Considering Russia - Emergence of a Near Peer Competitor

In 2014, the Russian Federation appeared to many Western observers to have reemerged on the international stage demonstrating an intent and capability to act as a great power in a way that had not been seen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This evolution began with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the first one hosted in Russia since the end of the Cold War, continued through the invasion and annexation of Crimea, and ended with pro-Russian separatists in control of most of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The world had largely looked past previous Russian violations of Estonian sovereignty through cyberattacks in 2007 and its conventional invasion of Georgia in August 2008; however, as the lights faded on the Olympics and "little green men" appeared on the Crimean Peninsula, it became clear that increased Russian assertiveness was the new norm. Many Western observers saw both something fundamentally innovative in the way Russia waged "ambiguous warfare" in Ukraine and the new cracks in European security architecture.

Is Russia the new Soviet Union starting another Cold War, as suggested by some analysts? Or is this "new Cold War" a far more dangerous time because the West has forgotten how to understand and deal with Russia, and the nuclear dimension of the conflict, in the way it did during the Soviet period? It seems clear that, if the West fails to invest the time necessary to regain knowledge from 1991, a failure to understand Russia could lead to a dangerous dynamic of escalation and strategic miscalculation. Vladimir Putin once contended that the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. From a Western perspective, there might be some truth to this argument in that it led to a sense of apathy about the need to understand and account for Russia's interests and the potential for compromising security in Europe.