title: The road to war
abstract: In this chapter we explore the dynamics of the Russian approach to the nations of the post-Soviet Eurasia. We show that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s claims for regional leadership seemed reasonable and the strategy of ‘soft dominance’ that implied the use of a combination of economic concessions and sanctions to limit Western influence in the post-Soviet countries as well as launching integration projects, did have some chance of developing into genuine regional leadership. T