How Ukraine crisis echoes the Cold War – and how it doesn’t

Tanks on the move somewhere in Europe. Headlines blare about “High-stakes talks!” between Moscow and Washington. Allies confer on the sidelines. A smaller country waits, stuck uneasily between big powers, as clocks tick and tension builds.

That’s the Ukraine situation today, as Russia amasses military force on its borders and threatens invasion. But blink, and it could be 1968, with Warsaw Pact armies preparing to roll into Czechoslovakia. Blink again, and it’s 1961 amid the Berlin crisis, as the Soviets try to muscle Western troops out of the divided German city.

In many ways Ukraine is a Cold War crisis that’s erupted in a post-Cold War world. It’s a reminder that the hard realities of geopolitical competition didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall – and that patient containment pressure across a variety of fronts has served the West well in the past.

But Ukraine isn’t only a Cold War-style problem. Conflict areas have evolved over a half-century, moving into the realms of cyber- and disinformation war. Possible U.S. responses have evolved as well in a more interconnected world economy, to include blocking Moscow from financial transaction systems and cutting off its supply of crucial high-tech parts.

The developing conflict between Russia and the West “definitely won’t look like the Cold War,” says Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

“But the basic challenge will be quite similar ... containing the malign influence of an authoritarian over many theaters over many years,” says Dr. Brands.

New age of great-power competition

It is “undeniable” that the United States is now involved in another era of great-power competition, says Dr. Brands, author of the recently published book “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today.”

During the Cold War era, U.S. and allied officials struggled with a dangerous opponent for decades in an ambiguous space between peace and war, according to Dr. Brands. In the end, they triumphed.

The U.S. needs to approach its renewed confrontation with Russia in the same way.

“We are really going to have to think about this as a long-term problem,” says Dr. Brands.

So far, the Biden administration has handled the Ukraine crisis relatively well, he adds, by not giving a lot of ground, offering off-ramps for de-escalation, and advertising what penalties Russia might suffer if it undertakes military action.

The problem is that, unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. now faces conflict with two great powers: Russia and China. Washington would prefer to focus on dealing with the latter, instead of handling a Russian-induced crisis. 

That makes sense in that only Beijing has the comprehensive strength to change the rules of the international system, says Dr. Brands. Russian power is narrower and military-based.

“I’m not worried about Putin creating a Russo-centric world 20 years from now,” he says. “I do worry about them being a persistent source of instability.”

A messy end to empire

On one level the current Ukraine situation is perhaps the revival of unfinished business from the Cold War’s messy end.

As the Soviet Union careened toward breakup in the fall of 1991, final leader Mikhail Gorbachev worked hard to keep USSR republics together in some sort of political and economic union. Ukraine was the wild card in this effort, according to declassified U.S. documents posted by the nonprofit National Security Archive at George Washington University. 

Both Mr. Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin felt that Ukraine had to stay in the new union for it to be successful, wrote national security adviser Brent Scowcroft in a memo for President George H.W. Bush. 

“It is a huge economy tightly integrated with Russia, and an abrupt separation would be disastrous,” wrote Mr. Scowcroft.

However, events had moved too far, too fast, to avoid that eventuality. Ukraine held a referendum on independence on Dec. 1, 1991, that passed overwhelmingly. At the end of that month the Soviet Union officially dissolved.  

For Europe the upshot was a new territorial settlement.

A key part of this new settlement was that all the countries on the Continent had the right to choose their own economic and security arrangements. There would be no more European spheres of influence – a development that didn’t sit well with Russia. 

For years Moscow was too weak to do anything about it. It watched helplessly as Eastern European nations that used to be part of its orbit – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic – joined NATO. In 2008 NATO promised that Ukraine could eventually join too, though the alliance was careful to not lay out a hard timeline. 

But in military terms Moscow is weak no longer. Vladimir Putin in his time in power has – among other things – poured money into modernizing Russian forces, providing new weapons and better-trained troops. In 2014, Russia invaded and successfully annexed Crimea, the peninsula that dangles off Ukraine into the Black Sea, and fomented revolts in several eastern Ukraine regions. 

Now Mr. Putin has encircled Ukraine with enough troops to threaten invasion along either a northern, eastern, or southern route, writes Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in an analysis of possible Russian actions. 

In military terms, the Russians are positioned to either seize Ukraine’s eastern slice of separatist territory, cut off a slice of land in the south to link Russian territory to Crimea, or even take the country in total and install their own government, according to the CSIS analysis.

In geopolitical terms, a Russian invasion risks establishing a new Iron Curtain through and around Europe, according to Mr. Jones. It’s about rolling back the clock – even if Moscow is just using its military to threaten.

“In essence, this conflict is about whether 30 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, its former ethnic republics can live as independent, sovereign states or if they still must acknowledge Moscow as their de facto sovereign,” Mr. Jones writes.

Where Cold War framing falls short

On another level, there may be ways in which it is simplistic or misleading to frame the Ukraine troubles as Cold War redux.

Russia’s aggression contains elements that are as modern as the latest smartphones, for one thing. Any military move against Ukraine is sure to be preceded with cyberattacks and disinformation spread on social media, a sort of hybrid war in which Moscow is well practiced. 

U.S. and NATO responses likewise may include actions that would have been impossible, or incomprehensible, in past decades. Kicking Russian banks off the global electronic payment messaging system known as Swift could effectively cut the country’s economy off from much of the global financial system. Depriving Russia of access to U.S.-designed or -produced electronic components such as semiconductors might jam a stick in its high-tech manufacturing.

And draping the situation in a Cold War mantle could make it harder to understand Ukraine as an individual country and the nature of the conflict.

“Then you look at Ukraine as an oblast rather than a state with its own interests,” says Terrell Starr, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and host of the “Black Diplomats” podcast, which focuses on Eastern Europe.

Ukrainians are not passive participants in a game between great powers but people who have become increasingly afraid of Russia as it tries to reexert its regional power. The reason they wanted to join NATO in the first place was their fear of Moscow’s influence, Mr. Starr says.

Many Ukrainians have a darker view of their nation’s experience as a Soviet republic than do Russians. They remember the engineered famine of the Stalin years, when forced collectivization of agriculture devastated harvests and starvation killed upward of 3.9 million people – 13% of Ukraine’s population. And they remember well the Soviet repression of their national identity and the devastating release of radiation at the Soviet-run Chernobyl nuclear plant.

The reason Mr. Putin wants Ukraine back under his control is to re-create the “settler-colonial” model of the Soviet Union, says Mr. Starr, in which Moscow took colonies along its periphery, then settled them with émigrés from the country’s heartland to seed the area with a pro-Russian elite.

“It’s to Putin’s advantage to frame this as a Cold War issue, because he never felt like the Soviet Union should have ended anyway,” says Mr. Starr.