How Soviet legacy has influenced foreign policy in Georgia and Ukraine

The legacy of the Soviet Union’s collapse plays a greater role in the foreign policies of Georgia and Ukraine than previous studies have suggested. Conducting foreign policy in former Soviet countries can be a major challenge as the Russian state does not accept the new order. These are the findings outlined in the thesis of political scientist Per Ekman from Uppsala University.

“To understand Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, it is important to see the war as part of a longer historical event. Since their first day of independence, Georgia and Ukraine have had to deal with Russian ambitions to control the region. For many in the West, it took a long time after the end of the Cold War to realize that a significant part of the Russian political leadership had not let go of the idea of controlling the countries that Moscow ruled during the Soviet era,” explains Ekman, doctor of political science at Uppsala University.

The end of the Cold War has often been described as peaceful because it did not lead to a world war. For Georgia and several other Soviet republics, however, the period was far from peaceful, with conflicts in several border regions, including with Russian involvement. In his thesis, Ekman shows how these experiences came to characterize the foreign policy that was subsequently pursued.

In the late 1990s, there was a strong desire in Georgia to create distance from Russia, something which was reinforced after the Rose Revolution in 2003. Russia’s interference in the country’s independence process was perceived by policymakers as highly negative and a main reason behind Georgia losing the conflicts with the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the 1990s.

“These early experiences pushed Georgia away from Russia and towards closer cooperation with the US, NATO and the EU, despite Russian protests and the fact that Georgia received no security guarantees from the West,” notes Ekman.

He also posits that Ukraine experienced a completely different situation. Russia certainly put political pressure on Ukraine in negotiations in the 1990s, particularly over the Black Sea Fleet and the Crimean peninsula. Moreover, it took time for the Kremlin to recognize Ukraine’s borders.

But the result was seemingly peaceful agreements, which contributed to a significant proportion of Ukraine’s decision-makers and population favoring a continued pragmatic relationship with Russia, although they also wanted to cooperate with the EU, the US and to some extent NATO.

“There was a minority of Ukrainian politicians who wanted to cut ties with Russia, but the country’s largest party, led by the influential Donetsk Network, rejected future Ukrainian membership of NATO and extended the Russian military presence in Crimea in 2010,” notes Ekman.

“Ukraine’s foreign policy changed monumentally when then-president Viktor Yanukovych rejected the association agreement with the EU, triggering the major Euromaidan protests in 2013. The protests were followed by Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. As I show in my thesis, these events resulted in a growing consensus in Ukraine to distance itself from Russia.

“Paradoxically, the Russian leadership’s behavior contributed greatly to Ukraine’s increasingly clear move towards the EU and NATO and away from Russia, something Vladimir Putin said he wanted to avoid at all costs.”