Russia: Other Points of View

ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE

COMMENTARY

Flying So High You Can’t See the Ground

By Patrick Armstrong

Ukrainians will be electing a new President on Sunday and, while we do not yet know who will win, we know that neither Yanukovych nor Tymoshenko is running on an overtly anti-Russia platform. Therefore, whoever wins, relations between Kiev and Moscow will likely be calmer than they have been since the “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Stratfor sees this in apocalyptic terms: “The next few months will therefore see the de facto folding of Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence” and “a new era of Russian aggressiveness” now begins The author goes on to talk about the Carpathians as a defence shield for Russia, Ukraine as Russia’s “breadbasket” and so on.

But who decided that this was the question that Ukrainian voters were answering? It was the “Orange Revolution” and its outside backers that injected into Ukrainian politics the binary choice of either joining the West or becoming Russia’s appendage: at no point was there support among the majority of Ukrainians for such a choice. And there is absolutely no reason to treat the recent election as having made such a choice. While Yushchenko was indeed the binary candidate: “either this pro-Kremlin couple and pro-Kremlin policy wins, or the pro-European policy does”, he and his view have been brutally rejected by the voters. No surprise, of course, to those who have been watching opinion polls in Ukraine.

WORKING WITH RUSSIA TO PREVENT EURASIAN COLLAPSE

REPRINTS

by Andrey Tsygankov

RFERL, Oct 29, 2009 

The Eurasian region continues to disintegrate, and neither Russia nor the West has been able to arrest the destabilizing dynamics.

Evidence of rising instability throughout the region include the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war, renewed terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus, the persistent failure of Western forces to stabilize Afghanistan, the inability of Central Asian rulers to reign in local clans and drug lords, and the paralysis of legitimately elected bodies of power in Ukraine and Moldova.

Violence is gradually spreading, waiting for an opportunity to erupt into a large-scale conflict. Transregional transportation routes may soon be choked due to Russia's conflicts with Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkmenistan.

The West's attempts to secure and stabilize Eurasia after the end of the Cold War must be recognized as a failure. In the mid-1990s, U.S. geostrategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski recommended that the United States pursue a policy of replacing Russia as the referee and protector of the newly established non-Russian states in the region. After initial hesitation, the United States and other Western states followed this advice.

Yet Eurasia has not become stable or peaceful and continues to disintegrate. The bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels have failed to understand that they lack the resources, the will, and the experience to stabilize the complex region. Today -- after the Iraq war and the global financial crisis -- the United States is beginning to recognize its overextension, but it is not at all clear if Washington and Brussels are prepared to act differently in Eurasia.

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