Shock! Ukraine Vanishes from Europe! Or Maybe Not.

It looks as if Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate favoured by Moscow, has defeated Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in a close elections race to become Ukraine’s next President. What happens right now is unclear, as Tymoshenko mulls over her legal and political options. It’s safe to bet on more protracted wrangling.

Surely the result if confirmed is a horrible defeat for the ‘European’ tendency in Ukraine, and a triumph for Moscow hard-liners wanting to reassert Russian hegemony across the ‘post-Soviet space’? Disaster!

Three things are worth bearing in mind about Ukraine.

First, psychology. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the smartest Ukrainians in the Soviet system decided to stay on in Moscow and work for the new Russian state. When the Ukraine delegations came to Moscow in the mid-1990s to argue with Russia about the fate of the rusting Black Sea Fleet, there were often more ethnic Ukrainians on the Russia side of the table than on the Ukraine side.

The main thing now from Moscow’s point of view is to preserve for as long as possible an existential ‘otherness’ of the former Soviet space as a whole. It is not so much about exerting Russian overt control over the other former republics, but denying control to anyone else. Russia of course will be pleased that Yanukovych has won, but know that he is quite capable of being damn awkward as and when it suits him.

Second, the European Union likes the idea of Ukraine joining Europe, but not the reality. Paris and some other capitals feel that the EU is already much too big – why annoy Moscow by pressing too hard to bring towards EU membership another large, awkward country whose loyalties are always likely to be divided between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’? This attitude is supremely cynical in most respects and blocks an active attempt to bring Ukraine more speedily towards full EU membership, as eg the UK and Poland favour.

Third, whoever runs Ukraine has to make the best of a complex job. Ukraine stagnated for the first decade after the Berlin Wall came down. In early 2005 the Orange Revolution (Помаранчева революція for our Slavist readers) brought an ostensibly pro-reform President Yushchenko to power. The then Polish President Kwasniewski played a lively personal role on brokering the final outcome via a Ukrainian ‘round table’ exercise (echoing the famous Polish Round Table which helped end communist rule in Poland in1989).

One of the senior Poles who took part told me afterwards that at the Polish Round Table many of the participants had been workers or intellectuals in shabby clothes. By contrast in Ukraine all the key players had arrived in gleaming big cars and smart outfits – this was a less an historic transition to democracy, more a tough haggle among powerful oligarchs. Ukraine’s ruling classes on all sides prosper precisely by playing on their position ‘between’ Russia and Europe – and they plan to keep it that way.

In short, Ukraine remains true to the Slavonic ambiguity of its very name – both ‘borderland’ and ‘principality’. Neither Brussels nor Moscow can agree whether Ukraine is a place in itself or some less defined border-space between West and East. Ukrainians themselves are divided. So don’t panic. These elections represent merely a new phase in a centuries-long tug of war.

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues. On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer.

Charles Crawford, a former British Ambassador turned blogger and policy pundit, looks at how UK policies shape global events – and how global events shape UK policies. For more information or to contact Charles Crawford, click here.

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