Why winning in Ukraine matters

This article will be published in the December 28 issue of The Weekly Standard.

It’s said that hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. At first blush, that’s Ukraine. On a recent visit to Kiev, we heard account after account of the problems facing Ukraine, the two most serious being corruption and the ongoing conflict with Russia. Two doozies, to be sure.

Corruption is ubiquitous. Famously, Ukrainian oligarchs have stolen massive amounts of the country’s wealth and used that wealth to control Ukraine’s political order. But corruption is pervasive in daily life as well. It’s not uncommon for university students to pay to take their exams, defend a thesis, or obtain their diploma. Diabetics are deprived of insulin, children lack vaccines, and HIV/AIDS patients die because they can’t get antiretrovirals, with doctors bilking patients and the system. Want a license for this or that from the bureaucracy? Expect to pay something under the table. Transparency International pegs Ukraine at 142 out of 175 countries in its world rankings. That’s on par with Uganda, worse than Nigeria (136th), and far from the league of ex-Soviet republic Georgia, which ranks 50th. By the Ukrainian government’s own estimate, the country’s off-the-books “shadow economy” is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent of the official GDP figure.

President Petro Poroshenko has been under constant fire both at home and abroad for moving too slowly to put reforms in place, to get the economy going, and to build public confidence in government. A central problem: The legal system remains a mess. The country has 18,000 prosecutors and 10,000 judges, with a very good number thought to be corrupt. Polls show that well over three-quarters of the country doesn’t trust the judiciary, and virtually everyone sees the current prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, as blocking investigations into corrupt prosecutors, judges, and graft. The former KGB, now the Security Services of Ukraine, has 4,000 officers tasked with fighting corruption. It’s unclear how many work as double agents and how many simply work full-time for the Chekists in Moscow. More than a few are tied to corruption schemes. The task of getting this country onto the right path is daunting.

Everything moves, it seems, at a snail’s pace. For example, Poroshenko has not touched reform of hundreds of the state-owned-enterprises—key components of the system of graft. Ministries point fingers at one another. Critics claim that Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has not done nearly enough. Everyone’s looking for breakthroughs; people are fed up with incrementalism.

None of this should be a surprise. The history of Ukraine since its modern independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union has been one of dashed expectations. Even a previous revolt against Ukrainian political and economic corruption, the Orange Revolution in 2004, only led to more of the same. “Ukraine fatigue” from both Washington and the capitals of Western Europe is not unexpected.

But it’s also too easily the default position. It’s only been two years since peaceful protests began in response to the decision of then-president Viktor Yanukovych to back away from an association with the European Union. And even less time has passed since his violent crackdowns at Kiev’s Maidan Square, which led to his ouster and the election of Poroshenko in May 2014 and a new parliament the following October. Rome, as they say, wasn’t built in a day, especially a “Rome” with so much muck to first dig out of.

Anders Åslund of the Atlantic Council says follow the model of Estonia and East Germany—sack the judges, prosecutors, and members of the secret services since “all but a few of them are likely to be corrupt.” While true, it’s not quite so easy to do. The German Democratic Republic was an acquisition, with a new West German parent company free to call virtually all the shots, and Estonia has a tiny population of 1.3 million people, as opposed to Ukraine’s 44.8 million.

And there has been progress. Ukraine’s fiscal situation has been largely stabilized; the country’s GDP has stopped contracting; reforms are underway in the banking system; judges have begun to be dismissed; a top anticorruption prosecutor has been named; a plan for creating an independent judiciary is afoot; an electronic and transparent government procurement system has been put in place; and measures to reduce government red-tape and domestic energy subsidies—both of which were invitations to massive corruption—have been established.

Since the fall of this year, a new police force has taken to the streets in Kiev and several other cities, with officers tooling around in a fleet of Toyota Priuses. Their job: to crack down on police demanding bribes at every turn. The initiative has proven hugely popular. Combine that success with the fact that the country has held three free and fair nationwide elections since the Maidan protests, and perhaps there is hope for Ukraine yet.

And lest anyone forget, all of this is being done while Ukraine is at war.

