Published in 2019 Ukraine’s uneven incorporation into the global capitalist system after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian capitalism’s internal contradictions and shifts of power between oligarchic blocs and their unfolding in the context of neo-imperialist rivalry between the USA, the EU, and Russia. Some of the major outcomes of that dialectic that facilitated a major multilevel crisis of 2013–2014 and led to the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of the southern peninsula Crimea, and the war in eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. A critical review of the major narratives on the nature and role of Western and Russian imperialisms in Ukraine’s crisis.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51