Finalist: The Wall Street Journal, by Matthew Kaminski

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Kiev — In Poland in 1989, there was the satisfaction of a long struggle against Soviet domination completed. In Serbia in 2000, the relief of an end to Slobodan Milosevic’s wars and isolation. In Egypt in 2011, euphoria and chaos. Every revolution has different mood music. What’s Ukraine like now? Somber. Anxious. Wary. Tough days are ahead, but this is the attitude that Ukraine will need to make its revolution a success.

 

There’s no euphoria here. The regime of Viktor Yanukovych crumbled in hours on Friday after three hard months of street protests, but the aftermath has been marked by funereal religious chants coming from Kiev’s Independence Square, or the Maidan. Mounds of flowers and red candles, too many to count, mark the spots nearby where some 77 people were killed by snipers and riot police in last week’s clashes. No one here expected such brute violence, and the experience has changed this place.

 

On television news, the images of crassly lavish Yanukovych presidential palaces are followed by reports from funerals for the “victims of the regime.” Eulogizing one of them, an Orthodox priest wonders: “Why? So one ‘Family’ can hold on to power?” The Family is the Yanukovych clan, now on the run, like their leader.

 

Across Ukraine, statues of Lenin are falling. A few pro-Russian towns are holding out, but 22 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse — an entire generation — there’s a previously missing consensus about the disastrous toll from Moscow’s domination over the past century. Millions of Ukrainians were killed in Stalin’s man-made famine in 1932-33. The language and culture were decimated as well.

 

Vladimir Putin’s television channels call this awakening “neo-fascism” and “ultranationalism” and a threat to Russians here. The Kremlin won’t accept the fluidity and diversity of Ukrainian identity. A local channel last weekend started running short films of famous and random Ukrainians, speaking in Russian and Ukrainian about their backgrounds. At the end, all hold hands while standing on a bridge and say in unison: “We are one country.”

 

Repeated assertions of the need for national unity come from anxiety over Russia’s intentions. The Maidan uprising stopped the Kremlin from steering Ukraine away from the European Union and into Mr. Putin’s Eurasian Union, otherwise known as the club of corrupt autocrats. His failure last week set in motion the contingency plan for Crimea, Ukraine’s sole majority-Russian region.

 

Crimea has been the dog that barely ever whimpered and never bit after the Soviet collapse. Aside from a large bastion of Russian Black Sea Fleet servicemen in the port of Sevastopol, the ethnic Russians in Crimea are mostly retirees and cranks — not exactly a rebel vanguard. The hardestworking and most organized ethnic group is the Crimean Tatars. On Wednesday, they held a large pro-Ukrainian counterprotest in Simferopol, the regional capital. The Tatars were expelled from their homeland en masse by Stalin and returned only

in the past two decades. Like the ethnic Ukrainians, they have reason to fear an assertion of Russian influence.

 

Mr. Putin can make life difficult for Ukraine’s leaders just by raising the prospect of violence or a territorial carve-up. On Wednesday the Russian president ordered a test of “battle readiness” of 150,000 troops along Ukraine’s border. Mr. Putin can’t afford a democratic, pro-Western success story in a country that Russians consider so similar to their own.

 

But Kiev has a long way to go on that score. Ukrainians distrust, with good reason, the entire political class. Mr. Yanukovych wasn’t the only greedy or incompetent pol here. But the Maidan crowds can’t rule the country, and in

the past five days, parliament has assumed that role. On Wednesday night, the names of those who would lead a proposed new transitional government were announced before thousands packed in at the Maidan. Some were booed, others

were cheered.

 

Behind closed doors, the politicians are “trying to recreate the old system,” says Mustafa Naim, an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, furious at the signs of deal-making by the same old faces. “You can see it in their eyes. We may need to go out on the Maidan again.” He says Ukraine needs to clean the whole political slate by scheduling a parliamentary election to coincide with the planned presidential vote in late May.

 

Mr. Naim started all this in late November by calling a meeting on the Maidan to protest Mr. Yanukovych’s decision to abandon an EU “association” pact. Now he hosts a show on a new television channel, Hromadske, created out

of the Maidan movement and funded by donations. “I think it’s very good that people don’t believe the politicians,” he says. “It means they won’t allow them to disappoint us again.”

 

Nine years ago, the Orange Revolution here overturned a fraudulent election result but failed to change Ukraine’s political ways. The recent revolt pitted a grass-roots movement against a Kremlin desperate to save its favorite embezzler in Kiev. The Maidan won. Another hard battle has just begun, but I wouldn’t bet against these determined people.

 

 

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Donetsk, Ukraine — Crimea was the appetizer. The real prize for Vladimir Putin is likely to be eastern Ukraine. Without this vast region of coal mines and factories, the Kremlin strongman won’t be able to achieve his goal of either controlling, destabilizing or splitting Ukraine. Otherwise the takeover of the country’s southern peninsula hardly seems worth the trouble.

 

The Kremlin’s claims about the importance of ethnic Russian identity and language are just a sideshow in the struggle here. What’s going on is a pure power play. Since Mr. Putin has nuclear weapons and no apparent care for world

opinion, give him an edge. But eastern Ukraine won’t be as easy to snare as Crimea, and the attempt could backfire on Mr. Putin.

