Authors
Damian Strycharz1; Mateusz Filary-Szczepanik2; 1 Krakow University of Economics, Poland; 2 Ignatianum University in Cracow, Poland Discussion
This article engages with the existing studies on the causes of the war in Ukraine. Among the various interpretations in literature, realist argumentation (e.g. Mearsheimer 2022) states that Russia invaded Ukraine out of fear of NATO’s enlargement. This paper argues that it was not the fear per se, but rather Russian elites’ perception of international environment as decreasingly permissive for the pursuit of Russian interests, that made the Moscow’s risky decision a reality. To explain the Russian invasion, we use Taliaferro’s work on prospect theory and great power intervention in the periphery (2004) and the subsequent literature that uses this theory in foreign policy analysis. We test the hypothesis based on prospect theory that the Russian elite’s initial outlook of the international environment after the annexation of Crimea was permissive, but after almost a decade, the perception of the environment changed to a more sombre. This led to the higher risk propensity of the Russian elites, which was one of the main reasons behind the decision to invade the Ukraine. To test this hypothesis we employ qualitative content analysis on the original dataset consisting of Putin’s speeches from the years leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2014-2022). Consequently, the article aims to understand the sources of the Russian threat, which may contribute to appropriate responses to them in the future. Furthermore, the paper has the theoretical goal of bringing together FPA and IR theory by combining prospect theory with neoclassical realism. 
