ABSTRACT
Power relations between the US and Russia insistently affirm Tolstoy's claim in Anna Karenina that unhappy families possess myriad forms of expressing their unhappiness. With the Soviet collapse, Russia endured a national trauma and transition from imperialism that, arguably, the Kremlin handled with relative deftness. The vast Soviet military industrial complex proved a massive burden for the economy and Russia achieved one of the most impressive demilitarization's of modern history after 1991. In 2014, former US officials Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates and Madeleine Albright publicly 'agreed Russia's assault on Ukraine's independence is the most serious crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War' and Barack Obama's 'greatest foreign policy test'. Referring to the contested territory in south-eastern Ukraine as Novorossiya, Vladimir Putin served notice that, for all its alleged respect for Westphalian norms, Moscow was no longer in the business of adhering to the post-Cold War consensus of considering the former Soviet republics as independent, sovereign states.