 

The Russian president is a man in a hurry. Russia has taken advantage of the inevitable chaos and uncertainty in post-revolutionary Kiev. A Moscow ally abandoned the presidency and fled town, and new pro-Western leaders formed a government only last Thursday. With each passing day, they should be getting a better grip over their state. The clock is perhaps their only true friend.

 

The Russian move on the east, beyond Crimea, began Saturday with protests in the industrial centers of Kharkiv, Donetsk and other cities. Television showed squares filled with thousands of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians. Fiery speeches

were made, local government buildings were stormed and topped with Russian flags, and calls for Moscow’s help were issued by little-known local politicians. Right on cue, Russia’s parliament accepted Mr. Putin’s request to deploy military forces in Ukraine, citing “the threat to the lives of citizens of the Russian Federation.” He gave himself the green light to go beyond Crimea.

 

These demonstrations were peculiar in places renowned for their political apathy and ethnic indifference. Political activists put deep roots in Kiev and in western Ukraine and made the revolution on the Maidan, or Independence Square. 

 

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Kiev, Ukraine — Why did Vladimir Putin grab Crimea? Of all the reasons for this crisis — empire rebuilding, control of Black Sea oil and gas, delusion born of a long dictatorial run — Occam’s razor points to the object of his attentions.

 

“Ukrainians are not just our neighbors,” the Russian ruler said in breaking his silence this week. “They are our brotherly republic and neighbor.” Don’t take that only as a Soviet man unable to stomach an independent Ukraine outside Moscow’s control. For three months, the Kremlin’s so-called political technologists have portrayed these brothers as “anti-Semitic,” “neo-Nazi,” “ultra-extremists” who “threaten Russian speakers.” Mr. Putin needs to distort and demonize the emerging Ukraine because the truth terrifies him. And should.

 

Look around this country. Television brings interesting, probing news. Investigative journalists poke into the state’s dirty dealings. Kiev’s Independence Square, called the Maidan, was a wonder of an engaged society shedding the last of Soviet-bred passivity. This was the revolution of no sex, no drugs and a lot of rock ‘n’ roll.

 

The downfall of a corrupt Soviet-style pol in his own image hit close to Mr. Putin. Besides cracks about his height — a brave Ukrainian oligarch dared to call him a “schizophrenic of short stature” and saw his bank in Moscow confiscated — there’s nothing that upsets Mr. Putin so much as a popular revolution. Add to that discomfort the look of Kiev’s new rulers. The technocratic 39-year-old prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, on Wednesday waited with other passengers for his commercial flight to Brussels to attend a European Union summit. The new minister for the economy took the subway to work. The foreign minister turned heads at the cafeteria this week by waiting in line to get his coffee. These shoots of transparency and humility contrast with

the imperious ways of Kremlin rulers.

 

“Ukraine is the alternative to the Russian authoritarian project,” says historian and activist Volodymyr Voitovych. Where Mr. Putin offers a revived empire, Ukraine is a large Slavic state that wants to join the West. Where Ukraine allows political freedoms, the Kremlin puts opposition leader Alexei Navalny under house arrest and turns the screws on TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television outlet. Mr. Putin offers Russia as a nationalist Orthodox Slavic bulwark against gays and other decadent Western imports. This Ukraine rejoins with freedom, tolerance (not perfect, to be sure) and diversity. Mr. Voitovych, speaking Russian, says: “A Ukrainian is anyone who thinks of himself as a Ukrainian.” The first victim of the police attacks on the Maidan was an ethnic Armenian, the next a Belarusian. The new interim president is an ethnic Russian. The deputy prime minister, a Jew. Ukraine is also incidentally a far more hospitable place for Crimea’s mix of Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars than a Putin-led Russia could ever be after last week’s takeover.

 

The moderation of Ukraine’s politics may be one reason why the Putin media have tried so hard to revive the Soviet caricature of Ukrainian nationalism as synonymous with Nazism. In response, Ukrainian Jewish leaders on Thursday wrote an open letter to President Putin to denounce his “lies and slander,” saying, “We certainly know that our very few nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government — which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services.”

 

In his apologias for President Putin, historian Stephen Cohen says Ukraine is really “two countries,” a pro-Russian east and a Ukrainian nationalist west. The past few months have indeed revealed two countries: Corrupt insiders and, from baroque Lviv to proletarian Donetsk, a nation that wants to move on from its dirty politics.

 

Out in the Russian-speaking east, there is scant separatist sentiment to stir, but Moscow is trying. Mr. Putin had thought about half of Ukraine supported him, he told President Yanukovych when he was still in power, according to someone who spoke about it with the former Ukrainian leader. Annoyed, Mr. Yanukovych commissioned a private poll and found the Russian’s support in low single digits, this person told me.

 

To speak of a Ukrainian nation has long been a cause for argument. At the turn of the last century, Ukrainian historians and polemicists offered competing visions. Vyacheslav Lypynsky’s has won out. He said Ukraine needed a state first to create a nation. Contrary to writers like Dmytro Dontsov, the Polish aristocrat Lypynsky said his Ukrainian nation shouldn’t and couldn’t be about ethnicity or language, but an idea. Ukraine got its state only in 1991, and inclusion is its national identity.

