The Red Line: Belarus: The Next Crimea?

 Since 1994 Belarus has been ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, often dubbed Europe's last dictator. 2020 though brought a brand new wave of protests and Lukashenko's position in power has become somewhat shaky, and he is beginning to outlive his usefulness to the Kremlin. Will the Kremlin fight to keep him there, or place someone else on the throne? Is there a future for Belarus in the West?

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The Guardian: How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights

 It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBTQ+ rights was spreading worldwide at the same time that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalisation. The collapse of these boundaries led to the rapid spread of ideas about sexual equality or gender transition – and also a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by patriarchs and priests who feared the loss of control that this process threatened. These were the dynamics along the pink line, particularly in places where people came to be counted as gay or lesbian or MSM (men who have sex with men) or transgender for the first time. In most societies, they had always been there, albeit in ways that were sometimes circumscribed or submerged, but now they claimed new status as they took on new political identities. And they became enmeshed in a bigger geopolitical dynamic. [...]

Particularly in Europe, these new-look nationalist movements sometimes bolstered their agendas by claiming they were protecting not just jobs and citizens but values, too. By the time Le Pen was running for office in 2017, these values included the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The man who wrote this script had been the crusading Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Fortuyn, who was gay, attracted mass support when he claimed that Muslim intolerance of homosexuality posed an existential threat to European civilisation. His far-right successor, Geert Wilders, drove the agenda hard. When a troubled Muslim man killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, Trump – then on the campaign trail – slammed “radical Islamic terrorism”. Wilders, fighting his own election campaign back home, capitalised on this: “The freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other, to marry, to have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against.” [...]

In western Europe, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights was being staked as a pink line against the influx of new migrants. At the same time, in eastern Europe, it was being staked as a pink line against decadent western liberalism. In both instances, queer people themselves came to be instrumentalised politically as never before. They acquired political meaning far beyond their own claims to equality and dignity. They became embodiments of progress and worldliness to some, but signs of moral and social decay to others.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Misrule of law: Ukraine’s constitutional crisis

 Instead of just replacing the prime minister, Zelensky progressively removed all reformers from the cabinet, state-owned enterprises, and government agencies. His timing could not have been worse. The new prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, was competent enough in his response to the coronavirus crisis. Yet Ukraine is one of several countries in which bad actors have used the crises of the moment as an opportunity to covertly dismantle reforms, betting that there would be no pushback from a European Union focused on the pandemic and a United States preoccupied by its presidential election.

Zelensky did nothing while revanchist oligarchs and Russian propagandists attacked EU agreements as “external governance” and domestic reformers as Sorosyata ([George] Soros’s piglets). Worse, some of Zelensky’s new appointments – such as that of the chief prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova – fanned the flames. As Zelensky was elected to fight corruption, his Servant of the People party fared poorly in the October local elections. The party’s once-impressive majority in the national parliament seems certain to disintegrate. Smelling blood in the water, judges on the Constitutional Court have thrown out every vestige of reform they can find.[...]

The crisis partly results from the efforts that Ukrainian oligarchs and other anti-reform forces have made to rebuild their influence in the judiciary in 2019 and 2020. When Poroshenko was president, they were largely on the defensive, intent on resisting legal reforms at every stage. Zelensky’s first chief prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, initially led a campaign against such resistance. He was not prepared to selectively prosecute leading figures of the Poroshenko era or the enemies of the oligarchs who backed Zelensky. In contrast, Venediktova appears to have shot the messenger – by harassing and laying charges against reformers, including Ryaboshapka.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Poland in the EU: How to lose friends and alienate people

 This year, when Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was the first to call for an extraordinary EU summit to discuss the EU’s reaction to violent events in Belarus, his words did not generate an immediately positive reaction from other capitals. An extraordinary Foreign Affairs Council is eventually taking place today – but credit should also go to Lithuania, Germany, and Sweden. It is not just the result of successful diplomatic efforts on the part of Warsaw, even if the Polish foreign ministry has sought to present it this way for its domestic audience. If any capital is currently leading on the EU’s reaction to events in Belarus, it is not Poland but the much smaller Lithuania – which merits a separate story about how to punch above one’s weight. [...]

