| Summary/Abstract |
Russia has entered a zone of geopolitical and economic turbulence. The country's main foreign policy objective - to create favorable external conditions for domestic development, particularly economic, and national security - has not been achieved, mainly because of Russia's confrontation with the West over Ukraine. Properly speaking, Russia has suffered its greatest geopolitical defeat since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The incorporation of Crimea has somewhat softened, but not counterbalanced, this defeat. The incumbent Ukrainian authorities are not just fully dependent on the West, above all on the United States, but they view this factor as their main foreign policy accomplishment. The U.S. has achieved this at a minimum cost (the $5 billion allocated for "the development of Ukrainian democracy" and made public by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is hardly a significant amount of money for this). Subsidizing the Ukrainian economy for years cost Russia much more, and for now those costs can be considered wasted.
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