Violence in Ukraine is spreading. The Ukrainian military and police are splitting apart, a reflection of the fissures in that deeply divided country. Pro-Russian separatists are taking over government buildings and police stations in eastern Ukraine. Pro-government mobs have burned protesters alive. The referenda on self-rule cobbled together by pro-Russian movements in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions deepens the divisions. Zealots on both sides could drive the country into a bloody and destructive civil war.
The United States has no direct national security interests at stake in Ukraine, but we do have an interest in a united and functional Ukraine that has stable relations with its European Union neighbors to the west and with Russia to the east. And the United States surely wants to forestall a crisis that could disintegrate into civil war, economic collapse and chaos, possibly destabilizing a weak European economy.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Post.
But if the United States is to help stabilize Ukraine and prevent a much larger European crisis, then the American political establishment and much of the mainstream media will need a sober reassessment of reality.
U.S. actions over the past several months have defied common sense. Given the deep divisions in Ukrainian society and the vital interest Russia has in the country, it was a provocative step for the United States to immediately and unconditionally recognize as legitimate the government erected out of violent protests and in violation of the negotiated agreement for a peaceful transition. And it makes no sense to treat Russia’s actions as an existential threat to the post-war international order, given that the West needs Russian cooperation to stabilize Ukraine both politically and financially.
Not only have the media and political class egged on the administration in a rash and destructive foreign policy, but the debate, shamefully inadequate as it has been, has had an Alice in Wonderland quality to it. Voices across the political spectrum have scorned the president as weak, fulminating about forceful action while forswearing any use of U.S. military forces, knowing the American people had no appetite for another conflict on the other side of the world.
Leaks from the White House to the New York Times suggest that Russia must be treated as a “pariah nation,” in an updated form of Cold War containment. This would require isolating the sixth-largest economy in the world, one that supplies Europe with more than a quarter of its oil and gas and has growing ties with emerging powers, including China and India. The only way to sell that to Americans — much less the
