How to Start a Civil War in Ukraine (and How to Avoid One)

How to Start a Civil War in Ukraine (and How to Avoid One)

05/30/14

Robert W. Merry

Security, Ukraine

Contrary to some interpretations of unfolding events, it isn’t possible for Ukraine to join the West while coexisting peacefully with Russia.

Buried near the bottom of the Wall Street Journal’s Tuesday editorial on the Ukrainian elections was this sentence: “Sunday’s vote showed that Ukrainians want to join the West while co-existing peacefully with Russia.” There are two problems with this. First, it is far from clear that this was the underlying civic sentiment expressed in the elections. Second, even if the Journal’s reading of the vote is correct, it isn’t remotely possible for Ukraine to join the West while coexisting peacefully with Russia.

If Ukraine’s electoral winner, Petro Poroshenko, is going to succeed, he must correctly dissect the vote, and the stakes posed by this challenge are immense. As the Journal notes, the “chance for civil war is real,” and avoidance of such bloodshed will require a delicate balancing act and an uncommon deftness in knitting disparate political sentiments, passions and interests into a governing coalition. If he takes the Journal’s position—that the election settled with finality the question of Ukraine’s tragic dual identity—he almost inevitably will unleash that civil war.

As I have emphasized in these spaces over the past several months, Ukraine is what the late Samuel Huntington called a “cleft country”, split between a European-oriented, nationalist region in the west and a Russian-oriented, largely Orthodox-influenced region in the east. Since Ukraine’s independence at the end of the Cold War, no Ukrainian politician has been able to bridge the gap between these two regions and these two cultural sensibilities. Electoral results over the years have reflected this dual identity—and also reflected the consequent inability of any population segment to impose, through politics, its cultural identity upon the nation as a whole.

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