Protests shake Ukraine

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kiev this week, besieging key government buildings and battling riot police in an effort to force President Viktor Yanukovych to resign. Protests erupted when Yanukovych abruptly scrapped political and free trade accords he had spent years negotiating with the European Union, focusing instead on strengthening ties with Russia. Moscow had threatened Ukraine with economic punishment over the prospective EU deal. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who survived a no-confidence vote in parliament, urged demonstrators to enter into talks with his government. “We will give you a hand,” said Azarov. “If we see a fist, we have enough force.”

Blame this mess on Vladimir Putin’s ambition to rebuild the Soviet Union, said Joerg Forbrig in CNN.com. The Russian president derailed Ukraine’s deal with the EU because he wants the country and other former Soviet republics to join a rival Moscow-led “Eurasian Union” that could compete with the U.S. and China. Without Ukraine’s huge market, mineral resources, and proximity to the EU, Putin knows his neo-Soviet project is dead.

The Ukrainian government was in a no-win situation, said Alex Spillius in The Telegraph (U.K.). The EU deal could have saved Ukrainian businesses more than $670 million a year in import duties. But it could have led Russia to block $16 billion in annual Ukrainian exports and hike the price of natural gas. The EU’s carrots “simply couldn’t match Putin’s sticks.”

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Yanukovych had his own reasons for canning the deal, said The Washington Post in an editorial. EU anti-corruption officials would have probed the fortune his family has acquired during his presidency. Still, he was fairly elected and remains popular in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east, so his fate should be settled through elections next year, not a repeat of 2004’s Orange Revolution. If he’s ousted through street protests, Ukraine could be doomed to “the endless turmoil that has afflicted other nations that removed elected leaders, including Thailand and Egypt.”