By Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev
Project Syndicate
VIENNA – Global temperatures are rising, but the former Soviet Union’s frozen conflicts show no sign of a thaw. On the contrary, the ice is expanding.
Russia’s support for the election held by separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk – key cities in Ukraine’s Donbas region – indicates that the Kremlin has decided to create another semi-permanent “mini-Cold War,” this time in rebel-controlled areas of Russia’s most important neighboring country. But freezing Ukraine’s legitimate government out of the region is potentially far more destabilizing than the Kremlin’s support for the other ex-Soviet breakaway territories: Moldova’s Transnistria and the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
By blurring its border with Ukraine, Russia is creating a new relationship with an anomalous, internationally unrecognizable entity that belongs, culturally and historically, not to the imaginary “Novorossiya” (New Russia) proclaimed by the separatists, but to the “undead” Soviet Union. The question is why Russian President Vladimir Putin and his entourage view a frozen conflict in Donbas, created to preclude a political settlement or lasting peace, as a positive outcome for their country.
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Stephen Holmes is a professor at New York University School of Law and is the author, most recently, of The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror.
Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. His latest book is In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?
This material is reproduced with the prior written consent of Project Syndicate. For more information on Project Syndicate, visit http://www.project-syndicate.org/
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