West Ukraine

According to the mainstream Western narrative, Vladimir Putin is an insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab. That story is incorrect. In reality, the United States and NATO bear much of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidential administrations of both parties pursued policies for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia that boosted Putin’s Russia and made U.S. relations with all-important Ukraine secondary to the Russia relationship, thus unwittingly playing into Russia’s imperialist myth of its supposed regional hegemony. The result should have been foreseeable: Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Alexander Vindman argues this history of U.S. missteps is bound up in policymakers’ fixation on immediate, short-term, and transactional thinking.

Der deutschen Diskussion um den Ukraine-Krieg liegt die Annahme zugrunde, dass unsere Verurteilung des russischen Angriffskriegs von der ganzen Welt geteilt wird. Diese Annahme ist jedoch unzutreffend und es ist Zeit, selbstkritisch nach den Gründen dafür zu fragen. Der russische Bruch des Gewaltverbots, der Fundamentalnorm des modernen Völkerrechts, verdient unzweifelhaft eine konsequente und nachhaltige Antwort, doch kann diese Antwort glaubwürdig vom Westen, geführt von den USA, gegeben werden?

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it invaded Georgia. Both states are part of Russia's "near abroad"—newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union. While the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 faded from the headlines in the wake of the global recession, the geopolitical contest that created it did not. Six years later, the specter of a revanchist Russia returned when Putin's forces invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula. Eminent political geographer Gerard Toal moves beyond the polemical rhetoric to study the underlying territorial conflicts and geopolitical struggles.

A memoir of service by the American ambassador who was on the diplomatic front lines when Putin invaded Ukraine, Midnight in Moscow is the first behind-the-scenes account of how U.S.-Russia relations hit their nadir—and a playbook for our unfolding confrontation.