Canada’s role in last Sunday’s election in Ukraine, where fully 400 Canadians attended as observers to ensure that the vote was free and fair, brings that relatively new democracy a new president and, hopefully, hope for its citizens.
It was unhelpful to learn Monday morning, the day after President-elect Petro Poroshenko’s successful bid, that pro-Russian forces had occupied the airport in one of the country’s eastern cities and that the Ukrainian military had been dispatched to reclaim it.
It would seem now that much is in the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin to decide whether to encourage or discourage civil unrest by that part of Ukraine’s population that favours closer ties with Russia than with the nations of Europe.
President Putin and Russia’s military forces moved swiftly to annex the Crimea, that part of Ukraine that boasted a great deal of Black Sea coast, historically Russia’s (and, for nearly 70 years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s) main warm-water port at Sebastopol for both military and commercial shipping.
‘Boasted,’ past tense, because this particular part of Ukraine seems to be securely in Russian hands now, in spite of the new Ukrainian president’s quick demands to Russia to relinquish it.
If President Poroshenko can parlay the Crimea to Russia in return for the larger and more powerful nation’s agreement to cease and desist in fomenting political strife within Ukraine, then this would appear to be a good deal for the Ukrainians as they try to build a sovereign state, particularly since Crimea had been a province of Russia (and before that the USSR) for much of recent history to the extent that the majority of its population is ethnic Russian.
The new Ukrainian president is said to favour closer relations with Europe than with Russia. If he and his government attempt to bring Ukraine into the European Economic Community (EEC) and so bid a final farewell to its Warsaw Pact connections with Russia/USSR, this may cause Moscow to encourage civil distress within its smaller neighbouring nation while most of the western world will be watching to see if such a cause and effect does play out if Ukraine reaches out to Europe.
Ukraine is a large nation and an important one for its agricultural output alone.
It depends, along with many other central and eastern European countries, on Russia for the bulk of its carbon fuels and even though Russia is just now making much of new energy providing relationships with China, the European markets are closer and politically, less fraught than would be putting too many eggs in the Chinese basket, thus Ukraine’s source of fossil fuels will likely be largely unaffected by whatever happens within its borders.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko, a successful businessman, will understand that giving up claims to Crimea to the Russians, however reluctantly this is done, can purchase stability for the rest of his country.
Just after the Olympic games were wound up, but during the Paralympic Games, Russia seized Crimea following the citizen revolt in Ukraine against the former president and his pro-Russian stance.
This was perhaps the window that Russia had been seeking for many years as an excuse to reclaim Crimea under the guise of “protecting” ethnic Russians there. The chances are that, sooner or later, this or some other excuse would have led to the same outcome.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko may well consider, after the appropriate period of demanding Crimea back, grudgingly ceding this territory to Russia but with the proviso (and with the support of as much of the international community as it can muster) that, for Russia, it’s hands off Ukraine from now on.
President Poroshenko should then hurry to join the EEC and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as quickly and expediently as possible in order to ensure that Russia must honour this compromise.
