dna edit: A new great game

The view from Kiev is looking increasingly grim. The fragile truce between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the protestors in the capital has lasted less than a day. The violence bookending the meeting between Yanukovych and opposition leaders on Wednesday night is hardening positions to the point where the idea of the country breaking up has entered the public sphere. It’s not a likely scenario at this point — despite the divide between the more European western half of the country and those in the east and south with closer links to Russia, there is a strong pan-national sense of nationhood — but it shows just how far the situation has gone. And it is bigger than Ukraine itself. At the root of the protests is a clash between competing ideas of the nation — one that wants to see Ukraine as part of the European project, and the other that hews to cultural and historical ties with Russia, both sides backed respectively by Brussels and Moscow.

The protests, after all, were catalysed by Yanukovych’s decision in November to back out of the impending EU Association Agreement that would have bound the country far closer to Europe. And Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offering the Yanukovych government a $15 billion lifeline next month as well as cheaper gas prices was adding insult to injury for the protestors already in the street; a clear sign that their president was Putin’s man. Given Ukraine’s spluttering economy, poor governance and endemic corruption — and the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin regime next door — the Ukrainian street unsurprisingly sees closer ties to Russia as worsening the situation, a slide into a Soviet-era relationship with Moscow calling the shots. The EU, on the other hand, is an aspirational ideal. It represents free trade, social welfare, the rule of law; in short, all the things Yanukovych has so conspicuously failed to deliver.

The Ukrainian president didn’t help matters when he had Parliament pass draconian anti-protest laws furthering public fears about a descent into authoritarianism. But his being forced to later repeal the laws is a fair pointer to how the situation is shaping up. The pressure on his government is building to the point where containing it will be impossible. And if he calls in the army — there are signs he intends to do so — he is likely to spur greater resistance, not squash it. Even in the east and south where he has the strongest support, industrial hubs with the strongest cultural and economic links to Russia and a populace that is consequently afraid of being hit hard by a tilt away from Moscow, there are signs of growing disenchantment with his regime.

The crucial element, of course, is Putin. Ukraine lies smack dab in the centre of his dream of a Eurasian Economic Union comprising of a number of post-Soviet states in eastern Europe and central Asia, to be established next year. The country is crucial to his ambition of building a power bloc to rival the EU and the US. All the signs point to his continuing to back Yanukovych through a mixture of bribes and economic blackmail. If the violence against the Ukrainian people is to stop, Washington and Brussels must now step up their game and start thinking in terms of targeted sanctions against the leadership, making the price of continued repression too high to pay. The alternative is a mounting death toll.