Resize Text: Russia's August 2008 invasion of Georgia and de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will undoubtedly have repercussions for Ukaine’s security. Although Ukraine had high hopes—following the Orange Revolution and election of the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko—of quickly integrating into Euro-Atlantic structures, only NATO opened its door in 2005-06 but closed it in 2007-08 due to low public support within Ukraine and the growing appeasement of Russia by key Western European NATO members. The EU continues not to view Ukraine as a future member. Ukraine’s security vacuum is coupled with instability, preventing the adoption of a unified position on Russia’s aggression in Georgia, which has plagued the entire Yushchenko administration and Russian assertiveness in the region. Russian-Ukrainian relations have deteriorated to their lowest point since the disintegration of the USSR. This poor state of affairs, combined with Russia’s willingness and legal justification for defending “Russian citizens” abroad, opens up the possibility that localized conflict in the Crimea and Sevastopol can no longer be ruled out.
This article is divided into five sections. In the first section, I analyze Ukrainian security policies and security dilemmas in the aftermath of the August 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, taking into consideration that NATO and EU membership are not likely for Ukraine in the foreseeable future. In the second section, I analyze Ukrainian-Georgian relations and the close ideological, personal, and security bonds between Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko and Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili. Although these particular connections emerged after the 2003 Rose Revolution and 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukraine and Georgia had a well-established security relationship under President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine and President Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia until 2003-04.
In the third and fourth sections of the article, I discuss the likelihood of the Crimea becoming the next target for Russian territorial assertiveness in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Ukraine’s security responses to what Kyiv sees as growing Russian nationalism. Russian opinion polls also show that the United States, Georgia, and Ukraine are the three most disliked countries in Russia. In these sections, I discuss Russia’s inability to come to terms with Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, and territorial control over the Crimea, as well as Ukraine’s right to have different national interests from Russia.
In the final section, I discuss how the Russia-Georgia war affected Ukrainian domestic politics (for a breakdown by leader and party, see the appendix). This section argues that existing divisions within the Orange Coalition prevented a unified response to the war, although both Our Ukraine and the Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT), as the coalition’s two key political forces, feuded, leading to the collapse of the coalition on September 3. Both wings of the democratic (i.e. Orange) coalition supported Georgia’s territorial integrity. The oppositional Party of Regions’ official stance, in support of the recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, split the party in the Ukrainian parliament. The party’s resolution in support of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia was supported by the Communist Party, but failed to win sufficient votes to be adopted. A similar resolution passed in the Crimean parliament.
Taras Kuzio is senior fellow and chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto and editor of Ukraine Analyst. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto.
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