tymoshenko26_Kommersant Photo Getty_Troops in Ukraine Kommersant Photo/Getty Images

Darkness on the Edge of Europe

Whether Ukraine is reduced to a semi-sovereign buffer state, and the rule of brute force is given free rein, depends on whether world leaders understand that appeasement begets only further aggression. If they do not, 2015 could mark the return of a European and world order that was supposedly overcome seven decades ago.

KYIV – In 2014, Vladimir Putin discovered his inner Trotsky. For what Russia’s president is now offering Ukraine is a perverse twist on the formula Trotsky proclaimed during the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in 1918: “No war, no peace.” In doing so, Putin has not only moved to trap my country in a frozen conflict that will prevent both democracy and the economy from flourishing; he has shredded the rules and norms that have kept the peace in Europe for three generations.

No one should believe that the Minsk Protocol – agreed in September by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, and the Kremlin-backed armed militants in the eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk – marked the beginning of a return to normalcy in either Ukraine or Europe. Under that agreement, Ukraine’s government ceded de facto control of the Donbas region, supposedly for only three years, to Russia’s hired secessionists. But this imported hybrid war – and Russia’s bid to carve up Ukraine – is far from over.

On the contrary, the Minsk Protocol marked only the end of the beginning of Putin’s program to turn Ukraine into a vassal state, and to restore a Russian veto over its neighbors’ international relations. His efforts to thwart Ukraine’s European future will continue, as will his efforts to hollow out our democracy and replace it with a Kremlin echo chamber, unless the world imposes such a high price for his imperial ambitions that the Russian people refuse to bear it.

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