Although separatist violations of the Ukrainian ceasefire are down, the Minsk-II accords are not being fulfilled in key areas. With more Russian-speakers fighting on the Ukrainian side, the conflict is not a civil war but a civilizational confrontation between Soviet Russophones seeking a future in Vladimir Putin’s “Russian World” and pro-European Russian and Ukrainian-speaking supporters of Ukraine's future in Europe. On the domestic front, the Euromaidan honeymoon is over and Ukrainians are becoming impatient with austerity and the lack of high-level criminal convictions of corrupt officials and members of the ousted Yanukovych regime. De-oligarchisation has not dislodged the oligarchs who together with nationalists and military veterans could constitute powerful forces for future counter-revolution. Will President Petro Poroshenko rise to the occasion, or follow the inglorious path of his predecessors?
Taras Kuzio is the author of Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism (Praeger, 2015), a definitive contemporary political, economic, and cultural history that surveys and analyzes Soviet and post-Soviet Ukrainian history since 1953 to provide a deeper understanding of the ongoing transition processes in Ukraine today.
Featuring:
Taras Kuzio
Senior Research Associate, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta;
Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Moderated by:
Jeffrey Mankoff
Acting Director and Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, CSIS
This event is made possible by support to the CSIS Russia and Eurasia program from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Programs
RUSSIA AND EURASIA PROGRAM
Topics
GOVERNANCE
Regions
EASTERN EUROPE, RUSSIA, RUSSIA AND EURASIA
