Winter 2014: Maidan, Kyiv. CC BY-ND 2.0 streetwrk.com / Flickr. Some rights reserved. Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands and Andrew Wilson’s Ukraine Crisis: What it means for the West are blow-by-blow accounts of the origins of the crisis in Ukraine.
But they put forward two starkly opposed narratives. Richard Sakwa’s book is the geo-political reading favoured by Putin that Russia was reacting to the westwards expansion of NATO. The other, from Andrew Wilson, is what I call the “political marketplace” reading that Russia could not accept a democratic revolution in Ukraine, which would expose the dealings of both Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Long telegrams
According to Sakwa, it was the expansion of the EU and NATO to the east that provoked the Russian actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He quotes George Kennan, credited with the containment strategy towards the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, who described NATO enlargement as a “tragic mistake”. The eastwards expansion of the European Union, according to Sakwa, gave precedence to a western concept of “Wider Europe” instead of a common project of “Greater Europe”.
