The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 47 troubling questions. Parliament is moving to clean up the judiciary, a long overdue reform to a system where judges often act as political pawns. And one detested group, the street police, underwent major change in 2015. When I vis- ited Kyiv last year, I witnessed friendly relations between police and pedestrians, something I had never seen before. Finally, resentment of Putin remains high, and that has translated into a feeling of unity among Ukrainians. A student at Kyiv-Mohyla put it this way to me in 2015: “Putin has done more to bring us together than any single individual I can recall. 1991 brought us independence, but not a new identity. The Maidan, and Putin’s behavior following the Maidan, gave us what we needed: a sense of being Ukrainian.” Anna Reid, acclaimed author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (2015, second edition), shares that assess- ment. She writes: “The big- gest change since I lived in Ukraine in the 1990s is that now it feels like a real country. Ukraine is no longer a borderland. It is its own place, and is here to stay.” One can only hope that Reid, the students across Ukraine and the millions who have put—and continue to put—their lives on the line, are right: Their country has finally arrived on the world stage. It faces many obstacles, but if it survives, there is no going back. n Resentment of Russian President Vladimir Putin remains high, and that has translated into a feeling of unity among Ukrainians.