Lawrence Freedman Survival: Global Politics and Strategy June–July 2014 "In this article, I will first describe the basic principles of crisis management as developed during the Cold War. I will then consider the origins of the Ukraine crisis, before seeking to apply these principles to its management in the spring of 2014. Crisis management turns, in the end, on how core interests are defined, and the risks that a state is prepared to run to defend them. In the first instance, the crisis over Ukraine was about that country’s own identity and chosen direction in its economic and foreign policy. Those choices, and the manner in which they were made, made this far more of a crisis for Russia than for the US and its European allies by challenging President Putin’s project for the creation of a Eurasian Union that could provide some compensation for the loss of the Soviet Union. The Western response reflected the fact that Ukraine was not a core interest. What did matter, however, was a pattern of Russian behaviour that threatened to unsettle not only Ukraine but the whole region, including members of NATO. This required reaffirming the benefits of alliance to those members and drawing Moscow’s attention to the potential costs of continuing with a campaign of ‘distraction, deception and destabilisation’ against Ukraine.6 The main costs to be faced by Russia lay not in countervailing military pressure by NATO but in the loss of any prospect of Ukraine joining a Eurasian Union, along with its potential economic revival in association with the EU, and, more immediately, a sharp deterioration in Russia’s own economic position."