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This has been a year of rising tensions in Central and Eastern Europe. Russia imposed sanctions on Ukraine last fall to discourage then-President Viktor Yanukovich from following through on his commitment to sign an Association Agreement with the EU, causing Yanukovich to back out of the agreement, and this led to angry and determined protests on the streets of Kiev. After a tense stand-off with police that continued through the depths of winter, violent clashes broke out that eventually culminated in Yanukovich’s ouster on February 21. Parliament elected an interim president and set a date for elections in May, and Petro Poroshenko, a moderate politician and billionaire businessman, was elected with a generous majority in the first round.
Petro Poroshenko, the new president of Ukraine
2010 Presidential Election Yanukovich vs. Timoshenko


Russia was not so easily deflected from its ambitions in Ukraine, however. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, seems to view uprisings against authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet Union as personal affronts and potential challenges to his own rule in Russia. Mass protests have a way of jumping over national boundaries, and small-scale protests began to emerge in Moscow in the wake of events in Ukraine. In a well-rehearsed and almost bloodless campaign, Russia seized the region of Crimea with special-forces troops without uniforms, and the Russian Duma almost immediately annexed the region. This action met broad approval in Russian popular opinion, which has long been vexed by what Russians saw as Crimea’s anomalous status as a province of Ukraine. It also fueled a surge of national feeling in Russia, accompanied, although this may seem an odd reaction to Western opinion, by a resurgence of anti-Americanism. The narrative that has become most deeply entrenched in Russia is that America is somehow responsible for all of Russia’s humiliations, and it is time for Russia to reassert its role as a great power.
Stone


The seizure of Ukrainian territory upset one of the fundamental norms of the post-World War II order in Europe, violated Russia’s commitments under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki Accords, and the terms of the 1994 agreement between Russia, the United States and Ukraine under which Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union in return for territorial guarantees. It was condemned in the United States and the EU, which responded by imposing narrowly-targeted sanctions on a list of Russian individuals and a few firms judged to be close to Putin. This has been controversial. Sanctions are always controversial, because they rarely achieve their goals in the short term, but in this case the question is whether the limited response is proportional to the provocation. Indeed, Putin has responded by ridiculing the sanctions in public. In private, however, Russian leaders seem to regard the sanctions as an ominous signal of what the United States could do to disrupt the Russian banking sector if the crisis widens.

Russia continues to support irregular forces in the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that have seized public buildings in a dozen cities and complete control of a few towns. These are apparently not, as was at first reported, composed of Russian military servicemen, but they are primarily composed of Russian citizens who are indirectly supplied by the Russian government. It seems unlikely that Russia intends to annex these regions along with Crimea, or to expand the struggle further and take over all of the predominantly Russian-speaking regions of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, as was at first feared. This would lead to a widening and unpredictable war that Russia can ill afford with an already weakening economy. The Russian military could overwhelm the under-equipped and poorly trained Ukrainian forces, but would then likely find itself in the midst of a long and costly civil war. Unlike Crimea, which was an administrative region of Russia transferred to Ukraine in 1954, which has a natural geographic definition, and whose population overwhelmingly supported integration into Russia, the region of predominantly Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine has no obvious dividing line and is much more diverse. Furthermore, widening the war would escalate the international dimension of the crisis, probably leading NATO to station alliance forces on Russia’s borders in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and possibly leading to a broad confrontation with the United States. The limited nature of the sanctions appears to be intended to leave Russia a way out of this more threatening scenario.

Putin’s objective in supporting the Russian separatists appears to be to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to comply with a long list of Russian wishes, which include preventing Ukraine from joining the EU or NATO and introducing constitutional changes that would prevent the central government from approving treaties without the support of all of the regions. It seems unlikely that Ukraine will accede to these demands. Indeed, after the seizure of Crimea, it seems likely that Ukraine will have a permanent majority in favor of integration with the West and opposed to friendly relations with Russia, rather than the alternating pro- and anti-Russian majorities it has sent to the polls in past elections. Russia will continue to apply pressure, including the threat of another natural gas embargo, but Ukraine is not without leverage of its own, since most Russian gas exports to Europe pass through pipelines located on Ukrainian territory.

The best hope of deescalating the crisis appears to be Petro Poroshenko, the new Ukrainian president and chocolate magnate. A veteran of both the pro-Western Yushchenko government (Foreign Minister in 2009-10) and of the pro-Russian Yanukovich government (Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012), he appears poised to broker a compromise. Whatever the immediate outcome of the Ukrainian drama, however, U.S.-Russian relations appear to be headed for a deep chill. The Obama administration is conducting a broad reassessment of relations with Russia based upon the assumption that Russia is a threat to be contained rather than a recalcitrant partner, and it seems likely that future U.S. administrations will approach Putin’s Russia with no less pessimism.

Randall W. Stone is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Skalny Center.