Western leaders are trying their best to sound tough as they wait to find out if Russia sticks to the Minsk agreement and halts its land grab in eastern Ukraine. President Obama has threatened a “strong reaction” if the ceasefire is breached. Chancellor Merkel says Europe is ready to impose new sanctions. The debate about arming Ukraine rumbles on in Washington. Yet this hardly amounts to a turning point. We have already been through 12 months of ‘red line’ ultimatums, incremental sanctions and penny-packet support for Ukraine. The West is no closer to forcing Vladimir Putin to think again than it was a year ago when he seized Crimea.
This makes a nonsense of the idea, skilfully encouraged by the Kremlin, that its intervention was provoked by Western efforts to lure Ukraine into its camp. The real story of EU and US policy towards Ukraine over the last decade has been one of lethargy and indifference. The much-cited 2008 NATO declaration that Ukraine “will join” was a sop designed to make up for the fact that it had just been denied a Membership Action Plan. The EU Association Agreement that Putin induced President Yanukovych to abandon, triggering the Ukrainian leader’s downfall, was offered as an alternative to membership because the EU had become too weary and self-absorbed to contemplate further enlargement.
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