Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 102

Are Russia’s newly resurrected expansionist
tendencies the harbinger of a secret plan for world
conquest, or do they signal something else altogether?
Why should the United States be concerned at all?
The fact is that the United States should be concerned
because in the evolving global system, both nations
are going to need each other—a lot. Consequently,
anything the United States can do to more fully grasp
the underlying motivations for Russia’s apparent
newfound aggressiveness, and to use such insight to
shape policy aimed as assuaging the bitterness Russia
currently harbors toward the United States, will be
hugely important to U.S. national interests.
For better or worse, the two nations share similar
threats to both their long-term security and their national identities. Consequently, the policy priorities of
the United States should focus on cultivating Russia
as a valued ally instead of continuing with ham-fisted
efforts to publicly humiliate it into compliance with
American wishes on the world stage over such issues
as its relationship with Ukraine. This is only serving
at present to convert Russia back into a Cold War-like
adversary.
Unquestionably, preservation of Ukraine as an
independent, sovereign nation should be a serious objective but one that can be best achieved by a concerted effort to see the issue from a Russian perspective
and reasonably accommodate Russian concerns and
interests.

The Return of Russia as a Great
Power?
A good place to start any critical analysis of the
Russian viewpoint regarding the events in Ukraine is
to consider whether Russia has any legitimate vested
interest in that nation. From the Russian perspective,
it certainly does. Russian interests stem in large part
from historical roots in Ukraine. Ethnic Russians see
Ukraine as the ancestral home of the founders of the
Russian nation itself—the Kievan Rus. Consequently,
Ukraine has been regarded for the better part of a
millennium by many ethnic Russians as an integral
part of Russian territory.2 (Most ethnic Ukrainians
appear to disagree with that premise.)
Irrespective of either f