 

Mr. Putin’s condescending comments about “brotherly” Ukraine hit at a worrying truth for him. Every other Ukrainian seems to have close family or friends in Russia. Most people here speak Russian, and in most cities it’s dominant. Some rural Ukrainians speak syurzhyk, a mix of the two languages.

 

This closeness is why the prospect of war upsets so many on both sides. But it is also why the Kremlin needs the Ukrainian experiment to fail.

 

“What happens in Ukraine, if we reform, is a good example for Russia,” says Vitali Klitschko, the retired heavyweight boxing champion and a leading candidate for president in May 25 elections. “That’s dangerous for Putin.” Born to a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, Mr. Klitschko speaks Russian with his family at home.

 

The Russian invasion of Crimea has revealed the fragility of the Ukrainian state. “We have ourselves to blame,” says Oleh Shamshur, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Washington. Many politicians reared in Soviet days sought power to steal. National interest is an alien concept to a Yanukovych brain. A new generation had to grow up to believe and take pride in being Ukrainian. Previously charged with holding the western front for the Soviets, the military was allowed to wither away.

 

Graft and incompetence are features of Putin-era Russia as well. The difference is that Moscow is the center of a centuries-old state. Mr. Putin has reinvested in his military, and of course has nukes too. Ukraine gave its up in 1994.

 

Picking on a smaller nation isn’t hurting Mr. Putin at home. His approval hit a two-year high on Thursday. After the revolution here, however, Mr. Putin has replaced Mr. Yanukovych as a dark, galvanizing figure inspiring pro-Ukrainian feeling. Television stations now run an on-screen flag with the logo “A United Ukraine!” in the corner. Lines stretch outside military-recruitment offices. “It’s no longer a fight of Ukrainians for freedom,” says Sasha Tkachenko, who runs the 1+1 television group. “It’s now a fight of Ukrainians against Putin.”

 

Like the Europe it wants to join, the new Ukraine has little hard power to deploy against the Kremlin. The power of its example is a threat that Russia has met by blocking websites with independent news from Ukraine. Preparing Crimea for life under its new master, Russia yanked two independent Ukrainian television stations off the air on Thursday. Inevitably, Ukrainian news will filter through to Crimea and to Russia. On Thursday, four Russian rock singers made a remarkable, moving video in support of Ukraine’s unity and implicitly rebuking Mr. Putin.

 

Ukraine was a delicate creation, requiring imagination, time and peace to flower on unpromising post-Soviet soil. Mr. Putin’s war isn’t on what Ukraine is now but what it might become.

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Simferopol, Ukraine — Most nights for the past week, Ali Tarsinov joins a few local men to guard their mosque. During the day, his wife, Feride, won’t let her eldest daughter attend college classes in central Simferopol, Crimea’s regional capital.

 

“We’re the hostages here,” says Ms. Tarsinov, setting out a spread of Tatar pastry, chicken and coffee. “The first who will suffer from this conflict — the first who will be forced to leave — are the Crimean Tatars. And we have nowhere to go.”

 

The Tarsinovs live in Kamenka, a suburb of Simferopol on the main road to the eastern port of Feodosiya. I met them in 1995, a few years after their move from Tajikistan. In a single May night in 1944, Stalin expelled the Crimean Tatars to Central Asia, cleansing the peninsula of its majority non-Slav population. As soon as travel restrictions crumbled with the Soviet Union, the Tarsinovs rushed back with tens of thousands of other Tatars.

 

The Tatars’ forebears ruled this peninsula on the Black Sea for three centuries beginning in 1441, but history since then has seen them more than once caught between larger powers wrestling over their homeland. Some 260,000 Tatars, about 12% of Crimea’s population, now seem fated to lose out either to a Russian annexation or an “independent” Crimea run by Moscow puppets. The likelihood of the Tatars seeing their preferred outcome — continued Ukrainian sovereignty — has faded under Russia’s assertion of military dominance.

 

Upon returning to Crimea two decades ago, Ali, then 40, and his son Damir, a reedy 18-year-old, lived in a shack and built their house by hand. The plot of land came free from a farm collective. Sitting in a tiny room of the house early in its construction, Feride, a chemist, insisted more than once — to convince herself, it seemed — that the homecoming was worth the sacrifice of the jobs, friends and house left behind. “Our children need a place to live where no one can tell them this is not their land,” she told me at the time. “The next generation won’t have it so bad.”

 

As I drove to see them on Sunday, I found that the road there is still a lumpy mud track. The Tarsinovs’ house is spacious, with electricity and running water, but no gas line. The second floor, impressive from the outside, is unfinished.

Money remains scarce. But their anxiety is elsewhere now. The Tatars staunchly backed Ukraine’s independence and its messy, corrupt-yet-freeish politics. The Russian nationalism uncorked in Crimea since the Russian intervention evokes memories of several expulsions and defeats at Moscow’s hand, going back to Catherine the Great’s conquest of the peninsula in 1783. A few chetnik volunteers from Serbia who turned up in recent days to support “brother” Russians raised the specter of Balkan-style ethnic cleansing. Some

 

Tatar houses in the group’s historic capital of Bakhchisara were marked with an X, while Russian homes were left alone.

