The 1997 Russia–Ukraine Friendship Treaty appeared to confirm Ukraine’s borders and to settle the status of the Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol, but many leading Russian politicians opposed it. Ukraine balanced its fear of Russia by becoming a leading participant in NATO’s Partnership for Peace. Meanwhile, the war in Yugoslavia exposed the tension between the western insistence on “European norms” and Russia’s insistence on its prerogatives as a traditional great power. By 1999, Russia was furious at NATO over expansion and Kosovo, and still sought to reintegrate Ukraine. However, the question of Ukraine remained largely distinct from Russia’s broader relationship with the West.

The delay of the Association Agreement spurred protests, and violent repression caused them to grow. Yanukovych’s ouster outraged Putin, who again saw a revolution thwart Russia’s position in Ukraine. He saw an irresistible opportunity to respond. Seizing Crimea regained a territory Russia had always wanted; it showed that Russia could defy the West; it boosted Putin’s domestic popularity; and it hamstrung Ukraine’s new government. The conflict then spread to eastern Ukraine, where the shooting down of a passenger aircraft dramatically increased international outrage at Russia’s actions. The West enacted sanctions, while the conflict itself stabilized territorially in the February 2015 Minsk-2 agreement.

Chapter 5 is the first part of our analytic narrative. We describe equilibrium selection in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan events. The first theater was Crimea. The question was whether Russian-speaking elites in peripheral communities would accept the first storyline (“Dignity”) and remain loyal to the Ukrainian state, or accept the second storyline (“coup”) and opt for sedition. Elites in Crimea coordinated rapidly on sedition. The only militias in the streets were pro-Russia (though a brave pro-Ukraine demonstration by Crimean Tatars is described). Russian soldiers arrived to secure parliament. The Party of Regions networks served a coordinating function, repurposing state institutions to legitimize the Russian presence and ensuring institutional continuity. Crimeans voted, Russia claimed self-determination, and the government in Kyiv was checkmated. Coordinated sedition was a fait accompli.

The Sultanate drew upon concepts of martial skill, valor and aggression attributed to the Mongol Imperium and its unprecedented conquests. While idealizing these traits, Mamluk Sultans exploited them to thwart Mongol expansion into their territories. They welcomed renegades from Mongol armies (Wafidiyya) to mimic their prowess while limiting their aggression. Mamluk cadets were imported initially from the Qipjaq Steppe in Central Asia, subsequently from Circassia in the Caucasus, with numerous other regions represented. They were instructed in Arabic, Turkish and Islam prior to being trained in arms. The Mamluk military hierarchy consisted of elite Mamluks imported as cadets in the Sultan’s service, Mamluks of senior officers, soldiers of former rulers restive over their loss of status, and descendants of 1st-generation Mamluks who served as infantry and assimilated into Arabic civil society (awlad al-nas). Advancement through the military hierarchy was marked by endemic factional rivalry in which conspiracy was expected not repudiated. Whether conspiracy enhanced the Sultanate’s military prowess or destabilized its governance remains a debated issue.

The Crimean War was not the first time Britons made their ways to the Black Sea peninsula, but it was the decisive occasion to place the land in the national consciousness, giving rise to travel narratives in newspapers, diaries, and letters. These accounts by wartime adventurers provided ways of understanding the Crimea, cosmopolitan and foreign in British eyes, during the conflict and after. Even while showcasing far-away lands, they showed Britons, the English especially, to be reluctant travelers, glad to head homeward at war’s end. After the troops exited the peninsula and across the Victorian age, return narratives cast the Crimea as a place of memory and self-discovery. During the twentieth century, global politics made the peninsula a stage for world wars and for international diplomacy, culminating in the Yalta Conference of 1945. In the postwar era and until the 2014 Russian invasion, the peninsula became a tourist destination, giving Britons a view behind the Iron Curtain and a glimpse of a post-Soviet Age. Across these changes, Crimean War narratives provided frameworks that allowed Britons to understand history, apprehend travel, and assess themselves.

It is common to think of languages and countries as simply matching up, but this is by no means always so. Most people in England do speak English; the citizens of France mainly speak French; the language of Germany is German; people in Spain speak Spanish; and in Italy they use Italian. But things are actually much more complicated than that.

Some worry that international peace may some day be punctured either by the rise of China as a challenger country or by excessive assertiveness by Russia backed by its large nuclear arsenal. Each wants to play a greater role on the world stage, but they are both trading states and do not seem to be territorially expansive (except for China on Taiwan), and do not have the wherewithal or, it seems, the ambition, to “run the world.” Indeed, there is a danger of making China into a threat by treating it as such. The dispute between Russia and neighboring Ukraine in 2014 was a unique and opportunistic escapade that proved to be costly to the perpetrators. Russian cybergeek interference in the 2016 US presidential election scarcely constituted a security threat: election fake news simply became higher and deeper. China, Russia, and Iran may present some “challenges” to U.S. policy, but none really presents a palpable security threat requiring large standing forces. Indeed, all three seem to be descending into stagnation. The current “new Cold War,” then, is quite a bit like the old one: an expensive, substantially militarized, and often hysterical campaign to deal with threats that do not exist or are likely to self-destruct.

