Solution in Ukraine Slips Almost Out of Reach

Solution in Ukraine Slips Almost Out of Reach

If the clock could be turned back, a solution would look like this. The pro-Western revolutionaries would have waited for elections — just months off — to gain power, and with them legitimacy they have yet to earn. A new constitution, decentralizing significant power to satisfy Ukraine's Russian-oriented eastern and southern provinces, would be passed (though not to the extreme that Russian now demands). Ukraine would stay militarily non-aligned. Russia inevitably would have significant influence for reasons of ethnicity, language and history — but without military intervention and at no great cost to the West. That is still the right solution and one that the Kiev government has belatedly moved toward, but as diplomats from Ukraine, Russia, the U.S. and the European Union meet in Geneva today, it seems almost out of reach. Putin has whipped up fervor for conquest at home that he may feel compelled to feed, and his new militarism — destabilizing the post-Cold War order of Europe — has gravely raised the stakes for the West, which is groping for response.

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