Ukraine at the breaking point

Ukraine’s embattled president was clinging desperately to power this week, after an increasingly violent protest movement forced his much-loathed prime minister to resign and parliament rolled back a raft of draconian laws against dissent. An alliance of opposition groups, enraged by President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision in November to suddenly abandon closer ties to the European Union and instead embrace Russia, vowed protests would continue until Yanukovych is removed from power, political prisoners are freed, and presidential authority is curtailed. “We have to change not only the government but the rules of the game as well,” said opposition leader Vitali Klitschko.

We’re witnessing the dawn of a new, postsectarian era in Ukraine, said Kataryna Wolczuk and Roman Wolczuk in The Washington Post. Anger against Yanukovych’s venal and arrogant regime has done what no one opposition leader could—namely, unite a country divided between an EU-leaning west and a Russian-speaking east that still identifies with the former USSR. Ukrainians of all stripes now see the ongoing protests as a fight to reclaim their status as “dignified citizens in their own land.”

Now is the time for the U.S. and Europe to act, said John E. Herbst and three other former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine in The New York Times. Through external mediation, threats of financial sanctions, and a blunt message to Yanukovych’s patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, to stop meddling, the West could put Ukraine back on the road to democracy. But unless Europe and the U.S. “use their leverage now,” the West will be “no more than a spectator” to almost certain bloodshed and chaos on its own doorstep.

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The real lesson here isn’t a pleasant one, said Anne Applebaum in Slate.com. The mythical takeaway of the 2004 Orange Revolution—that peaceful demonstrators with media savvy can nonviolently overthrow corrupt governments—is now dead. Backed by Putin’s ruthless tactics and petroleum money, the greedy oligarchs who’ve swooped into the post-Soviet vacuum have established a seductive, if cynical, alternative to Western-style democracy. Ukrainians who want to avoid getting sucked into Putin’s orbit have two choices: Try to topple Yanukovych by force or spend years reinventing Ukrainian culture and vanquishing the country’s corruption-as-usual attitude. “Slogans just aren’t good enough anymore.”