Faced with the double crisis of 2008 the reaction of Eastern Europe was not uniform. The Baltics stayed the course. Hungarian nationalism rebelled. But nowhere was the double shock more jarring than in Ukraine. The coincidence of the escalation of geopolitical tension between Russia and the West with the financial crisis dealt a shuddering blow to its fragile polity. The route to the Ukraine crisis of 2013 was twisted. But the path that it would travel down was mapped out already five years earlier.
