Ukraine: A case of lost sovereignty in the middle of a geopolitical struggle
Ukraine has by now all the symptoms of a failed state. The government does not control its own alleged borders. Separatist regions in Donetsk and Lugansk with tacit Russian support do not recognize Kiev’s authority while Crimea and Sevastopol function de facto (or de jure, depending on the point of view) as federal subjects of the Russian Federation.
The current Ukrainian authorities have become extremely dependent on the support of the United States and the International Monetary Fund while foreigners with strong links to the US participate as cabinet members or in key positions in the government. Besides, local armed militias act beyond the supposed legal order and establish their own policies as in the case of the economic blockade against Crimea.
Meanwhile, mostly the same group of oligarchs that amassed their fortunes due to their links to political power in the last decades continue to monopole most of the economic activity and control the main political parties while bargaining with the West in function of their needs. Local Media held by those same oligarchs display now an anti-Russian ‘patriotic struggle’ and antagonize even more the complex relation with the neighbour with which they had strong economic interaction under the regime of Victor Yanukovych until he was ousted on February 2014, as a consequence of a long political crisis related to the events in the Maidan. Those same events in the Maidan, which left numerous victims, failed mostly in one thing. They were not able of producing a political force independent from the oligarchs. Therefore, denying one of the few genuine attempts to produce a democratic force occurred in the recent history of the country.
Instead, an ethnonational rhetoric divides now even more the complex multi-ethnic and multilingual composition, which the Ukrainian territory has enjoyed for centuries, in which Russian language now is the mother tongue of near half of the population. This division also showcases how after more than two decades of the fall of the Soviet Union, the attempt to build an Ukrainian state in which all its inhabitants feel identified has been a failure.
In the meantime, the country is one of the poorest in Europe with a minimum wage equivalent to less than 50 EUR a month. More than 58% of the GDP refers to black market economy and almost two million people were displaced due to the war in the Donbas while Ukrainian economy shrank 6.8% in 2014 and 10.4% in 2015.
All this happens, while the territory remains with no sovereign way to affront three surrounding geopolitical proposals: NATO enlargement, the European Union with its Association Agreements and the Eurasian Economic Union promoted by Moscow. All of these projects contemplate the Ukrainian territory as strategic for their goals.
