Ukraine Wants to Be a Part of the West

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Security, Europe

But it's strategy is yielding mixed results.

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has staked his country’s future and his own chances at re-election to a second term on three gambles. He hopes that these gambles will permanently rupture Ukraine’s connections to Russia and ensure that Ukraine becomes a full member of the Western community of nations. So far, however, the scorecard is showing mixed results.

After the Euro-Maidan revolution overthrew then-President Viktor Yanukovych, sending him fleeing into exile in Russia in 2014, the Kremlin began an ambitious effort to route its major geo-economic linkages to Europe in order to completely bypass Ukraine. (Yanukovych, for all of his faults and corruption, had successfully blunted earlier Russian attempts to do so by offering concessions on gas transit and the Black Sea fleet.) Initially, the European Commission aided Ukraine’s position by effectively blocking the South Stream pipeline. Moreover, the 2015 rupture in Russia-Turkey relations after the shootdown of a Russian fighter jet by the Turkish Air Force on the Syria-Turkey border seemed to presage Ankara moving into its traditional role of blocking Russian ambitions in the Black Sea region. These developments, however, have proven to be temporary.

Poroshenko relied on assurances from the United States and some of its central European allies like Poland that Russian pipeline projects to Europe bypassing Ukraine would be permanently stopped. However, steady Russian efforts have chipped away at those assurances. Turkish Stream is now becoming a reality, with Turkey likely to cease all of its gas importation from Russia via Ukraine, and the second tranche of that line will give Russia direct access to Southern European customers. More critically, the Nord Stream II project has begun to lay pipeline, doubling Russia’s capacity to send gas to Germany and the European core directly via the Baltic Sea.