The Integration Policies of Belarus and Ukraine vis-à-vis the EU and Russia: A Comparative Case Study Through the Prism of a Two-Level Game Approach(197 Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society)

The escalating rivalry between the EU and Russia in their shared neighborhood creates important economic, political, and legal challenges for the lands-in-between. Belarus and Ukraine have received proposals of integration from both the EU and Russia. However, the extents to which they accepted these offers differ and result from a multitude of factors as well as their interplay affecting the policy choices of their governments. International integration is a foreign policy question, but it has a strong domestic dimension, too. Explaining various integration stances demands considering a country’s foreign and internal affairs. Alla 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. Her research results benefit from triangulation through primary documents analysis and semi-structured interviews with elites and experts in Minsk, Moscow, Brussels, and Washington, DC. The book analyses how the simultaneity of European and Eurasian integration challenged the two countries to make a major strategic integration choice. The study sheds light on the reasons for and genesis of the Ukraine Crisis, and on how external actors, such as the EU, can succeed in facilitating domestic reforms in Eastern Partnership countries.

About the Author :
Dr. Alla Leukavets has an interdisciplinary background and holds several postgraduate degrees. After studying law at the Belarusian State Economics University, she pursued an MA programme 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, Alla Leukavets completed several traineeships, inter alia, at the European Parliament in Brussels and the UK Parliament in London. She has published in, among other outlets, Belarus-Analysen and Russian Analytical Digest.

Review :
"A solid and valuable piece of academic work. This clearly structured and factually rich book benefits from and contributes to several theoretical and empirical scholarly literatures. It is a useful guide to the collection, organization, assessment, and interpretation of the enormous amount of relevant historical and contemporary evidence."—Peter Mayer, Professor of International Relations, University of Bremen "A rich and thorough empirical analysis."—Frank Schimmelfennig, Professor of European Politics, ETH Zürich "Methodologically well-designed and thoroughly researched, this book, originally a doctoral thesis, scrupulously considers a number of factors [...] and delivers a detailed, empirically rich and theoretically informed account of ‘two+-level games’ observed in Ukraine’s and Belarus’ strategic interactions vis-à-vis both the European Union and Russia in 1994–2020. Victoria Leukavets’ work deserves attention and could well serve as an authoritative source to rethink and reassess the promises and pitfalls of sovereignty games before and after February 2022." —Andriy Tyushka, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 77:2, 2025.