The Long Road to War.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen

Even beyond the genuine horrors of the war in Ukraine, Western officials--as well as Western journalists--are prone to portray it in highly emotional and overly simplified terms. The dominant narrative goes essentially like this: the turmoil and bloodshed are all because of Vladimir Putin, an extraordinarily aggressive, evil individual who may even be out of his mind. Absent his insatiable lust for aggression and a desire to rebuild the Soviet Union, we are told, there would be no war between Russia and Ukraine. The extent of the Kremlin's aggressive intentions toward its neighbor began to become evident in 2014, when Putin moved to annex Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and then conducted illegal military incursions in the name of supporting bogus separatist movements in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

How persuasive are such accounts? One problem is that they ignore or at least minimize the extent to which NATO expansion generated and exacerbated tensions between the United States and Russia as well as evidence of other problems, both in the bilateral Russian-Ukrainian relationship and within Ukraine itself. Yet all of those factors set the stage for the Russia-Ukraine war that erupted in February 2022.

Relations between Kyiv and Moscow often were marked by a chill even during the years immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Similarly, Ukraine's internal political, economic, and ideological tensions were evident early on. Indeed, openly secessionist sentiments in both Crimea and the Donbas surfaced in the 1990s. Populations in both regions chafed at being ruled by nationalist, anti-Russia elements based in western Ukraine. Instead, they sought greater respect for Russian as an official second language in Ukraine and wanted closer overall cultural and economic ties with Russia. The current armed conflict has deep and tangled roots, ones that bear elucidation.

Ukraine's sudden independence in late 1991 left both Moscow and Kyiv unprepared to deal with each other. That sudden shift in the conditions governing their relations led to an often icy and contentious bilateral relationship during the 1990s. While the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States did prevent a total split between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukraine's newfound independence occurred against the background of persistent attitudes among both Russian elites and ordinary citizens that Ukraine, like Belarus, is part of one "Greater Russia." That perspective later became a very prominent and persistent theme in Putin's speeches and policies, but it was visible much earlier. Even Russian president Boris Yeltsin asserted Russia's right to raise border issues with the other states emerging from the carcass of the USSR--especially with those countries that had significant Russian minorities, such as Ukraine with its heavily Russified eastern regions. As such, disputes arose quickly between the two newly independent countries.

One thorny issue was whether Russia would inherit and control the entire former Soviet Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol on Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, or whether there would be some division of naval assets. Most former Soviet sailors remained loyal to the Kremlin, but others declared their allegiance to newly independent Ukraine. The feuding Black Sea Fleet sailors nearly came to blows several...