The Law and Justice party formed a government in 2015 with a lofty promise to lift Poland’s foreign policy from its knees. Since then, however, the country’s standing in the EU has hardly improved even a bit. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. The Coalition Explorer survey of policy professionals reveals that collectively they regard Poland as the second most disappointing country in the bloc, after Hungary. It is also among three countries (alongside Italy and Spain) that are most often seen as punching below their weight in EU politics. [...]

However, as usual, the devil lies in the detail. Apart from a limited group of the EU’s eastern member states (Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria; half of them Polish neighbours), rarely does anyone consider Poland as having the same longer-standing interests on EU policy; and only some of these countries (plus Germany) include Poland on the list of their most contacted partners. This clashes with Warsaw’s ambition to play the role of one of the EU’s post-Brexit ‘Big Five’, alongside Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. [...]

Most notably, the United Kingdom used to be the key western EU member that considered that Poland shared similar interests with it. This translated into strong contacts between the two capitals. Now this alliance has been moved outside the EU framework and, as a result, nowhere in the EU’s western part do policy professionals consider Poland as sharing interests with their country. Germany is the only pre-2004 EU member where Poland is among the most contacted partners – but Poland ranks only fifth, after France, Netherlands, Austria, and Spain (with which Germany does not even have the border). Relations between Warsaw and Berlin are far from perfect, to say the least, largely upon Poland’s own wish.

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis

Ukraine nevertheless stands apart. It is still a nation at war, yet in a survey last year, 55 percent of residents named mass emigration as the greatest threat to their country—the UN estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly a fifth of its population by 2050. And whereas politicians in Eastern Europe typically invoke demographic decline as a justification for conservative policies such as restricting abortion rights and providing financial bonuses for large families, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reverse brain drain by improving his country’s economy and rule of law. In December, he announced a program to draw young Ukrainians back from abroad with promises of preferential loans to start their own businesses upon their return. [...]

Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)

So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.

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WorldAffairs: Ukraine Explained

One question at the heart of the impeachment case against Donald Trump is whether the president threatened to withhold US military assistance from Ukraine. In this episode, we explore why the US has been supporting Ukraine in Europe’s only active war and why Ukraine needs help defending itself against Russian aggression. John E. Herbst, Atlantic Council and former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Oxana Shevel, Tufts University, and Simon Ostrovsky, Filmmaker and Journalist at the PBS NewsHour, speak with Ray Suarez.

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The Bell: Romanticism, nostalgia, regret: why are Russians discussing the 1990s?

For much of the last two decades, the 1990s have been used by supporters of President Vladimir Putin as a bogeyman to highlight the contrast with post-2000 stability. But the period still evokes some romanticism: a survey (Rus) released Thursday showed most business people think that, despite the lawlessness and real physical danger, running a business was easier in the 1990s than in the 2010s. [...]

As many as 53 percent of Russians aged between 18 and 24 want to leave the country, according to a survey (Rus) published Tuesday by independent pollster the Levada Center. This is the highest figure in a decade: put simply, more and more young people do not have faith in the path the country is taking. [...]

Everyone worries about their children’s futures and healthcare. But the mood is changing among young people; the post-Crimea annexation euphoria that led to less talk of emigration has definitely passed. And it will be challenging to convince them otherwise: between 2016 and 2018, the number of young people getting their news primarily from tightly controlled state-owned television fell from 75 percent to 42 percent. [...]

It emerged this week that U.S. tech giant Apple has decided to label Crimea as a part of Russia, more than 5 years after the region was annexed. For Russian users in Russia, Apple’s ‘Weather’ and ‘Maps’ apps now show Crimea as being Russian territory — while, for Ukrainians, Crimea remains Ukrainian and for other users around the world it is a disputed territory. The move prompted furious protests from Ukrainian officials, but Apple is following in the footsteps of Google, which made the same switch in March. The changes come after months of negotiations between Apple and Russian Duma deputies.

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Foreign Policy: It’s Time for Ukraine to Let the Donbass Go

The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010. It was out of the Donbass that came his corrupt Party of Regions. And it was the Donbass that opposed popular pro-democracy uprisings in 2004 and 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass in the summer of 2014 effectively disenfranchised its voters. That was bad for the voters, but it enabled pro-democratic forces in unoccupied Ukraine to win the presidency and control of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2014. Most of the reforms that have been adopted in the past five years—along with Ukraine’s steady march toward Europe—would have been impossible had the Donbass remained a part of Ukraine. [...]

