The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

46 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL tent corruption, including allegations of presidential aides scheming undercover to manipulate state enter- prises, provoked the IMF to freeze payments to Ukraine in 2015. Vice President Biden and IMF officials have both warned Pres. Poroshenko that resumption of payments hinges on meaningful eco- nomic reform—in particular, ending bribes to oligarchs who continue to siphon off badly needed funds for economic development. Few in Kyiv, however, believe that an all-out assault on the oligarchs is about to happen. The gravity of this came home recently when the ultra-competent finance minister, the Ukrainian-American Natalia Jaresko, refused to remain in the government. Finally, generous economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine stands in stark contrast to military aid for the war in the Donbass, Ukraine’s industrial southeast. To date, more than 9,000 people have died there, many of them civilians. And nearly 1.5 million refugees from the Donbass have fled into other parts of Ukraine, with another half-million moving to Russia. Efforts by Poroshenko to secure heavy arms from Europe or America have not borne fruit, except for a military training program led by some 300 American advisers, sta- tioned near Lviv in western Ukraine. The Russian Bear All of this brings us to Ukraine’s biggest challenge, which can be summed up in two words: Vladimir Putin. Over and over, the Russian president has refused to accept Ukraine’s very existence, as when he told former President George W. Bush in 2008 that Ukraine was “not even a legitimate nation.” No one held the Euromaidan or the Orange Revolution in greater contempt than Putin, perhaps for good reason. After all, a successful Ukraine, free and prosperous, would cast a long shadow over his increasingly authoritarian regime. The 2014 ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin loyalist who had attempted to bring Kyiv into the Russian-led Customs Union, only increased Putin’s ire. Putin took revenge by seizing the strategically vital Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea and sponsoring a pro-Russia insurrection in southeast- ern Ukraine, the Donbass. Though he insists to this day that no Russian soldiers have ever been there, skirmishes between rebels and the central government continue with no end in sight. After Ukrainian rebels used a Russian rocket to down a Malaysia Airlines airliner flying over the region, killing almost 300 people, the European Union and America jointly imposed severe economic sanctions on Moscow in July 2014. These measures, which remain in effect, have plunged the Russian economy— already reeling from a sharp drop in energy prices on which the Kremlin relies to balance its budget—into a recession that is now well into its third year. Nonetheless, no one believes that Crimea is coming back to Ukraine anytime soon, if ever. Putin prizes the peninsula’s strategic significance far too much, as shown by the fact that the Russian fleet has long been anchored at Sebastopol. More- over, the Russian leader views Crimea as the cradle of Russian civilization because it was there, in 988, that Grand Prince Volodymyr, leader of Kyivan Rus, accepted the Christian faith and was baptized. Signs of Hope In the midst of all the gloom, Ukraine has seen some posi- tive developments, however. Many new parliamentarians, elected in 2014, are youthful activists, tested on the Maidan. The reformist government is pro-European, though recent ministerial resignations over alleged backroom deals raise The reformist government is pro-European, though recent ministerial resignations over alleged backroom deals raise troubling questions. ALEXANDERNOSKIN/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kyiv.