraine: Entering a New Phase

Abstract

At the beginning of this new decade, Russian-Ukrainian relations, rather troublesome since the very moment of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, seem to be entering a new phase and acquiring a new dynamic. In the 1990s bilateral collisions and disputes were largely rooted in the poor understanding by Russia of the substance of Ukrainian independence. Russians did not understand that for Ukrainians independence made no sense as an abstract term, but only in the sense of independencefrom Russia.Thus, Russia was genuinely surprised to see that its ‘brotherly’ or paternalistic behaviour, which combined a certain neglect of Ukraine’s foreign policy self-perception with the will to assist ‘the younger brother’ economically, was not much appreciated in Ukraine. To Ukrainians, in turn, these attitudes gave birth to a desire, on the one hand, to compete with Russia wherever possible in to order to overcome a certain inferiority complex of being ‘always the second’, and on the other hand, to a mentality and a practice of parasitising on Russian subsidies.

Article Footnote

This paper is a shortenrd, revised and updated version of an Article, prepared for the Militärwissenschaftliches Bureau of the Austrian Ministry of Defence in the spring of 2000.