 

“There’s no need to put marks on our houses,” says Feride. “Our whole village is Crimean Tatar.” Her husband adds, “If they start to attack us, and they will think little of it, they could throw us out in a matter of days.” Prejudice may not be hard to whip up. “The Soviet Communists put out the word: Tatars are the chornomazy,” Feride says, literally “black faces,” a slur used in Russia for any non-European foreigner.

 

Tatars are prominent in pro-Ukrainian rallies in Crimea, some of which have ended in scuffles with Russian militants.

 

But there’s no choice here. The Russian military backs a local government led by a marginal party and appointed by a coup. In the plebiscite hurriedly scheduled for Sunday, Crimeans can vote either to join Russia or declare independence from Ukraine. The Tatars, many ethnic Ukrainians and more than a few ethnic Russians — perhaps, if asked in circumstances other than an invasion, a majority in all — want to stay with Ukraine. Tatar leaders called for a boycott of the vote, a move that Feride calls “suicidal but we had no choice.”

 

If retribution comes, will it be through violence or other means? The rights to their property could be challenged. “The Russians will go further,” says Ali. “They will come and we won’t be able to go to meetings and talk freely. We have gotten used to, over the last 20 years, life in freedom.” 

 

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Simferopol, Ukraine — Late the other night at 7 Pyatnits (“7 Fridays”), one of a few fashionable restaurant bars in the Crimean capital, the Soviet national anthem came on the karaoke machine. A couple of guys grabbed the microphone. Their girlfriends and a few others joined in, formed a dancing circle and together sang out the last refrain, “O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,/ To Communism’s triumph lead us on!”

 

None of them looked old enough to remember the U.S.S.R. They wore casual clothes and carried smartphones. It’s safe to say their nostalgia wasn’t for class struggle or the Soviet lifestyle. This kind of nod to past Soviet glory is a favored way to express support for a revived Great Russian power in the future.

 

It comes in various forms in Crimea, parts of Ukraine and Russia itself. There’s all the “U.S.S.R. lives!” graffiti, and repurposed Soviet flags and slogans. There’s the Kremlin’s obsessive anti-Americanism. The orange-and-black ribbons of St. George favored by Russian nationalists are most closely associated with Soviet victory over the Nazis. The war was used to legitimize Soviet rule, and Vladimir Putin has appropriated it for his attack on Ukraine’s supposedly illegitimate and Nazi government.

 

The neo-Soviet man is the latest Putin avatar. In 1999, the obscure KGB colonel established his credentials for Russia’s presidency by waging war on the Chechens and improving the economy in the following decade. When he lost the educated middle classes of Moscow and St. Petersburg who demonstrated against a corrupt and authoritarian Kremlin in late 2011 — and growth slowed to a trickle after so many years of theft and bad investment — out came an ultra-nationalist with Soviet imperial ambitions.

 

Russians fiddled with press freedoms and political pluralism after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but that “didn’t work,” as the Russian writer and filmmaker Alexander Nevzorov put it this week, and the familiar “cocktail of patriotism, chauvinism, imperialism” goes down all too easily.

 

In his speech annexing Ukraine’s Crimea last week, Mr. Putin added a pointed retro-Stalinist warning about “a fifth column, this disparate bunch of ‘national traitors’.” He’s signaling a worse purge to come after two years of unrelenting repression of dissent inside Russia — and a wider and ongoing conflict with Ukraine fought with higher natural gas prices, trade embargoes, KGB-style subversion and possibly tanks and soldiers. Mr. Putin has no good reason to stop with Crimea.

 

Moscow liberals may groan, and tens of thousands of them did come out to protest against conflict with Ukraine, but the neo-Soviet revival has pushed support for Mr. Putin at home to 80%, up 11 points in a month, according to a Levada Center poll released on Wednesday. As intended, the invasion and war talk distracts from the bad Russian economy and hurts Ukraine’s chances of becoming a functioning (and Russian speaking!) democracy, the Kremlin’s worst nightmare next door.

 

So Mr. Putin rages about Western decadence from Moscow, the Gomorrah of easy petro-millions and everything-for-sale mores. While Russian propaganda portrays Ukraine as a fascist threat, the Kremlin encourages neo-Nazi groups at home. The number of reported hate crimes in Russia is rising, hitting a peak last year.

 

“This is not even double standards. This is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.” In his speech last week, Mr. Putin was riffing on the West’s “double standards” toward Kosovo and Crimea, but the self-analysis was strikingly apt. Or maybe they’ve not heard of Freudian projection at the Kremlin.

 

The Putin ideologies are a unique “fusion of despotism and postmodernism, in which no truth is certain,” as Peter Pomerantsev has written, “a world of masks and poses, colorful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.”

 

Neo-Sovietism offers up Russian jingoism stripped bare of Marxist internationalist pretenses, which scares its neighbors and could be used to further isolate a friendless Moscow in the region. The Kremlin elite’s unimaginable wealth and power offers another opportunity to end the Putin march.

