Nearly four years after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine, there is no resolution in sight. Fighting continues, and the February 2015 Minsk agreement brokered by Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine that was intended to end the conflict remains in limbo. Each side accuses the other of not fulfilling its obligations under the agreement. In this prolonged standoff between Russia and the West, everyone loses, argue Samuel Charap and Timothy J. Colton. Ukraine is at war with Russian-backed separatists and the peaceful post–Cold War European order the European Union (EU) has worked so hard to construct has been broken. The authors’ purpose in this book is to answer the two essential questions that have been asked over and over in Russia for the past two centuries: Who is guilty? What is to be done?
The authors assign much of the blame to the...