Book Talk – Everyone Loses: the Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Please join us for a book talk with Samuel Charap, co-author of Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Routledge, 2017). Support for this event was provided by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Disorder erupted in Ukraine in 2014, involving the overthrow of a sitting government, the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and a violent insurrection, supported by Moscow, in the east of the country.

This Adelphi book argues that the crisis has yielded a ruinous outcome, in which all the parties are worse off and international security has deteriorated. This negative-sum scenario resulted from years of zero-sum behaviour on the part of Russia and the West in post-Soviet Eurasia, which the authors rigorously analyse. The rivalry was manageable in the early period after the Cold War, only to become entrenched and bitter a decade later. The upshot has been systematic losses for Russia, the West and the countries caught in between.

All the governments involved must recognise that long-standing policies aimed at achieving one-sided advantage have reached a dead end, Charap and Colton argue, and commit to finding mutually acceptable alternatives through patient negotiation.

Samuel Charap is the Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in the Institute’s Washington, DC office. He focuses on the political economy and foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; Western policy toward the region; and US-Russia deterrence, strategic stability and arms control. Prior to joining the Institute, Dr. Charap served at the U.S. Department of State as Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, where he covered Russia and Eurasia. From 2009-2011, Dr. Charap was Director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank. Dr. Charap is author of the forthcoming Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (Routledge, 2017). His articles have been published in the Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History, New York Times, and several other journals and newspapers.

From Columbia’s Harriman Institute.