Russia's full invasion in February 2022 came after more than a decade of actions against Ukraine and other states. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian government pushed hard for Ukraine to pull out of its association agreement talks with the European Union. When this triggered a popular revolt that drove Ukraine's Russia-leaning President Yanukovich from office, Russia moved quickly to annex Crimea and then stoked conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. European powers responded with a suite of measures against Russia, helped Ukraine with new cooperation and supported a peace accord. Tensions between the West and Russia worsened, although many EU member state governments judged that the conflict in Donbas had been contained to a relatively low-level of intensity.

A brief background of this period prior to the full invasion lays the foundations for understanding events since 2022. While European powers adjusted their policies towards the wider Europe region and began to act more geopolitically after the 2014 events, they failed to put in place strategic guardrails that might have prevented the Russian invasion in 2022. The post-2014 crisis did not unleash any significant dynamics of re-ordering, in contrast to the post-2022 fall-out. Indeed, in the 2010s most EU governments approached the crisis through a prism of limiting or heading-off European re-ordering. Their aim was to contain the conflict without major order-changing policy commitments. The green shoots of what this book conceptualizes as geoliberalism appeared but did not flourish in the uneasy eastern stasis of the years before 2022.

LOW-COST ORDER MAINTENANCE

Relations between Western powers and Russia became gradually more strained in the early 2000s for multiple reasons. When Russia launched a military incursion into Georgia in 2008 and consolidated its de facto hold over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – that it then recognized as independent – the international community engaged diplomatically to prevent war but soon reverted to business as usual. The EU sought to upgrade its formal economic-cooperation partnership with Russia. In 2008, governments declared at a NATO summit that Georgia and Ukraine could join the defence alliance; however, this was pushed through at the behest of the United States and most European governments were not supportive of the idea, ensuring that it made no progress in the years that followed.