The Donbass and its residents have been the war’s greatest losers. Thousands have died in the fighting; houses and infrastructure have been destroyed. The region’s economy, once an integral part of Ukraine’s, went into a tailspin, unemployment went through the roof, inflation soared—and the new regime and its thugs took advantage to enrich themselves. The separatist government helped promote the decay by dismantling viable factories and selling them to Russia. Small wonder that, for many Donbass residents, the best source of employment is the separatist armed forces. [...]

Thanks to Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass, his leverage over Ukraine also decreased. As long as a pro-Russian, anti-Western region was part of Ukraine, he could—and did—insist on being able to intervene on its behalf—ostensibly to protect the rights of Russian speakers, but in reality to interfere in the internal affairs of democratic neighbors. If the eastern Donbass is brought back into Ukraine’s fold, Putin’s leverage will increase once more. He’d be given an inroad back into the country’s politics as a whole.

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The Guardian: Trump's presidency is built on lies. Does he actually believe them?

From the phantom peace in Syria to the phantom wall on the Mexican border, the Trump presidency is based on the theory that reality is created by mere assertion. The scariest interpretation of the torrent of Trump lies is that the president actually believes the words that he is saying each time his lips move. [...]

By any rational measure, the Watergate break-in was dangerously unnecessary since Nixon would go on to carry 49 states against the hapless McGovern, even without planted microphones at Democratic headquarters. [...]

Taylor’s written statement ended with an earnest plea: “We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor. Russian aggression cannot stand.” Sadly, the same thing can be said about the Kurds, whom Trump also cynically and willfully abandoned.

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Politico: What Putin Got From the Trump-Zelensky Phone Call

Five years on, it’s still a hot war, with Russia constantly pushing forward the line of occupation. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced. The shifting mass of regular and irregular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine — soldiers and mercenaries; “separatist” proxies and militias; a lot of guys with pseudonyms using advanced Russian weaponry that Russia claims must have been bought at the local corner shop (note: it is supplied from Russia) — constantly test and adapt new capabilities, especially electronic warfare capabilities, on the battlefield. [...]

The dirty, confusing, irregular conflict in Ukraine is part of a broader political war waged by the Kremlin. In countless ways, this is the inevitable evolution of Russia’s aggression against its neighbors after Putin paid so little price for invading Georgia in 2008. I worked as an adviser to the Georgian government in the years after that war, and we watched as almost everyone normalized Putin’s behavior, emboldening him to press forward. Now, Russia’s army sniper school has been transferred to the Ukrainian front, training the next generation of elite Russian marksmen by having them pick off Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers like Baklanova. [...]

Since the annexation of Crimea, there has been a lot of speculation about Putin’s long-term goals for Ukraine and the region, be it rebuilding a kind of Russian empire or disrupting what he views as another empire moving toward his borders. But in the near term, Putin knows that pushing for a pro-Kremlin alignment in Ukrainian politics — especially with the war still on — is a waste of effort. Far better to hope for what has succeeded elsewhere along the Russian rim, and in Europe, and in the United States: the sense that it would be nice to get along better with Russia, because it’s exhausting to live under a constant existential threat.

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The Guardian: Russia Without Putin by Tony Wood review – myths of the new cold war (27 Dec 2018)

In the first piece of myth-debunking promised in his subtitle Tony Wood argues that Putin’s system is not a deviation from the Yeltsin years when the Russian elite enthusiastically embraced capitalism; it is a direct continuation of it. There may have been a minor shift under Putin towards the restoration of partial or full control by the state over some of the big resource-extracting companies in the raw material sector. But the intertwining of government and big business, the creation of an oligarchy and a huge widening of income differentials in favour of the rich were initiated under Yeltsin. To call Putin’s Russia a mafia state is therefore a mystification, since its elements – the hollowing out of elections so as to remove genuine democratic content, the promotion of former security agents to top jobs in the state apparatus and the entanglement of officialdom with organised crime – were all there under Yeltsin, too. Western governments and the advisers they dispatched to aid the Kremlin’s economic ministries at best turned a blind eye; more often they connived at it.

