ABSTRACT
Historians, as well as Putin, might argue that the modern Ukraine crisis began with Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea from the Russian Socialist Federal Republic to the Ukrainian Socialist Federal Republic to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Ukrainian–Russian unification. Since both republics were within the Soviet Union, this was a symbolic event, until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when the location of Crimea in newly independent Ukraine became significant. Despite the statement’s literal meaning, it was in fact intended to defer Ukraine’s and Georgia’s NATO membership indefinitely – that is, forever. But Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, read it as a formal commitment to make Ukraine and Georgia allies. Within the US policy community, as part of the backdrop to the Ukraine crisis and US–Russia relations more broadly, there is a widespread conviction that the United States must be ‘number one’ and cannot tolerate challenges from a so-called near-peer competitor.