 

Will the neo-Soviet men in that Crimean bar truly sacrifice their material happiness and vacations abroad for a bunch of Kremlin “thieves and crooks” (to use dissident blogger Alexei Navalny’s famous phrase)? Will Moscow tycoons sit by as the ruble tumbles, the economy stalls and their access to bank accounts, yachts and schools for their kids in the West is endangered? Much harder sanctions than the European Union and America have so far proved willing to consider could test these propositions.

 

There’s another familiar note from the past. Over the last four months, Kiev came to resemble Gdansk or Prague in 1989 or Lithuania’s rebellious capital Vilnius a few years later — the scene of a society coming of age, demanding a say over its own future, preferably in a free Europe. Then as now, standing in the way is a little man at the Kremlin desperate to hold on to the Soviet/Russian empire and his own throne.

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Kiev, Ukraine — ‘We’re the chosen generation,” says Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s interim prime minister. He’s referring to all those who made this winter’s European revolution. For the first time since 1654, when Ukrainian Cossacks formed a fateful alliance with Moscow against Polish rulers, Ukrainians are heading back West.

 

Their timing is terrible. Two decades ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, the West embraced another generation of Eastern Europeans. Ukraine has gotten a different welcoming committee. An economically feeble European Union gorges on Russian energy and dirty money while lecturing Ukraine on Western values but refusing to defend it. Asking for Washington’s help against Russian attack, Kiev finds a man “chosen” in the past two presidential elections to get America out of the world’s trouble spots.

 

Vladimir Putin sees a West made soft by money, led by weak men and women, unwilling to make sacrifices to defend their so-called ideals. In the Ukrainian crisis, the image fits. Russia’s president is many things, but most of all he is resolute. He took the EU and America’s measure and annexed Crimea last month at minimal cost. Ignoring Western pleas for “de-escalation,” Russia this weekend invaded eastern Ukraine. Just don’t look for video of T-72 tanks rolling across the borders, not yet at least.

 

Russian intelligence and special forces on Saturday directed local crime bosses and thugs in coordinated attacks on police stations and other government buildings in towns across eastern Ukraine. These men were dressed and equipped like the elite Russian special forces (“little green men,” as Ukrainians called them) who took Crimea. Ukrainian participants got the equivalent of $500 to storm and $40 to occupy buildings, according to journalists who spoke to them. Fighting broke out on Sunday in Slovyansk, a sleepy town in the working-class Donbas region that hadn’t seen any “pro-Russia” protests. A Ukrainian security officer was killed.

 

Kiev is on a war footing. Radio commercials ask for donations to the defense budget by mobile-telephone texts. The government’s decision to cede Crimea without firing a shot cost the defense minister his job and wasn’t popular. Western praise for Ukrainians’ “restraint” got them nothing. The fight for Ukraine’s east will be different.

 

This invasion was stealthy enough to let Brussels and Washington not use the i-word in their toothless statements. The EU’s high representative, Catherine Ashton, called herself “gravely concerned” and commended Ukraine’s “measured response.” There was no mention of sanctions or blame. The U.S. State Department on Saturday said that John Kerry warned his diplomatic counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that “if Russia did not take steps to de-escalate in eastern Ukraine and move its troops back from Ukraine’s border, there would be additional consequences.”

 

By now, the Ukrainians ought to have seen enough to know that they’re on their own. Moscow has reached the same conclusion. These perceptions of the West are shaping events.

 

A month ago, the EU sanctioned 21 marginal Russian officials and quickly tried to get back to business as usual. On Friday, the U.S. added to its sanctions list seven Russian citizens and one company, all in Crimea. What a relief for Moscow’s elites, who were speculating in recent days about who might end up on the list. Slovyansk fell the next day. Any revolution brings a hangover. Ukrainians expected problems: an economic downturn, some of the old politics-as-usual in Kiev, including fisticuffs last week in parliament, and trouble from Russia. Abandonment by the West is the unexpected blow. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought, and 100 died, for their chance to join the world’s democracies.

 

As an institution, the EU always found excuses to deny Ukraine the prospect of membership in the bloc one day. But Bill Clinton and George W. Bush never recognized Russian domination over Ukraine. Billions were spent — Kiev was the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid in the 1990s — and American promises were made to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. In return, Ukraine took active part in NATO discussions and missions, sending thousands of troops to the Balkans and Iraq.

 

When Russia invaded Crimea and massed 40,000 or more troops in the east, Ukraine turned to an old friend, the United States, and asked for light arms, antitank weapons, intelligence help and nonlethal aid. The Obama administration agreed to deliver 300,000 meals-ready-to-eat. As this newspaper reported Friday, military transport planes were deemed too provocative for Russia, so the food was shipped by commercial trucks. The administration refused Kiev’s requests for intelligence-sharing and other supplies, lethal or not.

 

Boris Tarasiuk, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, barely disguises his anger. He says: “We’ve not seen the same reaction from the U.S.” as during Russia’s 2008 attack on Georgia. U.S. Navy warships were deployed off the Georgian Black Sea coast. Large Air Force transport planes flew into Tbilisi with emergency humanitarian supplies. But who really knew for sure what was on board the planes? That was the point. Russian troops on the road to the Georgian capital saw them above and soon after turned back. The Bush administration dropped the ball on follow-up sanctions but may have saved Georgia.

