Ukraine in the middle
Its fractious politics spill far beyond its borders
It is essentially absurd that the major issue standing in the way of reasonable relations between Russia and the West is the fate of Ukraine.
Ukraine, a fragmented nation of some 45 million, is wracked by two severe problems. The first, partly an international issue, is the division among its population over what its policy should be toward Russia. This question, partly based in history, language, religion and ethnicity, is an internal one, played out in domestic Ukrainian politics. It has, of course, been sharpened by direct Russian intervention in Ukrainian affairs, not only in Russia’s seizure of the Crimea in 2014 and its continued military support of pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists in eastern Ukraine, but also by its maneuverings through money leading directly into Ukrainian affairs, including elections.
Ukraine’s second severe problem is the high level of corruption that governs economic as well as political life in the country. Ukrainian governments have pledged repeatedly to the International Monetary Fund, which keeps the country afloat financially, and to various aid donors, including the United States, that they will clean up the Kiev financial pigsty. But they don’t.
A scuffle in Ukraine is between President Petro Poroshenko and other Ukrainian oligarchs and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, with the former taking actions to cripple the latter. Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia, is another player in the Ukrainian puzzle, leading some of the opposition to Mr. Poroshenko and government-byoligarch in the troubled country. As this occurs, Ukraine drifts further and further away from the state that the European Union envisaged when it signed an association agreement with Ukraine in 2014
The United States is not contributing to prospects for sensible and honest government in Ukraine. It is moving toward the sale of arms that easily could become an instrument in internal Ukrainian strife, as well as provoke the Russians to be even less reasonable in their approach to Ukraine.
It is easy to argue that the United States should step back from arms sales, in spite of the advocacy of such sales by the U.S. defense industry. It is also easy to ask the EU to put the association agreement on hold until Ukraine straightens out and begins to fly right. But the real question — while Ukrainians themselves do not clean up their act — is why bother? Involvement in Ukraine has already put President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort under indictment, and other questions raised by the investigation led by former FBI chief Robert Mueller still wait to be answered. For the United States, why not start by putting relations with Ukraine into suspension, until it cleans itself up and Americans find out what earlier U.S. involvement there actually amounted to?