Russia had planned to transport more gas to Europe via its new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany, but Berlin froze regulatory approval of the project after Russia’s invasion. The flow of Russian gas through Ukraine continued in early 2022 despite the outbreak of wider hostilities between the two countries. Russia has relied on Ukrainian pipelines to pump its gas to customers in Central and Eastern Europe for decades, and it pays billions of dollars per year in transit fees to Kyiv. Prior to its invasion of Crimea, Russia had hoped to pull Ukraine into its single market, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which today includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.Įnergy. China eventually surpassed Russia in trade with Ukraine. Russia was for a long time Ukraine’s largest trading partner, although this link withered dramatically in recent years. The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the dominant maritime force in the region. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.” However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both Russia and Crimea longed for a return of the peninsula. Losing a permanent hold on Ukraine, and letting it fall into the Western orbit, would be seen by many as a major blow to Russia’s international prestige.Ĭrimea. After the Soviet collapse, many Russian politicians viewed the divorce with Ukraine as a mistake of history and a threat to Russia’s standing as a great power. Moscow claimed a duty to protect these people as a pretext for its actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Approximately eight million ethnic Russians were living in Ukraine as of 2001, according to a census taken that year, mostly in the south and east. And it was Christianity that served as the anchor for Kievan Rus, the early Slavic state from which modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians draw their lineage. It was in Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries that Christianity was brought from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is sometimes referred to as “the mother of Russian cities,” on par in terms of cultural influence with Moscow and St. Russia and Ukraine have strong familial bonds that go back centuries.

Russia has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Ukraine, and in many ways Ukraine is central to Russia’s identity and vision for itself in the world.įamily ties. What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine? In February 2022, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the aim of toppling the Western-aligned government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A more nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking population in western parts of the country generally supported greater integration with Europe, while a mostly Russian-speaking community in the east favored closer ties with Russia. However, Kyiv struggled to balance its foreign relations and to bridge deep internal divisions. In its three decades of independence, Ukraine has sought to forge its own path as a sovereign state while looking to align more closely with Western institutions, including the EU and NATO. Ukraine was so vital to the union that its decision to sever ties in 1991 proved to be a coup de grâce for the ailing superpower. Behind only Russia, it was the second-most-populous and -powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, home to much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries, and military, including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union, the archrival of the United States during the Cold War. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point? Ukraine’s place in the world, including its future alignment with institutions such as the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hangs in the balance. It remains unclear if and how a diplomatic resolution could emerge. With expanding Western aid, Ukraine has managed to frustrate many aspects of Russia’s attack, but many of its cities have been pulverized and one-quarter of its citizens are now refugees or have been displaced. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a dramatic escalation of the eight-year-old conflict and a historic turning point for European security. CFR’s Blackwill on U.S.-China Relations, Ukraine, U.S.

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