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Posted by:
Jan Techau
Monday, December 14, 2015 | http://carnegieeurope.eu/
Ten months after the Minsk II agreement of
February 2015, which aimed to end the unrest in eastern Ukraine, a
strange and delicate status quo has emerged. It seems that all the major
strategic players involved in the conflict—Russia, the government of
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the West, the Ukrainian
oligarchs—can well live with the current precarious state of affairs.
The big wild card that could break the standstill is the Ukrainian
people.The conflict over the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, where so-called rebels, equipped and directed by Russia, claim to have established autonomous regions to “protect” ethnic Russians from hostile action by the Kiev government, has all but disappeared from the headlines. This is not just because a relative calm has emerged on the frontlines, or because the war in Syria now hogs all the attention. It is also because all the major players in the Ukrainian conflict seem to have achieved roughly what they can realistically expect to achieve. All except the Ukrainians themselves.
Let’s look at Russia first. Through its proxy presence in Ukraine’s east, Moscow can ensure that Ukraine delivers the strategic goods that Russia wants from Ukraine. Moscow’s de facto veto power over Ukrainian constitutional reform will ensure that the country can’t properly settle its territorial and minority issues, thereby withholding a key success from the Poroshenko regime. http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=62269&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonvKXNZKXonjHpfsX57uQsW6Sg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIGRcR0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D
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