It was probably the singular moment at a conference on the future of Ukraine: Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that Vladimir Putin wants to take “all of Ukraine,” that the Russian president intends to “eliminate Ukraine as an independent country.” Yatsenyuk delivered this stark assessment at the eleventh annual meeting of the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference, held this year in Kiev—a location that alone gave force to his words. For Yalta, of course, is in Crimea, and Crimea is now in Russian hands.
Try as I might, after spending a long weekend in Kiev at the conference and among the people of that city, I couldn’t resist a profound pessimism about the country’s future. Particularly telling for me, as an American and an advocate of American leadership abroad, was the degree to which the United States is not seen as an important actor in securing Ukraine’s future. Ukrainians increasingly see the ongoing crisis in their country as a domestic issue that they must resolve with the Russian Federation. In no small part is this perspective based on the fact that the Europeans, and the West more generally, have not been able to persuade the Russian government to bring a definitive end to the crisis. This was underscored by the comment that the conference’s host, Victor Pinchuk, made to the European Commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, after the E.U. announced that it would delay implementation of its trade pact with Ukraine—the original instigator
