Ukraine’s future as a cohesive, European-style state remains very much in doubt. For Russia, this crisis represents the best opportunity since 1991 to reevaluate its policy in the post-Soviet space in the face of a new international environment.

       Political scientist Timofei Bordachev on the lessons Russian diplomats should take from the Ukrainian crisis .

       “We don’t have oil, but we have ideas.” Such was the European response to the 1973 oil crisis.

       What precipitated the political crisis in Ukraine in 2013 was the idea of EU sages to use the free trade agreement with Ukraine against Russia. Brussels, having carefully studied Russia’s policy toward its neighbor to the south, realized that any attempts by Moscow to escape this trap would look like pressure on Ukraine. European officials expected that Yanukovych’s decision to deny Ukraine its “European choice” would set off a chain reaction resulting in the overthrow of his rotten regime.

       Many of my colleagues in the United States and Europe openly cheered the outcome in Ukraine as the true end of the Cold War. And yet Ukraine’s future as a cohesive, European-style state remains very much in doubt.

       For Russia, this crisis represents the best opportunity since 1991 to reevaluate its policy in the post-Soviet space in the face of a new international environment, and to draw the appropriate conclusions, some of which I will describe below.

       Regardless of what happens next, it is absolutely necessary to rule out any measures aimed at limiting the freedom of movement between Russia and Ukraine, such as visas or tough border control. The Banderovites attempting to seize Kiev have no reason to go to Russia anyway, and visa restrictions would hit Russian speakers in the south-east and Crimea the hardest.

       On the contrary, Russia should do all it can to show its commitment to uninhibited contact between people of different nations. In fact, the circumstances call for even greater efforts to promote Russian language and culture in “pro-Russian” regions and organize exchange programs for university and school students. Russia should raise quotas on students from Donbass, Kharkov and Crimea at Russian universities specializing in the humanities. There’s no point in training engineers. We should produce graduates who contribute to the world of ideas and images.

       Similar programs once helped the United States to foster a sense of kinship with Britain and later the rest of Europe.

       Since the new Ukrainian government will most likely sign the association agreement with the EU, Russia should host several conferences with the participation of international experts on the topic, “Why Russia will not pay for the Ukraine-EU association,” as an opportunity to commission and promote serious research on this issue.

       Western propaganda and Russia’s own missteps have made it easier to portray any future changes in Ukraine’s trade and economic relations with Russia caused by the EU-Ukraine free trade area as pressure from Russia. Even if Russia could silence its most zealous pseudo-imperialists, it would still be hard to change this perception. But we must try.

       It is essential to understand that the West scored its geopolitical victory over Russia by making common cause with far-right nationalists, who pose the greatest threat to the political stability and elites of the Old World. Russia cannot even theoretically contemplate giving them a seat at the table. We will just have to wait until they collapse under the weight of the irresponsible economic policies typical of the far-right.

       The question is how much harm these builders of the Ukrainian nation state will do to the country and its economy, and what role Moscow will play in the next act of the Ukrainian drama.

       Russia must get more serious about the Eurasian integration project and the Customs Union. To ensure that Minsk is not next, Russia should meet its partners Belarus and Kazakhstan halfway and transfer as much regulatory activity as possible to the supranational level. It is also necessary to consolidate the institutional and legal foundation of the union.

       We must explain to Belarusian, Kazakh and Russian citizens day and night how they personally stand to benefit from integration. Russia should step up talks with Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. It should support transferring responsibility for many trade and economic issues (including those related to Ukraine) to the Eurasian Economic Commission. Russia should at least involve the commission’s chairman in all meetings conducted by Astana, Minsk and Moscow with foreign partners at the highest level.

       It is time Moscow stopped positioning the Eurasian project as a foreign policy initiative of the Russian Federation.

       We need to realize that skilled diplomacy no longer guarantees victory in international politics. The past year was a success for our foreign policy and we got a bit carried away. As in the good old days, we started relying on panache and sheer luck in the hope of producing maximum results by paradoxical diplomatic moves, most prominently in Syria.

       But modern foreign policy also calls for consistency and cohesiveness.

       Consistency means making a concerted, large-scale effort to elaborate multi-move combinations and scenarios. It means working closely with the expert community, training highly qualified young experts and, most importantly, making a habit of systemic, multi-variant planning instead of falling back into our national habit of waiting till the last minute.

       Compared to our competitors, Russia has a negligible number of intellectual centers and think tanks. While our diplomatic corps is brilliant, it is also fairly small.

       Cohesiveness means working as closely as possible with the business community and civil society to pursue national foreign policy goals. Modern forms of public-private partnership make it possible to put private companies in charge of even the most intricate foreign policy operations.

       This applies, for one, to organizing citizen action. Government agencies alone cannot do everything. The other side in Ukraine had been tirelessly working on the broadest possible front – in the media, social media, on squares and international venues. Russia should learn from this experience, just as we did 150 years ago when allied steamships and guns were assaulting Crimea.

       We should take the lessons of Ukraine and become more flexible and consistent in pursuing our long-term goals. We should try to live up to the reputation created by our great ancestors who, as Chancellor Bismarck aptly put it, “always come back for their money.”

       This article was originally published in Russian in Известия newspaper.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.