EuroMaidan Revolution

Andreas Umland: Misunderstanding Ukraine, misreading Russia

By Andreas Umland.

Published Jan. 18, 2014 at 9:45 am

Some 1,000 anti-government activists, enraged over sweeping new laws that stiffen penalties for mass demonstrations, marched from Independence Square to the Presidential Administration in Kyiv on Jan. 17. The protesters, chanting \u201cout with the gang!\u201d marched together and carried placards with the words \u201cDictatorship\" and \"They made it legal\u201d scrawled across them. They also displayed photographs of activists beaten during demonstrations over the course of the past eight weeks, as well as excerpts from the laws passed in parliament on Jan. 16.

Photo by Kostyantyn Chernichkin

The Western public’s disappointment about Yanukovych’s behavior vis-à-vis the EU is duplicitous. Unless Brussels takes its partnership with Kyiv as well as the Ukrainian-Russian conflict seriously, the Association Agreement with Ukraine will not be signed. Above all, the EU member countries have to make a conceptual and practical conjunction of their intensive economic relations with Russia with their interests in the EU’s Eastern neighborhood, a connection that needs to be made clear to Moscow. The conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine has not only a geopolitical, but also security dimension. If the EU does not invest today its economic weight into securing Ukraine’s sovereignty and Europeanization, it may have to deal with political turmoil, migration waves, and armed confrontations on its Eastern border in the future.

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