The second myth is that where there were negative distortions in Russia’s transition to capitalism it was because of the legacy of the Soviet past with an authoritarian ruling class and a population made passive by decades of submission to power. Here Wood is bold enough to confront the prevailing narrative of several prominent Russian writers and sociologists, as well as western observers, who adopt a kind of social Darwinism in arguing that it will take another generation for Homo Sovieticus to die out. Wood turns the argument on its head: “Rather than being a hindrance, the remnants of the Soviet past have been a massive boon for post-Soviet Russia,” he writes. Russians were willing to put up with devastating inflation, the destruction of their savings, the loss of jobs and the closure of much of industry because these hardships were softened by the survival, at least until recently, of low rents, free medicine, the pension system and other aspects of the welfare state. This parallelism of old and new structures smoothed the path of capitalist transition and forestalled massive rebellion. [...]

The fundamental fact, as Wood sees it, is the huge imbalance of power and resources between the west and post-Soviet Russia since the end of the cold war. In the 1990s the west wanted to drive home its advantage, hence the expansion of Nato that Russians, elite as well as people, came to resent. Not initially, though. Under Yeltsin and in Putin’s first few years as president, Russians wanted to be part of the liberal internationalist US-led bloc of developed states. The downfall of that idea was caused by the west’s rejection of Russia’s repeated proposals to join Nato, followed by Washington’s promotion of “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004. Even as recently as 2011 when Dmitry Medvedev was president, Russia went along with the west on a major foreign policy issue by declining to use its UN security council veto to block the west’s intervention in Libya.

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EURACTIV: Ukraine president on course for unprecedented majority after election win

A pre-election survey by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute said 45% of voters expected Zelenskiy to negotiate a peace in the Donbass within 12 months — the biggest single priority among voters.

But 57% would not accept peace at the cost of allowing Crimea to become a recognised part of Russia — something Moscow is likely to insist on — and 62% would not accept peace if Donbass did not return to Kyiv’s full control.

More than half of respondents also expected Ukraine to be a member of the European Union by 2030. [...]

Another new pro-Western party, Voice, fronted by rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, also passed the 5% threshold to enter parliament. Voice is the only party to which Zelenskiy has offered coalition talks.

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euronews: Government restrictions on religion rising in Europe — Pew Research Centre study

It highlighted that although religious restrictions remain higher in the Middle East-North Africa region, the biggest increases over the last decade have been in Europe and in sub-Saharan Africa.

It flagged, for instance, the growing number of European governments placing limits on Muslim women's dress. In 2007, there were five countries reported to have such restrictions in Europe, by 2017, that number had quadrupled to 20. [...]

Pew also flagged Spain as having experienced the largest increases in its score for government limits on religious activity. Catalonia introduced bans on the burqa and niqab, while religious groups such as Latter-day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses have faced restrictions on public preaching and proselytising.

Social hostilities related to religious norms also rose dramatically in Europe. Four countries in 2007 reported having individuals or groups who used violence or the threat of violence to try and force others to accept their own religious practices and beliefs.

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Politico: What Putin could lose in Ukraine

Unlike Poroshenko, who embraced Ukrainian nationalism and spoke only in Ukrainian, Zelenskiy is capable of speaking to Russians in their own language, and of reaching them through his Instagram and other social media channels. For Putin, having a Russian-speaking president in democratic Ukraine is like eating a live octopus — exhilarating, yes, but also terrifying. [...]

Putin, it seems, has a different take. The Russian president has not called the Russian-speaking comedian to congratulate him on his victory. There has been near silence from the Kremlin except a terse statement “recognizing” the election, while criticizing Ukraine for not allowing the 3.5 million Ukrainians living in Russia to vote.

Sure, Putin most likely prefers Zelenskiy to Poroshenko, who was more interested in going mano o mano with Putin than the nitty-gritty of governance. The comedian has promised to lift the ban on Russian artists and Russian social networks, and will most likely encourage a cultural thaw between the two countries. Direct flights might even be reinstated at some point. [...]

