Europe's attractiveness as a soft power to Central and Eastern European countries was seen by Russia as power politics, aimed at preventing the emergence of a new Russian sphere of influence. The attractiveness and the actual outcomes of European soft power were undeniable. Central and Eastern European countries enjoyed a massive growth spurt after they joined the European institutions. The Baltic States, once part of the Soviet Union, changed unrecognisably as a result of increasing prosperity. The countries that remained outside the European institutions, such as Ukraine and Belarus, lagged far behind. The World Bank found that the Ukrainian economy remained the same in the period between 1990 and 2012, whilst the Polish economy quadrupled.

Europe's attractiveness poses a direct threat to Russia and is as dangerous as NATO's hard power. Europe's soft power is preventing Moscow from creating its own sphere of influence within the borders of the former Soviet Union. Optimism initially prevailed in the West regarding relations with Russia. As early as the time of the German reunification, however, the foundations were being laid for the problems that eventually led to the Ukraine crisis of 2014. This is shown in accounts such as that by the American professor of international relations, Mary Elise Sarotte, in International Security.

To start with, the fall of the Soviet Union was a humiliating experience for the country's leaders and large swathes of the population. For many decades, both leaders and people had taken for granted the true and invincible nature of the Marxist course, which had transformed rural, Tsarist Russia into a superpower with deterrent capability in the form of a nuclear weapons arsenal and an economy built on heavy industry that brought prosperity to all. At least, that was the story.

Towards the end of the 1980s, it became clear how decayed the economy was and how little support the Soviet leaders could count upon. In 1986 the last General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, began to experiment with openness (glasnost) and reform (perestroika). This revealed great discontent amongst the population, intensified by an economic crisis. Falling welfare levels threatened as a result, and the communist leadership lost its legitimacy in the eyes of many of the people.