Ideas Papers

What did Putin misunderstand about Russia’s ‘near abroad’? In short, he did not grasp that a higher linkage between Russia and its ‘near abroad’ could in fact lead to increased Russian leverage, rather than the other way around. By applying the concepts of leverage and linkage, the paper offers several important pointers with respect to how reverse sequence effects could have precluded the considerable human and material losses inflicted by Russia’s unjustified full-scale military invasion of Ukraine.