The real danger for Putin is what happens next. Zelenskiy fired the first salvo on election night by calling out to all post-Soviet states with the cheer: “Look at us – everything is possible.” His landslide victory in a free election has puzzled Russians who are used to elections being decided in advance. It makes them wonder whether Putin could also be so easily swept aside in a free election. The theater of democracy in Ukraine has already been infectious: Some politicians have called for debates in football stadiums for Russian elections.

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openDemocracy: The people’s rebellion, or why a showman became president of Ukraine

This, then, is a rebellious popular vote against corrupt politics-as-usual by people who are largely non-political. In this sense, there’s a certain resonance with the Gilets Jaunes movement – and like their French counterparts, Zelensky voters do not have any political unity or ideological coherence. Their basic common denominator is negation. The demands and expectations of Zelensky voters are heterogeneous and even contradictory, ranging from putting an end to the war and oligarchy to increasing wages, lowering prices and household gas tariffs. But in the best traditions of 1968, they are demanding the “impossible” – just social conditions that are equal for all. And 73% means a clear refusal of any kind of negotiations or possible compromise with the current ruling class so that it could remain in power. [...]

While Zelensky voters may vary widely in their claims about what they voted for, they found common ground in what they voted against. First of all, they voted against the war. And this is not a blind denial of the reality of warfare and occupation – this vote was against the war as a political and economic system of relations between the state and the society that has emerged in Ukraine during the recent years. Russian military intervention and occupation has poisoned the atmosphere inside Ukraine, creating the conditions for political reaction in the form of bans on certain social media platforms, attacks on anti-corruption NGOs, the beating and killing of activists, racist pogroms and so on. [...]

Zelensky isn’t a right-winger or even a conservative, but rather a libertarian in a very broad sense, while right-wing populism is exactly what Ukraine has experienced under Poroshenko’s rule at its purest. Throughout most of his presidency, Poroshenko has addressed the Ukrainian public predominantly in a discourse of narrow-minded ethnic nationalism borrowed from Ukraine’s far-right Svoboda party. He ended up campaigning for president with the medieval slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” – in reference to laws protecting the Ukrainan language, military reforms and the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In recent years, various extreme right and neo-Nazi organisations have been legitimised in the public sphere as “activists” and “freedom fighters”, receiving the informal backing of the security services and law enforcement. They have remained unpunished for their committed hate crimes.

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openDemocracy: Ukrainians voted for change, but is it enough?

Still, sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina believes that Zelensky voters share a wide range of views. For example, Bekeshkina cited statistics on Zelensky supporters’ attitudes towards NATO membership - 37% support the idea, 33% support a neutral status for Ukraine, and six percent support a military union with Russia. In Bekeshkina’s opinion, Ukrainian citizens didn’t vote so much for Zelensky, but against Poroshenko.

It’s hard to figure out what Zelensky really offered Ukrainian voters, or how he sees internal and foreign politics. Indeed, Zelensky gave practically no interviews to journalists throughout the election campaign. For the most part, he limited himself to short phrases or jokes. In the end, he gave an interview to RBC-Ukraine several days before the election. But questions remained - and for both journalists and voters it was important to find out more about Zelensky. More, at least, than what they knew about him as the actor who plays a president in a popular television series. [...]

After the exit polls were released, Poroshenko conceded with a farewell speech in which he thanked Ukrainian citizens for their votes: “I’m leaving the office of president, but I’m not leaving politics.” Among Poroshenko’s achievements we can pick out the following: visa-free regime with the EU, an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church, a new and effective Ukrainian army, as well as the decentralisation reform. Poroshenko’s presidency coincided with the first years of the Russia-Ukraine war and the annexation of Crimea. And during Poroshenko’s rule, the Ukrainian government has built an international pro-Ukrainian coalition, which is important in terms of supporting sanctions against Russian officials responsible for crimes in Donbas and repressions in Crimea.

But at the same time, recent corruption scandals at defence manufacturer Ukroboronprom and in Ukraine’s energy sector suggested that Poroshenko was all-too loyal when it came to his “team”. The incumbent also drew on the support of regional politicians with “complex” backgrounds. The mayor of Odesa Gennady Trukhanov, who holds Russian citizenship, is connected to corruption schemes in the city, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Indeed, recent years have seen a wave of attacks on civil society activists in the southern port city.

