ABSTRACT
In 2014, the relationship between the United States and Russia, and between Europe and Russia, hit a post-Cold War low. Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to the imposition of economic sanctions by the United States and the European Union and to countersanctions by Russia. Paradoxically, leaders in other states sometimes agreed that the spread of democracy was good for the United States; for that reason, they saw democratization as a geopolitical threat as much as a matter of domestic politics. The deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations gave the United States an increased interest in bolstering Ukraine's autonomy. Entering a new Cold War, the events in Ukraine in 2014 the history books much the way the elections in Poland and Czechoslovakia or the civil wars in Greece and Turkey regarded in the late 1940s. Domestic politics appear have played directly into the decisions to annex Crimea and intervene in Eastern Ukraine.