 

By contrast, the Obama administration seems to think that pre-emptive concessions will pacify Mr. Putin. So the president in March ruled out U.S. military intervention in Ukraine. Maybe, but why say so? Late last month at a news conference in Brussels, Mr. Obama also openly discouraged the idea of Georgia or Ukraine joining NATO.

 

The next diplomatic “off ramp” touted by the Obama administration will be the negotiations involving Russia Ukraine, the EU and the U.S. scheduled for later this week. Petro Poroshenko, the leading Ukrainian presidential candidate, tells me that these “talks for the sake of talks” send “a very wrong signal” about the West’s commitment to sanctions. It’s a case of the blind faith in “diplomacy” undermining diplomacy. See the Obama record on Syria for the past three years.

 

The West looks scared of Russia, which encourages Mr. Putin’s bullying. But on the Ukrainian side, the sense of abandonment brings unappreciated consequences. Ukraine’s political elites have taken into account that Russia could reimpose its will — perhaps that anticorruption law demanded by the EU isn’t so necessary after all?

 

While millions of Ukrainians have united against Russia, out in the east of the country many people are fence-sitters. The fight there, as in Crimea, won’t be over any genuine desire to rejoin Russia. Before last month, polls in Crimea and eastern Ukraine put support for separatists in single digits. But the locals’ historical memory teaches them to respect force and side with winners. Left to fend for itself by the West, Ukraine looks like a loser to them, notes Kiev academic Andreas Umland.

 

The U.S. Army won’t save Slovyansk. But Ukraine expects and deserves America’s support by every other means that Washington has refused so far. Betrayal is an ugly word and an uglier deed. Europe and the U.S. will pay dearly for it in Ukraine.

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Moscow — ‘Every day, there’s some dreadful news,” says Alexander Vinokurov. He points to an item in the morning business paper, Kommersant, about Moscow restaurateur Mikhail Zelman, who has joined the exodus of talented Russians and gone to build out his “Burger & Lobster” chain in London. Mr. Zelman recently said that “a totalitarian mindset” makes innovation too hard in Russia.

 

“Often I try to reach someone here,” Mr. Vinokurov says over breakfast, “and it turns out they’ve moved to London or California.”

 

Stocks, property values and the ruble are dropping. Investors shun Russia’s near-zero growth and bad reputation. Some $70 billion fled the country in the first quarter, more than all of last year, prompting talk of capital controls. Mr. Vinokurov, a 43-year-old who made a small fortune in finance, texted a Russian friend at an American bank in Moscow to ask if he was all right. The reply quoted a line from “Pulp Fiction”: “Nah man, I’m pretty … far from O.K.”

 

The news for Mr. Vinokurov, whose morning stubble and black-rimmed glasses personify a kind of easygoing Moscow hip, isn’t good either. Five years ago, he created TV Rain. The channel’s young vibe drew Russians with disposable income. Audience numbers shot up during the mass protests against the Kremlin in 2011-12, although the news coverage never challenged authority head-on. Still, in January, after the Kremlin criticized a Rain segment, all the major cable carriers dropped the channel. Advertising tanked. The last independent television station in Russia may not survive the spring.

 

“We didn’t think the media business was dangerous,” says Mr. Vinokurov. “In 2009, there was a different environment in Russia.”

 

The new-new Moscow isn’t the stagnant capital of Brezhnev days. But for political liberals, financiers, expats and others it has become stifling. The Kremlin shut a lot of windows after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 following a four-year detour as prime minister. The Ukraine crisis has brought startling repression and hard anti-American nationalism in Russia.

 

Far from Crimea or turbulent eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is winning at home. This is what matters most to him. The invasion of Ukraine is, to a degree, hard to overstate, a pre-emptive strike to ensure the survival of the Putin regime.

 

It’s a demonstration of his power — look at all I can do in Ukraine! — that enables Mr. Putin to strengthen his domestic position. As a side benefit, Ukraine’s fate tells Russians that popular uprisings end in violence and chaos.

 

The war drums have silenced dissent. But just in case, laws against extremism and defining treason are being tightened. A new generation of political prisoners and refugees is being born. The harsh treatment and sentences meted out to the demonstrators arrested in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square protests in 2012 are meant to deter others. By a court order issued the same day the Kremlin sent its special forces to take Crimea, Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, can’tleave his apartment, use the Internet or meet with supporters. Various cases cooked up against him may put him in jail for years.

 

After Crimea, protests about the costs of Western economic sanctions are rare. “The message to the oligarchs is: ‘Don’t complain. If you want Russia to be great, we’ll endure,’" says a diplomat. A couple of long-time expat fund managers that I’ve known for years are seriously thinking about closing up their shops. One says that Russia may not even have a stock exchange in five years, since the Kremlin has little political use for a thriving equities market. Another, American David Hearne, says, “for the first time in 20 years I feel a tension with Russian friends and colleagues” over Russia’s aggressive turn against the West.

 

“In suffocating Ukraine, Putin’s really suffocating Russia,” says the political analyst Lilia Shevtsova. And he’s doing it with the approval of four in five Russians. Surely, some say, his popularity can’t last. By World Bank numbers, 60% of Russians are middle class. These people travel freely and consume the West’s culture and goods. When the Great Russia fervor wears off, the burdens under Mr. Putin may sink in and resuscitate the opposition. His regime lost the support of the capital years ago. “Those tens of thousands who came out in 2012 [in anti-government protests] are waiting for another opportunity,” says Oleg Kozlovsky, an activist.

