Why the West Keeps Misreading Russia – and Why That’s Dangerous

By Ilya Timtchenko

Ilya Timtchenko is an independent researcher and graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was also a Belfer Young Leaders Student Fellow. Before studying at Harvard, Ilya was a journalist and editor based in Kyiv from 2014 to 2021.

By Kateryna Shynkaruk

Kateryna Shynkaruk, PhD, is a senior lecturer in International Relations Theory and Eastern European Politics at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington DC and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

OPINION — As the U.S. continues to respond to Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is an ongoing assumption that dominates DC policy debates regarding Russia: that Russia is a great power. This view legitimizes Moscow’s “vital interests” in the East European neighborhood and has visibly distorted the U.S. policy approach towards the region. Moreover, this assumption is outdated and requires fundamental rethinking, as its consequences are dangerous.  

At the onset of the Cold War in 1953, through his Project Solarium, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower set a hawkish U.S. stance against the Soviet Union which more or less persisted until the latter’s collapse in 1991. Fortunately, the aggressive position was correct. Unfortunately, the U.S. post-Soviet strategy toward Russia inherited a perception of a “mighty” Russia that does not correspond to today’s reality. Furthermore, the U.S. replaced its correct hawkish stance with one based on a hopeful thawing of relations, in which Russia was optimistically and conveniently perceived as going through rapid democratization.  

While the West was switching its perception of the world toward 21st-century post-modern thinking, it nevertheless endorsed Russia’s goal of restoring its regional hegemony in the traditions of great-power politics. Russia inherited from the Soviet Union a seat at the United Nations Security Council, it was invited into the G7+1 format, and multinational businesses established their regional headquarters in Moscow. Russian ruler Vladimir Putin’s ill-fated Eurasian Customs Union was seriously discussed in Paris and Berlin as a regional alternative to the European Union. Taken together, these policies helped Russia project its image as a great power and made the U.S. and EU think of it as an equal. 

To further achieve its aims, Russia targeted Western academia, as powerful tycoons close to the Kremlin circle poured billions of dollars into the world’s most elite institutions. Since 2009, if not before, Russian billionaires have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to top American academic institutions, including Yale, MIT, and Harvard. Some of these leading schools were included in the 2020 widespread noncompliance report released by the U.S. Department of Education. The West’s Eastern European programs at academic institutions are foundationally and prevailingly Russia-centric.  

Russia’s success in presenting itself to the West as a regional hegemon was manifested in the “Russia First” approach toward Eastern Europe. It resulted in overly cautious outcomes of the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit (where Putin notoriously claimed Ukraine was “an artificial state”); little to no response to the Kremlin’s five-day war against Georgia in 2008; and the downplaying of Russia’s aggression after the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. 

Time for a change

There is an urgent need for a critical review of the Russia-centric approach and its underlying assumptions, most of which correspond to a great-power perspective, while others promote the liberal order. The post-Soviet U.S. Russia policy has often espoused the least fortunate combination of liberalism and realism. It neither sufficiently recognized agency and sovereign decision-making by East European states – like Ukraine – as liberalism would suggest, nor the threat Russia presented if seen through the realist lens, with its realpolitik zero-sum approach and revisionist ambitions that were only emboldened by appeasement. During the first years of Russia’s invasion, the U.S. consistently denied Kyiv lethal weapons to defend itself from Russia in order “not to provoke Putin”.  

Paradoxically, this Russia-centric view still dominates among U.S. policymakers and leading academics even as Russia continues its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The lessons learned from the failure to deter Russia’s war against Ukraine and its further escalation should include a critical revision of the underlying assumptions of the U.S. policy approach that were unsuccessful in preventing the largest war in Europe since WWII.  

Assumption 1: Russia is a great power with a legitimate sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and is the only guarantor of regional security 

Whether a realist or liberal approach is applied, Russia today does not pass the test of a great power. Russia’s military spending in 2022, the year of the full-scale invasion, made up only a tenth of the U.S. figure, and a third of China’s. Russia’s GDP is a tenth of China’s and not even 8% of the U.S.’s. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on natural resource commodities and does not even rank among the top 50 most innovative countries, based on the Global Innovation Index. It is a natural-resource-rich country with declining regional influence and imperial ambitions. Its autocratic regime, nuclear weapons, and multi-billion-dollar disinformation machinery make it a significant threat – a disruptor – but not a reliable contributor to the global agenda.  

Assumption 2: The liberal rules-based order can be upheld without recognizing the agency of medium and small powers.  

The U.S. foreign policy community is dangerously sliding back to great-power competition thinking, as it allows strategic competitors such as Russia and China to drag the U.S. with them back into the 20th century – where the few “major” powers decided the world order, and not the multinational community. The rules-based liberal world order is clearly more advantageous to the U.S. than great-power politics, and the liberal idea does not imply naivete as to the ways of dealing with its foes. A reasonable caution when addressing the Russian threat should not create any illusions about incorporating Russia into global structures as any type of meaningful stakeholder, as long as it continues acting as a disruptor and threat to the international order. 

Assumption 3: Effective Russia deterrence is limited to non-interference in Russia’s “sphere of influence” and the creation of a “security gray zone,” rather than through extending Western protection and military support in order to significantly increase the costs of an attack by the aggressor state.  

Russia’s war against Ukraine confirmed the opposite: Russia sees its neighbors in the security gray zone as low-hanging fruit for its aggression. Furthermore, signaling to the Kremlin about one’s policy limitations and self-deterrence, like announcing the types of weapons or military tactics Ukraine is prohibited to use, only further emboldens Russia.  

Rebooting the Russia approach 

More than two and a half years into the war, these assumptions continue to persist in various forms. This needs to change.  

First, the U.S. should develop a clear bipartisan strategy for dealing with Russia in the present and future. It should define the various possibilities of what kind of Russia it will be dealing with, including a dissipated Russia which will consist of smaller states, a victorious Russia over Ukraine, or a defeated yet still geographically intact Russia  

Second, if the West is to believe in the liberal vision of providing agency to medium and small powers, it must entrust these countries with a larger degree of their own vision and knowledge. This will require creativity, trust, and two-way partnerships that will enable true agency and ownership by smaller states. Such an approach will endorse a 21st-century view that crushes the 20th-century imperial optic and uproots any leftovers of last century’s colonist frameworks.  

Third, U.S. academic institutions should move away from regional power programs and instead diverge their research towards individual countries. Currently, the status quo allows countries like Russia and China to influence the decision-making of policymakers in Washington.    

Fourth, U.S. institutions – especially those involved in shaping policy – should be more transparent with their donations, as foreign money can influence how we think about policy. Universities should not be allowed to receive money from individuals who have close links to political circles of aggressor states, and should be strongly penalized if they do. 

We must not lose our vision of Russia as we did during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The U.S. must make sure that Ukraine wins and the Kremlin loses, and this includes critically reviewing our assumptions and policy approaches, assessments, frameworks, and the cultural and information space on how we perceive Russia and what is left of it. 

The U.S. should reshape its approach and establish a clear bipartisan strategy on how to win this war. With the current ambiguous, delayed, and loose U.S. approach that is still fundamentally tailored to the fears of a Russia-centric, post-Cold War view, Ukraine is on the road to defeat. In turn, this defeat would be a major one for U.S. national security as well, as a Kremlin victory will spread like cancer into the flourishing of democracies and international rule of law across the globe – a system that is paramount for the success of U.S. diplomacy, security, and economy. The U.S. and the rest of the democratic world cannot afford this and should fully acknowledge that a defeat for Ukraine is to be feared more than a defeat for Russia.  

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. 

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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