Genesis of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Abstract

It was initially hoped that the dispute between Kiev and Moscow in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse represented a peaceful “civilized divorce” between two equal sovereign states over the division of financial assets, resources, territory, as well as nuclear and conventional weaponry. At that time, in the period from 1991 to 1994, Washington and Moscow had largely worked in tandem to pressure Ukraine, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, to give up their nuclear-weapons capability left over from the Cold War. Yet Russian-Ukrainian disputes have since aggravated, so that by 2013–14, the dispute between Moscow and Kiev has transmogrified into a very uncivilized divorce. The two then broke apart violently after the pro-European Euromaidan movement came to power in Kiev in November 2013 and once the kleptocratic Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was pressured to flee the country on February 21, 2014.¹