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27 August 2024

Are the Russians Realists?

Matthew Bryant

Ten years ago, the borders of Eastern Europe shifted for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine saw its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, ousted from power, shortly followed by the takeover of Crimea by the Russian Federation. These events also started the war in the Donbas, which, in February 2022, escalated into an all-out war on Ukraine.

In the United States, this slow-burn regional escalation characterized Russian president Vladimir Putin as a latter-day Adolf Hitler who was attempting to reunite all of the exclave Russian populations under one banner. Dr. Sumantra Maitra’s The Sources of Russian Aggression: Is Russia a Realist Power? offers better causal explanations than allowing politicians to relive fantasies of WWII.

In the weeks following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden declared, “For God’s sake [Putin] cannot remain in power.” There is a certain comfort in believing that Russian foreign policy is predicated on the psychology of one individual. No doubt Putin has immense control over foreign policy, but to suggest that a different Russian leader would change Russian key strategic interests is contradicted by history. In 2008, diplomat William Burns, in an email to Condoleezza Rice, stated that “Ukraine in NATO remains the ‘brightest of all red lines.’” Despite the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations throughout the 2010s, Ukraine’s entrance into NATO was still being promoted, even as pressure built. Ten years later, hundreds of thousands are dead, millions more have been displaced, and the threat of nuclear war grows with each new expansion of the war in Ukraine.

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