 

Maybe. Muscovites and Kievans are similar enough to make a popular uprising here plausible. Mr. Putin seems to think so. His paranoia inspires him to double down on censorship, prosecutions and other forms of repression, in Moscow above all, and to make sure that the revanchist march goes on — Ukraine now, maybe Moldova tomorrow, the Baltics states one day. His survival depends on it. A scary thought.

 

Even scarier: There is little to stop him inside Russia. Soviet leaders had to answer to the Politburo. Czars had to keep their aristocratic boyars happy. Who was the last Russian leader with so few formal or informal checks on him? Well, upon taking the Kremlin, Mr. Putin gave up an opulent hall used by Brezhnev and, later, Boris Yeltsin, for a modest office. The previous occupant was Stalin. “Small room,” he once told a visiting head of state, “big power.”

 

 

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Palomino, Colombia — The world usually looks good from a thatched beach hut on the Caribbean. But this spot not far from the Venezuelan border offers a unique perspective. Less than a decade ago, few ventured to the seaside village set against lush tropical forest and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Marxist rebels, paramilitary bands and narcotraffickers had the run of it. This was the bad-news Colombia of guerrilla wars and Pablo Escobar.

 

Arriving in Palomino these days, visitors see a poster that reads: “Ejercito national: Su causa es nuestra.” (National Army: Your cause is ours.) Young soldiers patrol the main road. Military helicopters occasionally fly overhead. Yet the town is calm and safe. Its main preoccupation is tending to backpackers from Europe and America.

 

So many countries in this summer of war can only dream of one day becoming Colombia. It is a nation far from perfect, with plenty of conflicts and problems, but on the mend and coming up. The list of crippled countries with recovery hard to see is heavy on the Middle East: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya. Afghanistan of course. Closer to Colombia, Venezuela and much of Central America are messes. And Crimea, the old Soviet Riviera with palm trees and beaches, fell off the tourist map after Russia’s springtime military invasion of Ukraine.

 

Colombia was long the sick man of Latin America. The 19th and 20th centuries were virtually one long undeclared civil war. The current conflict with FARC guerrillas — depleted militarily, unpopular and suing for peace — goes back 50 years. The nation’s best people sought futures elsewhere. Kidnappers, criminals and rebels made the roads too scary to brave at night.

 

The center in Colombia didn’t just fail to hold; there was never much of a center, with powerful extremists on most sides. That’s even though Colombia’s democratic roots are deeper than almost any of its neighbors’, save for a short period of military rule in the 1950s.

 

The Colombian security and economic renaissance didn’t come overnight and is incomplete. Many of the reasons for it are complex and local, but the lessons are universal. Strong and legitimate political leaders, acting with the support of a populace tired of conflict, tamed the criminal and ideological forces of disorder.

 

The route out for a failed state takes a national consensus, by necessity formed through compromise, about the way ahead. Zero-sum politics, the scourge of authoritarian states as well as some aspiring democracies, is the way back to violence and instability.

 

Consider the Arabic case. Of the nations thrown into upheaval by the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, only Tunisia avoided the catastrophes of Egypt, Libya and others. Islamist terrorists tried to kill Tunisia’s experiment with free politics, assassinating prominent politicians and waging a low-grade war along the Algerian border. Tunisia’s mainstream Islamist party, which won the most votes in an election, has fought them. It made political concessions to the secular establishment parties that, at one point last year, agitated for a coup on the Egyptian model. Hard political negotiations produced a strong constitution this year. Free elections, only the second in its history, are due in the fall.

 

Elsewhere in the region, as extremists clash, the center vanishes. Earlier this summer, I met an Iraqi Shiite cleric and politician, Iyad Jamal al-Din. He represents an alternative to Iraq’s purely sectarian politics. He had joined with Sunnis and battled Iran’s influence on Baghdad. A “true liberal,” the Iraqi exile scholar Kanan Makiya calls him. “With a few thousand like him we could launch an Islamic reformation.” Mr. al-Din’s prominent family and religious credentials gave him a platform — and made him a threat to Iraq’s peddlers of the politics of victimhood, sectarian hatred and intolerance. Mr. al-Din has survived seven assassination attempts. He served in Parliament after Saddam Hussein’s fall. He formed his own party, which failed to win a single seat in the 2010 elections. Mr. al-Din now lives in exile in suburban Washington.

 

Egypt is riven by a similar partisan dynamic, pitting the secular establishment against the banned Muslim Brotherhood. In Russia — another state with a deficit of democratic hope — Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin kills, imprisons and muffles domestic opponents.

 

Yet history isn’t static. There was a time when the idea of taking a family vacation in Colombia would have sounded more like a punch line.

By Matthew Kaminski

 

Berlin — Checkpoint Charlie is an aging tourist shrine. As a symbol of a divided continent, it’s part of a Berlin that was buried late in the last century. The political heart of Europe moved on to Brussels. London and Frankfurt ran the EU economy. Paris, Milan and Barcelona were the capitals of style and cool.

 

Then something funny happened on the way to the new Europe. Any hipster outside Brooklyn knows that this ugly urban duckling is the place to be today. The euro crisis elevated Berlin to economic pre-eminence. And now a violent conflict over Ukraine puts it at the center of the debate and decisions on the Continent’s security.

 

These roles don’t fit Berlin comfortably. For those who dreamed of restoring the city to its prewar stature as a business hub, the slackers who love the nightclubs and cheap rents are a consolation prize. Five years after Greece blew up, large eurozone economies are veering toward recession with few of the structural fixes pushed by Germany to prevent a repeat. The Russian attack on Ukraine has stirred Germany’s historical hangups and self-doubts.

 

The future of Europe is in shaky hands, but Chancellor Angela Merkel is the sole option available. As the Continent’s largest and healthiest economy, only Germany could bankroll the euro rescues. Berlin’s prominence on Ukraine is more unexpected. In a security crisis, European eyes usually turn to London and Paris. But David Cameron and Francois Hollande are weak leaders. As if by default, the Russia folder also fell on Ms. Merkel’s desk.

 

A scientist by training, the chancellor by temperament prefers problem-solving and balancing interests over grand strategy or grandiloquence. Careful, pragmatic, always attuned to the next German election — she used this approach to reassure markets and steady the euro, if only for now. When Vladimir Putin first moved on Ukraine in late February, Ms. Merkel urged caution on sanctions and reached out to Moscow. Russia accelerated the annexation of Crimea and moved on to eastern Ukraine. You now hear regret from Merkel aides. “We have been late to recognize what Putin’s up to,” says a senior official.

 

Warsaw — The translucent green building lights up the working-class neighborhood of Muranow. Its glass exterior reflects the trees from a park and shabby Communist-era apartment blocks nearby. A memorial to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands outside. The architectural boldness of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is matched by its intentions.

 

The opening of the museum’s core exhibition on Tuesday, coming 10 days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a fitting tribute to the possibilities of freedom in Europe.

 

What is most remarkable is that this institution ever came to be. To utter the phrase “Polish-Jewish relations” is a provocation. Poland is the world’s largest Jewish graveyard. Before Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust mostly on its soil, for half a millennium Poland was Europe’s largest Jewish sanctuary. Four in five American Jews and nine in 14 world-wide trace their roots back to Poland. Everything else is debatable, and these debates inevitably bring out the passions and misunderstandings of the worst family quarrels.

 

This past is intimate, hard and long. After the war, Catholic Poles stood accused of collective racism, passively standing by to Hitler’s genocide — “every Pole sucked anti-Semitism with his mother’s milk,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put it. Poles, in their turn, were defensive about the reality of anti-Semitism in their country and clumsy or ill-informed about the other reality of centuries of coexistence with Jews. It was the Poles alone who armed the Jewish underground during the war and did more than any other nation in Europe to try to save European Jewry. Historian Marci Shore calls it all “desperately complicated.”

 

The Cold War made an honest conversation impossible. Its end opened the gates. Historian Jan T. Gross’s controversial 2001 book “Neighbors,” about a 1941 massacre in Jedwabne, forced into the open the matter of Polish civilians’ violence against Jews during and after the war. Several films, including this year’s critically well-received “Ida,” have tried to capture the complexities of the wartime history.

 

An annual cultural festival in Cracow revived interest in Jewish music and arts. A democratic and thriving Poland found the confidence and voice for this overdue debate. The idea for a major museum was proposed almost two decades ago by a couple of Polish Jews in Warsaw. In a breakthrough a decade ago, the leader of Poland’s leading right-wing party, one associated with Catholic nationalism (and, to some, with anti-Semitism), backed it. The state provided the land and paid for the stunning modernist building. A couple of Polish-Jewish exiles in America and a Catholic industrialist in Poland led the fundraising drive to pay for the permanent exhibit. It was hard. American Jews were reluctant to support such a project in Poland, still viewed with suspicion.

 

The chief curator of the museum — and, as a consequence, of Poland’s Jewish heritage — is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. She is a renowned ethnographer at New York University, born to Jewish parents who left Poland before the war. “It’s bad enough that we lost three million Polish Jews and another three million European Jews,” she told me the first time I met her in Warsaw, in late 2012. “That’s devastating. But we also lost the memory of their world.”

 

The museum seeks to reclaim a past overshadowed by the Holocaust. The core exhibit offers a varied journey across a thousand years. You begin with Jewish traders coming to Poland in the 11th century. Tolerant and liberal for its day, it was the most welcoming place in Europe.

 

Communism and Zionism arrive in the 19th century, along with pogroms. Some Jews assimilate, others leave. The centrality of Jews to Polish cultural and economic life is impossible to miss. Jews were a third of Poland’s urban population and a majority in cities like Bialystok. As equally clear here, there’s no Jewish history without Poland.

 

Of the 3.5 million Jews in Poland in 1939, one-tenth survived the Holocaust. But the story doesn’t end there. You hear about Jewish Stalinists who purged Polish nationalists, and Polish Communists who forced some 13,000 Jews into exile in 1968. The Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka who railed against this Jewish “fifth column” — a video of his speech plays in a loop — as it happens was married into a Hasidic Jewish family.