Keep an Eye On, But Don't Isolate Ukraine

Keep an Eye On, But Don't Isolate Ukraine

Ukraine this week held a deeply flawed election, in which the main opposition leader was jailed and the biggest gains went to a party of neo-fascists, who appear to have won 10 percent of the vote. For a country that eight years ago staged an inspiring uprising to overturn a stolen election, it’s hard to imagine a more depressing outcome.

The breakthrough by Svoboda, an extreme-right-wing party from the nation’s Ukrainian-speaking west, is just another sign that all is not well in this divided country. Before the Oct. 28 election, Ukraine was already being shut out by the European Union over its democratic failures and pressured by Russia to join a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan instead. Now neo-fascists will take their seats in parliament.

But here is why Ukraine is so difficult to read and handle, for all of its neighbors. To start with, Svoboda (which translates as Freedom), must be Europe’s only neo-fascists who are also pro-EU. Meanwhile, Yulia Tymoshenko, the jailed heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution, says the EU is wrong to punish Ukraine for her treatment by freezing its association agreement with the bloc. And the supposedly pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych doesn’t even want to join Russia’s customs union, if he can avoid it.

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