Of the Soviet Union’s fourteen non-Russian successor states, none was more important to Moscow than Ukraine. With more than 40 million inhabitants, a strategic location on the Black Sea, the world’s most fertile farmland, and a military-industrial sector deeply integrated into Russia’s own, Ukraine was in many ways the former crown jewel of the Soviet Union. It was also home to Sevastopol, where Russia operated its most critical warm-water naval port. “It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former U.S. national security advisor, in 1994. An Oxbridge don put it in less delicate terms: “With the Ukraine, Russia is a USA; without, she is a Canada—mostly snow.”
CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman