Why this Ukrainian ‘revolution’ may be doomed, too
Home
Lucian Kim
Friday, May 22, 2015 – MOST Ukrainians wanted their country to be different by now. Even those who didn’t support the Maidan protest two winters ago were fed up with living in Europe’s most corrupt country. When then-President Viktor Yanukovych fled office after the demonstrations turned bloody in February 2014, the civic activists behind the protest movement hoped to turn their country from a dysfunctional kleptocracy into a rule-of-law democracy worthy of European Union membership.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stealth annexation of Crimea and his sponsorship of an insurrection in eastern Ukraine imperiled the country’s reform drive from the start. Despite the Kremlin’s intervention, Ukrainians elected a new president, Petro Poroshenko, followed by a new parliament with a strong mandate for change. Now frustration is growing about the pace of reform — not only domestically but among the country’s biggest backers abroad. If it isn’t torn apart by war, Ukraine risks slipping back into a gray zone between Russia and Europe. The pro-reform Orange Revolution nine years ago ended in squabbling among its leaders, opening the way to Yanukovych’s election as president in 2010.
At home, there is the possibility of more protests, a paralyzed government, and the rise of politicians seeking accommodation with Putin. “Slow and unsuccessful reforms are a bigger existential threat than the Russian aggression,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, a security expert at Kyiv’s Razumkov Center. Even if Ukrainians don’t return to the street, they’ll get a chance to voice their discontent at the ballot box. Local elections are due in the fall — and the governing coalition between Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is so shaky that nobody can rule out an early parliamentary vote.
In its international relations, Ukraine is living on borrowed time — and money. A dispute over restructuring $23 billion in debt broke into the open last week with the Finance Ministry accusing foreign creditors of not negotiating in good faith ahead of a June deadline. An EU summit this week is likely to end in more disappointment, as Western European countries are reluctant to grant Ukrainians visa-free travel.
Kyiv has become an accidental, burdensome ally to the West. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization only paid lip service to future Ukrainian membership, while the EU, which never had any intention of taking in Ukraine, pushed an association agreement out of bureaucratic habit more than strategic vision.
When Yanukovych backed out of the EU deal at the last minute after coming under pressure from Putin, the first protesters showed up on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, in November 2013. Ordinary Ukrainians were holding up the “European values” that feckless EU leaders trumpeted at every opportunity. For Western Europeans who take their freedom, prosperity, and security for granted, the bloodshed on the Maidan was a rude awakening. Today, people in Kyiv remind visitors that Ukrainians were the first Europeans to die under the EU flag.
Larger in area than France and almost as populous as Spain, Ukraine is hard to ignore. But saddled with its own tests of internal unity, the EU would be more than happy to forget about its troubled eastern neighbor. The challenges facing the Kyiv government are enough to give anybody a headache, and Poroshenko has repeatedly warned that a string of bad news could lead to “Ukraine fatigue” in the West. Plenty of Europeans miss the status quo ante — before the imposition of sanctions on the Kremlin — when Russia was open for business and Ukraine’s raison d’être was delivering Siberian natural gas via its pipelines.
Ukrainians now worry that following the German-brokered Minsk peace agreement, the conflict in the east of the country will enter a new phase — not hot enough to be called a war but explosive enough to divert resources and scare off foreign investment. The threat of fascism was always a hobgoblin created by Kremlin propagandists; the real danger facing Ukraine is getting stuck in the dysfunction of the past. The brazen murders of pro-Russian journalist Oles Buzyna and former Yanukovych ally Oleh Kalashnikov in April are indicative of a government that is unable or unwilling to protect its critics.
—Courtesy: By Reuters