Grapevine

How Soviet legacy has influenced foreign policy in Georgia and Ukraine

The legacy of the Soviet Union's collapse plays a greater role in the foreign policies of Georgia and Ukraine than previous studies have suggested. Conducting foreign policy in former Soviet countries can be a major challenge as the Russian state does not accept the new order. These are the findings outlined in the thesis of political scientist Per Ekman from Uppsala University.

"To understand Russia's war in Ukraine, for example, it is important to see the war as part of a longer historical event. Since their first day of independence, Georgia and Ukraine have had to deal with Russian ambitions to control the region. For many in the West, it took a long time after the end of the Cold War to realize that a significant part of the Russian political leadership had not let go of the idea of controlling the countries that Moscow ruled during the Soviet era," explains Ekman, doctor of political science at Uppsala University.

The end of the Cold War has often been described as peaceful because it did not lead to a world war. For Georgia and several other Soviet republics, however, the period was far from peaceful, with conflicts in several border regions, including with Russian involvement. In his thesis, Ekman shows how these experiences came to characterize the foreign policy that was subsequently pursued.

In the late 1990s, there was a strong desire in Georgia to create distance from Russia, something which was reinforced after the Rose Revolution in 2003. Russia's interference in the country's independence process was perceived by policymakers as highly negative and a main reason behind Georgia losing the conflicts with the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the 1990s.

"These early experiences pushed Georgia away from Russia and towards closer cooperation with the US, NATO and the EU, despite Russian protests and the fact that Georgia received no security guarantees from the West," notes Ekman.