[LINK] "Now Putin Has to Figure Out What to Do With the Separatists"

[rfmcdonald]

Joshua Yaffa's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article makes the point that, from Russia's perspective, having the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk (and perhaps others) break away to join the Russian Federation isn't an optimal outcome. Keeping them inside Ukraine would be much preferable for Russian interests in wider Ukraine.

I wonder if, depending on what public opinion is in this eastern Ukrainian regions, Ukrainians hoping for European integration might do better to let these regions separate from Ukraine and enter the Russian sphere,

For starters, Putin has “no appetite or readiness to absorb eastern Ukraine,” said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. Moscow does not relish the idea of being responsible for the region’s disaffected coal miners and Soviet-era industrial infrastructure. Nor does it want to bear the costs of a civil war among the local population—or even worse, find itself in the quagmire of a real war if the Ukrainian army were to resist Russia’s land grab. It also wants to avoid the hardship of sectoral economic sanctions that the U.S. and European Union would introduce if Russia were to invade or annex Ukraine’s eastern regions.

Instead, Trenin explained, the Kremlin would like to exploit the uncertainty and instability of eastern Ukraine to ram through its ultimate, and most important, strategic aim: a so-called “federalization” plan that would see eastern regions handed a wide degree of autonomy, thus keeping the country from moving closer to the EU or NATO and ensuring a powerful countervailing voice for a pro-Russian elite. With these interests in mind, Russia views Ukraine’s eastern territory more as a bargaining chip than as a potential territorial acquisition. In future rounds of negotiations with the Ukrainian government and Western officials, the Kremlin can wield the unresolved status of eastern Ukraine and the appeal by the separatists to join Russia as an ever-present threat: Give us what we want, or we’ll break Ukraine apart. If no grand bargain can be found, or if Russia decides it prefers permanent instability in Ukraine to a diplomatic solution, the Kremlin could keep eastern Ukraine as a perpetually contested territory, a grander version of the political and security headache posed by the breakaway republic of Transnistria.