The Ukraine… Is it Really Over?

Anybody who’s been keeping tabs on the situation in the Ukraine at the moment will have noticed that things have finally come to a standstill. What does this mean for the future of the country considering its larger problems?

Over the course of the weekend it seems that the leaders of the Ukraine have finally come to an accord. The president was kicked out, the protesters have stopped marching and elections have been called for May.

It would seem that the situation has finally settled. However Oliver Rawlings readers I would argue that this is part of recurring problems that elections aren’t going to solve.

Ukraine has been in this position before, multiple times. I would argue that in order to solve the problem for good we need to go deeper than just calling for another election. We need to look at the basic cultural divide that haunts the Ukraine and has done for decades.

The Ukraine for a long time was either under direct Russian control or a client state of the much larger nation. Indeed for most of its life it was either a part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. However the west of the Ukraine has been, at other points in its history, Polish, Austrian, Hungarian etc.

This means that there’s a basic cultural divide in the country, indeed this divide is what led to the clash in the first place. The protests were sparked by the Russian friendly government after they turned down a trade deal with the EU in favour of closer ties with Putin’s autocracy.

This is what sparked the riots. People in the East rely on Russia and when they threatened to pull away trade, the government had to protect their interests. However the people in the west of the Ukraine were hoping that EU trade deals would bring living standards more in line with those enjoyed in the west.

This is a problem that runs deeper. What will happen in May is that the Ukraine will most likely elect a EU friendly government, then things will be quiet for a time before they make a decision that’s unpopular with the other half of the country. The merry-go round goes round and round as it were.

The nation needs to address this cultural divide if it ever hopes to survive. Should it even survive?  I’m guessing that this may be a question those in the Ukraine ask themselves in the coming days and months.