Kto Vinovat? Why is there a crisis in Russia’s relations with the West?

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the deterioration in relations between Russia and the West from their high point in the early 1990s to the current conflict over issues such as Ukraine and Syria. It discusses the dominant modes of understanding that decline, notably the propositions, on the one hand, that this decline is a result of Western policies and, on the other hand, that the decline follows naturally from the characteristics and aspirations of the Russian state and its leaders. It suggests that the deterioration is best understand as a result of multiple, reinforcing factors related to the internal characteristics of Russian political culture and the political system, and also to Russia’s experience in international relations since the end of the Cold War.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian foreign policy
• Russia and Europe
• Russia and the West
• Ukraine

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor and also to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments in the preparation of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

S. Neil MacFarlane received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1982. After academic appointments at the University of Virginia and Queen's University (Canada), he returned to Oxford as Lester B. Pearson Professor of International Relations. He specialises in the international relations of the former Soviet space and Russian foreign policy.

Notes

1. The Normandy Format for facilitation of a settlement to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine originated in a meeting on the side-lines of the 2014 commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, in Normandy France. The meeting, and subsequent telephone exchanges, included the President of France, the Chancellor of Germany, and the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine.

2. For claims of the emergence of a new Cold War, see Lucas (2008) and Charap and Shapiro (2015). For nuanced analyses that question the Cold War analogy, see Shevtsova (2015) and Monaghan (2015).

3. For a similar view from a leading Russian scholar, see Temirgaleev (2015).

4. In September 2013, for example, the president of the American National Endowment for Democracy wrote that “Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” The National Endowment for Democracy is funded by the US Congress (Gershman, 2013).

5. There is reason to question the reliability of Russian polling on this point, in view of possible respondent concern about the anonymity of the polling process and possible punishment that might arise in the event that polls could be used to identify people who were not supportive of Putin. However, in a carefully constructed experiment with polling behaviour, a recent study concluded that Putin's support ranges from 79% to 81%. See Frye, Gelbach, Marquardt, and Reuter (2015).

6. For a similar contextualisation of Putin, see Hill and Gaddy (2015).