Vladimir Putin rallied against Ukraine’s course correction by annexing Crimea in March 2014 and starting a conflict soon thereafter in eastern Ukraine, where, up until that time, ethnic Russians had been living rather peacefully alongside ethnic Ukrainians. Russian-backed separatists waged insurrections in their self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and, while the worst of the fighting has died down of late, no one should underestimate the toll this war has already taken. Askold Krushelnycky, a former BBC journalist who has spent more than half of the year on the ground as a freelancer tagging along with Ukrainian forces, says “people have to understand this is a real war, with tanks and artillery and wounded soldiers returning west without limbs, their lives forever changed.”

Putin must not be permitted to win in Ukraine. The first reason is a moral one. Admittedly, it’s a hard argument to make now because what’s happening in this corner of Europe can look tangential to the pressing matters of the day. Even for Europeans, preventing the next terrorist attack, defeating ISIS, stabilizing Syria, and contending with a major refugee crisis are urgent and vital. Nevertheless, the energy and idealism of Ukraine’s younger generation must be viewed with respect and admiration. For all its problems, civil society is alive and well in Ukraine.

The NGOs we met with in Kiev are brimming with remarkable enthusiasm, purpose, and drive. We know of a twentysomething Ukrainian American who had, until recently, lived a safe and comfortable life in Munich, where his German father resides. This young gentleman now spends most of his time in Kiev working with NGOs to help the cause. He’s also told his mother if he needs to, he’ll enlist and go east “to fight for European values.” This is a reminder that there are still people, partly of a new generation, who are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom and a democratic way of life.

But, frankly, Ukraine is no longer simply about Ukraine. As a matter of power politics, Putin wants the country to fail, which means one thing: Ukraine cannot be allowed to become part of the West in any real sense of the word. No EU membership, no NATO membership, no evolution to the rule of law and well-functioning democratic institutions. For one thing, Ukraine has remained an important piece of the Kremlin’s chessboard. As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in the late 1990s, “if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state.” It’s why you find a good number of Georgians in Kiev to help pro-Western forces. Georgians and others know that if Ukraine gets sucked back into the Russian orbit, neighboring countries, too, will feel the Kremlin’s pull—and stranglehold—even stronger than they do now.

But no less important is the ideological struggle underlying the conflict. Putin cannot permit a country of Ukraine’s size, proximity, and cultural affinity—he likes to speak of the “fraternal Ukrainian people”—to create an attractive alternative model to his gangster state in Russia. We’ve never been clear whether we have merely a Putin problem or a Russia problem. We do know, however, that this Kremlin boss plays it safe, muzzling the media, reining in (or worse) dissidents, and snuffing out where he can all liberal aspirations that crop up in Russia. Success in Ukraine can’t help but be a problem for Putin.

More broadly, failure in Ukraine puts a stake in the heart of the idea of Europe “whole and free.” It’s bad enough that the West has for all practical purposes conceded Putin’s military conquest of Crimea and the de facto annexation of the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. What accommodationists fail to see, though, is that something larger and civilizational is now at stake. Abandon Ukraine and other euro-Atlantic aspirants and we’re not just acquiescing to spheres of influence, we’re also giving legitimacy, providing the aura of success, to a form of nationalism and autocratic rule that America and its allies have fought two wars to stamp out. In short, not only must Putin not win in Ukraine, he has to be seen domestically and internationally as losing.

Ukrainians themselves, of course, must ultimately bear the lion’s share of responsibility for their own success or failure. But the United States, together with the EU, can do our part: through economic aid (tied to progress on corruption); intelligence and military support (including lethal assistance); and diplomatic solidarity (foremost, continued sanctions against Russia). And while Washington, Brussels, and the other European capitals must continue to press the government of Ukraine to move forward with reforms, they should not throw up their hands in frustration that it hasn’t happened overnight. Winning in Ukraine matters—for both Ukrainians and the West.

Jeffrey Gedmin is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, senior adviser at Blue Star Strategies, and executive director of the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Renewal Initiative. Gary Schmitt is resident scholar and codirector of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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