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Politico: 6 takeaways from Ukraine’s presidential vote

It’s not a clean break — these kinds of divisions don't tend to be. But previous candidates have successfully exploited this split: Yanukovych owed his surprise victory in the 2006 parliamentary election to a large degree by playing on the resentment felt by those in the Russian-speaking south and east toward western and central Ukrainians. [...]

But this time, the strategy failed: The electoral map shows green representing support for Zelenskiy — a Russian speaker — stretching across regional and linguistic boundaries. [...]

And Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists are typically an anemic presence at the polls. Ruslan Koshulynsky, a joint candidate from far-right parties, won only 2.2 percent in the first round of this election. [...]

It would be wrong to say the idea of aligning Ukraine with Russia couldn't be revived in the future, or that there are no Moscow-friendly politicians. But the pro-Russian camp at the moment remains weak, divided and without a strong leader.

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TLDR News: Have May's Red Lines Made Getting a Deal Impossible? - Brexit Explained

May has been talking about red lines for months, her hard limits when it comes to Brexit negotiations. However, there's a case to be made that these red lines are exactly what's sabotaged the Brexit process. We discuss why the red lines have limited the chances of getting a deal and how the EU sees the process.

Foreign Policy: In Ukraine’s Election, Pro-Russian Candidates Can’t Win

In the other 93 percent of Ukraine, however, things have not gone in the Kremlin’s favor. For Ukrainian politicians focused on consolidating their country’s independence and national identity—and that includes Poroshenko and most of the country’s political class—the status quo is tolerable. They would prefer to get Crimea and the Donbass back, yet Russia’s ongoing occupation has its benefits too. In seizing those areas, Russia chopped off the two regions with the least-developed sense of Ukrainian identity. And with them gone, no pro-Russian candidate could win a Ukrainian election. Long gone are the days when candidates such as former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was openly sympathetic to Russia, could win a majority of votes. [...]

It is less clear what Russia is getting from the status quo. The Kremlin has proved willing to bear the costs of occupation, paying for soldiers’ salaries, tolerating the collapse in Russia-Ukraine trade, and putting up with Western sanctions that will persist until Moscow agrees to return the Donbass to Ukrainian control. Why? There are several potential explanations. [...]

Yet Russia’s neighbors do not seem to have gotten the message. Just last year, Armenia tossed out its pro-Russian government, installing a younger crowd that wants better ties with Europe. Fearing blowback, the new Armenian government has insisted that its revolution is not anti-Russia. But the country is tacking closer to the West all the same. [...]

European Union membership for Ukraine is no more likely in the short term. But here, too, the Donbass is not the most important factor. More significant is the EU’s own expansion fatigue. Ukraine, with 44 million people, would be the most populous country to join the EU since Spain joined the then-European Communities in 1986. Integrating countries such as Romania and Bulgaria caused plenty of difficulty. Ukraine is significantly bigger, and it would be significantly harder to integrate. Existing member states aren’t eager to take on that challenge now.

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Politico: Ukraine’s crisis of faith

As the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Kremlin-backed separatists in the country’s east has dragged on, it’s become increasingly difficult to separate the centuries-old ideological conflict from the ongoing political and military conflict. [...]

With his popularity plummeting ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election in March, Poroshenko likely saw the issue as an opportunity to win back public support. With an independent church, Ukrainians would finally gain “spiritual independence that can be compared to political independence” from Russia, he said in December. [...]

Speaking at a Russian Orthodox Church event alongside Kirill in Moscow last month, Putin doubled down, saying Russia “reserve[s] the right to respond and do everything possible to protect human rights, including freedom of religion.” The thinly veiled threat resonated with officials in Kiev who recalled the Russian leader’s justification for annexing Crimea in 2014 and backing pro-Moscow separatists that same year: defending Russian speakers.[...]

Religious leaders from the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine are quick to point out that the 300 or so churches that have changed allegiances in the past month are a relative drop in the bucket, given there are still some 12,000 to 14,000 Moscow-aligned churches in Ukraine. [...]

Some 5,000 parishes that previously adhered to the two unofficial Ukrainian churches — the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate — have also become part of the new independent church. Most are located in Ukraine’s predominantly pro-European west and center, while the Moscow Patriarchate’s influence in strongest in the east and south.

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