THE NATIONAL INTEREST

This is a lengthy article. Here are a couple of extracts:

Today, Moscow has a primarily negative strategy with regards to Ukraine: make Ukraine unpalatable for EU/NATO membership; prevent a consolidation of the Ukrainian political system; and reroute Russia’s geo-economic connections. The goal is to recreate a failing state and throw responsibility for its financial upkeep onto the Europeans and the United States. Putin’s gamble is that the West will be disinclined to take upon itself the burden of renovating Ukraine.

The risk for Ukraine, therefore, is that much of the world learns to live with de facto Russian control of Crimea—much in the same way that, despite numerous United Nations resolutions affirming the territorial integrity of Cyprus, Northern Cyprus has been maintained by Turkey as a separate entity since 1974

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the Captain Jerome E. Levy chair of economic geography and national security at the U.S. Naval War College. He is also a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views expressed here are his own.

To read the whole article, click the following:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/where-will-ukraine-go-here-87936