Standoff in Ukraine

The allure of the West has helped shape Russian history since Peter the Great three centuries ago. Now it’s shattering even older bonds with Russia’s neighbor, Ukraine. In 2013, a rebellion in Kyiv sparked by pro-European protesters seeking a decisive break from the nation’s Soviet past set in motion a chain of events that created the tensest standoff between Russia and the West since the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, proclaiming a duty to defend the ethnic Russians who dominate the population there and sending shockwaves through the post-World War II order. Soon after, he fomented a military conflict in eastern Ukraine that dragged on for more than five years.

The election in 2019 of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his pledge to end the war reinvigorated diplomatic efforts to implement a lapsed 2015 peace accord. The years of fighting in rebel-held eastern Ukraine have claimed in excess of 13,000 lives. Sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and the European Union over the Crimea seizure helped bring Putin to the negotiating table. But the sticking point remained the same: Russia wants any deal to include a halt to Ukraine’s aspirations to join the EU and NATO. Were Zelenskiy to agree, he’d risk another revolution, like the 2013 uprising that prompted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych to flee, because most Ukrainians favor a tilt to the West. There was some progress in 2019: Prisoners were exchanged, troops pulled back from the contested border and Russia returned two Ukrainian vessels it seized during naval standoff near Crimea. Violence has also fallen from peak levels in 2014, when a Malaysian Air jet was shot down over the conflict zone, killing 298 passengers and crew. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, America is supplying military aid to Ukraine, though its provision was at the center of the scandal that prompted efforts to remove Trump from office. The U.S. crisis was a distraction for Zelenskiy as he pushed a package of market-friendly measures to pep up the economy and pursued more than $5 billion of aid from the International Monetary Fund.