The intense release of energy by four successive earthquakes that we analysed in the second chapter and the aftershocks they have triggered has rendered seismic dynamism systemic. The most significant feature of this systemic earthquake is the 'fragility' that it has fostered in every component of the system. Fragility is defined as the loss of internal harmony and resistance in the structural components of any order as a result of earthquake impacts.

An analysis at the national, regional and global levels of the fragilities caused by the systemic earthquake process currently under way is of critical importance with respect to developing the ability to conduct a damage assessment of these fragilities, preparing for the possibilities of a surprise collapse, and taking the necessary measures for rehabilitation.

The third chapter examines the effects of the systemic earthquake that has emerged from within this accumulated legacy on national, regional and global structures.

Chapter six sets a counterpoint to this argument, exploring cases in which the Muslim population proved uncooperative with, or openly resisted, state institutions, including the judiciary, police, and local administration. Most of these cases were related to land issues and the fear of forced conversion in the Volga region. In Crimea, where forced conversion was less of a threat and where land had been surveyed and demarcated earlier, most remaining disputes could be fought out in court by the 1870s.

Introducing the two regions at the heart of this study, chapter two maps out the geographical, political, economic, and cultural setting of the book. While it focuses on the years around the Great Reforms, it puts this period into broader perspective, tracing continuity and change throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter combines elements of temporal and spatial comparison, highlighting the distinctiveness of the two regions and their similarities. First, it discusses their dynamic, and diverging, role in the imperial imagination. While both regions were considered to be different from both the empire’s peripheries and traditional heartlands, they were appropriated as part of the imperial core, in discourse and in practice. Second, the chapter reviews the demographic composition of the two territories, their changing institutional landscapes and forms of governance. Finally, it charts the socio-economic conditions under which people lived, while paying close attention to the effects of migration. In all of these questions, the situation of Muslim Tatars is foregrounded.

The introduction poses the question of how we should best understand the military conflict that began in 2014, showing why the prevailing explanations are insufficient. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many analysts believed that the problems of security in central Europe had disappeared. Security challenges did not disappear in 1991 and resurface later, but rather persisted. This chapter uses three concepts in international relations theory – the security dilemma, loss aversion, and the democratic peace – that will be used throughout the book to show why the new conflicts could not easily be managed.

The 1997 Russia-Ukraine Friendship Treaty appeared to confirm Ukraine’s borders and to settle the status of the Black Sea Fleet and Sevastopol, but many leading Russian politicians opposed it. Ukraine balanced its fear of Russia by becoming a leading participant in NATO’s Partnership for Peace. Meanwhile, the war in Yugoslavia exposed the tension between the western insistence on “European norms” and Russia’s insistence on its prerogatives as a traditional great power. By 1999, Russia was furious at NATO over expansion and Kosovo, and still sought to reintegrate Ukraine. However, the question of Ukraine remained largely distinct from Russia’s broader relationship with the West.

The delay of the Association Agreement spurred protests, and violent repression caused them to grow. Yanukovych’s ouster outraged Putin, who again saw a revolution thwart Russia’s position in Ukraine. He saw an irresistible opportunity to respond. Seizing Crimea regained a territory Russia had always wanted; it showed that Russia could defy the West; it boosted Putin’s domestic popularity; and it hamstrung Ukraine’s new government. The conflict then spread to eastern Ukraine, where the shooting down of a passenger aircraft dramatically increased international outrage at Russia’s actions. The West enacted sanctions, while the conflict itself stabilized territorially in the February 2015 Minsk-2 agreement.

The chapter identifies warnings within the EU foreign policy system related to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and examines the reasons for the differentiated impact among EU decision-makers. The Ukraine case was a strategic surprise to the overwhelming majority of EU policy-makers and posed significant diagnostic problems, but senior ministers within the system were warning their peers on the basis of previous cases, historical analogies, expert knowledge and recent indications of changed Russian intent. However, the persuasiveness of the few and late warnings suffered, first of all, from distraction by external crises coupled with limited bandwidth in the EU, shortages in relevant and reliable intelligence, high resistance against divergent policy predispositions of the warning and, finally, significant suspicions of national biases against key warning sources. The supranational part of the system was almost completely blindsided to geopolitical risk, while the newly established EEAS was partly unable and partly unwilling to persuade the Commission. It is fair to say that the system as a whole acted as an impediment to having a holistic discussion of warning as part of foreign policy discourse.