But while the US provided loans and economic assistance to the government of the acting Russian prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, Russians expected much more.Īfter seven decades of central planning, a sudden transformation into a flourishing market economy was impossible for Russia. ![]() In the early years, Clinton and Yeltsin made a serious effort to develop good relations. Initially, there was a great deal of optimism, in both Russia and the West, that the Soviet Union's collapse would allow for the rise of democracy and a market economy in Russia. The possibility of NATO expansion thus was merely one of several intermediate causes-one made less salient soon after the Bucharest summit by France and Germany's announcements that they would veto Ukraine's NATO membership.īehind all this were the remote or deep causes that followed the end of the Cold War. He had helped the United States following the September 11, 2001, attacks, but his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech shows that he had already soured on the West before the Bucharest summit. Still, while NATO's decision in 2008 may have been misguided, Putin's change of attitude predated it. Airborne troops would capture the airport and advancing tanks would seize Kyiv, removing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and installing a puppet government. Like the leaders of the great powers in 1914, he probably believed that it would be a short, sharp war with a quick victory, somewhat like the Soviet Union's takeover of Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. In Ukraine, there is no question that Putin lit the match when he ordered Russian troops to invade on 24 February. ![]() Poor policy choices were a crucial cause of the catastrophe. As historian Christopher Clark notes in his book about the origins of WWI, The sleepwalkers, in 1914, 'the future was still open-just'. A strong wind may extinguish the match, or a sudden rainstorm may have soaked the wood. But even then, a bonfire is not inevitable. Think of building a bonfire: piling up the logs is a deep cause, adding kindling and paper is an intermediate cause, and striking a match is a precipitating cause. ![]() To sort things out, it helps to distinguish between deep, intermediate and immediate causes. But war was not inevitable until it actually broke out in August 1914, and even then it was not inevitable that four years of carnage had to follow. Did it start because a Serbian terrorist assassinated an Austrian archduke in 1914, or did it have more to do with ascendant German power challenging Britain, or rising nationalism throughout Europe? The answer is 'all of the above, plus more'. World War I occurred more than a century ago, yet historians still write books debating what caused it. How can we discern the origins of a war that may last for years? While many in the West see a war of choice by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says that NATO's 2008 decision in favour of eventual Ukrainian membership brought an existential threat to Russia's borders, and still others trace the conflict back to the Cold War's end and the failure of the West to support Russia adequately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia's war in Ukraine is the most disruptive conflict that Europe has seen since 1945.
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