Victoria Leukavets

The escalating rivalry between the EU and Russia in their shared neighborhood creates important economic, political, and legal challenges for the so-called states-in-between — Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Over the analyzed timeline (1994-2020), Belarus and Ukraine, which are the largest of the states-in-between, have received integration proposals from both the EU and Russia. However, the extents to which they accepted these offers differ and result from a multitude of factors affecting the policy choices of their governments. International integration is a foreign policy question, but it also includes a significant domestic dimension. Therefore, explaining various integration stances demands considering a country’s foreign and internal affairs. Victoria Leukavets applies here Putnam’s two-level game theoretical approach in combination with findings from Europeanization literature and democracy promotion studies. She develops various actor-centered and structural explanatory variables and applies them in the subsequent empirical analysis. The book analyzes how the simultaneity of European and Eurasian integration challenged Belarus and Ukraine to make their major strategic integration choices. The study sheds light on the reasons for and genesis of the 2014 Ukraine Crisis, and on how external actors, such as the EU, can succeed in facilitating domestic reforms in Eastern Partnership countries.

Victoria Leukavets is a research fellow at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies. She has an interdisciplinary background and holds several postgraduate degrees. After studying law at the Belarusian State Economic University, she pursued MA in human rights at the University of Manchester. She received her second MA degree in EU international relations from the College of Europe and did a PhD in political science at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. In addition, Victoria Leukavets completed several traineeships and fellowships, inter alia, at the European Parliament in Brussels, the UK Parliament in London, Harvard Davis Center and Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has published in, among other outlets, Belarus-Analysen, Russian Analytical Digest, Caucasus Survey and New Perspectives.

"A rich and thorough empirical analysis."—Frank Schimmelfennig, Professor of European Politics, ETH Zürich

"A solid and valuable piece of academic work. It addresses an interesting puzzle in the field of post-Soviet integration politics, the relevance of which is further increased by the political significance of the developments under study, which have contributed to an ongoing crisis of European and international security. This clearly structured and factually rich book benefits from and contributes to several theoretical and empirical scholarly literatures. It develops an analytical framework that proves to be a useful guide to the collection, organization, assessment, and interpretation of the enormous amount of relevant historical and contemporary empirical material." -- Peter Mayer, Professor of International Relations, University of Bremen