The fifth anniversary on 18 March of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election two weeks later prompt reflection on the most serious conflict to threaten Europe’s security since the Cold War ended: the smouldering war between Russia and Ukraine.
The most important aspect of Ukraine’s presidential election is its legitimacy. Unlike almost all other so-named exercises in the now-independent states that were under Soviet-Russian rule – with the exceptions of Georgia and Moldova and the Baltic States – this one offers a genuine choice, and its outcome is not predetermined. No matter how limited and fitful its progress in reducing the endemic corruption that is the most insidious element of a legacy of centuries of Russian rule, Ukraine is currently, in crude terms, a more genuinely competitive democracy than either neighbouring Poland and Hungary. And this at a time when two of the more venerable institutions of democracy, the Mother of Parliaments and the US presidency, are lugubrious and alarming spectacles for those who prize democratic freedoms.
The most ominous threat to Ukrainian aspirations to entrench democracy within a genuinely sovereign state is Putinist Russia’s determination to prevent it: to ensure that a deferential government in Kyiv accepts tutelage (one that recognises “Russia’s legitimate security concerns”) or that Ukraine remains unstable and ungovernable.
