The jury is still out on how history books will look back at Viktor Yanukovych, the towering 63-year old who rose up from a troubled Soviet childhood in Ukraine’s tough eastern industrial heartland to eventually become president of this independent country of 46 million.
His greatest legacy may turn out not to be domestic, but in helping Russian president Vladimir Putin restrict the EU’s eastern border at Poland, leaving much of the eastern edge of Europe within a competing Eurasian Union. Some fear it would be ‘USSR 2.0′.
While Ukraine’s last minute decision this week to pull out of a historic association and free trade agreement with Brussels may have been motivated by domestic politics – namely Yanukovych’s would-be desire to land a Russian bailout that could help him get re-elected in 2015 – his decision, if final, could plunge the success and future of the EU’s Eastern Partnership program into question. As the largest country within that program (that also includes the likes of Georgia and Moldova), Ukraine is the main prize.
