Despite Kuchma’s posturing, the nuclear issue seemed to be resolved to the satisfaction of both Ukraine and Russia with the signing of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in December 1994. In that document, Ukraine (along with Belarus and Kazakhstan) agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons they had inherited from the USSR and to join the NPT as nonnuclear members. In exchange, the Memorandum prohibited Russia, the United States, and Britain from either using force or threatening to use force, including economic coercion, against Ukraine. The parties explicitly recognized the country’s independence and territorial integrity. As a later Brookings Institution report has noted, however, the Budapest Memorandum provided for security assurances, not guarantees. Russia’s Crimea annexation in 2014 and the later Russo-Ukrainian War demonstrated that such assurances fell far short of a U.S. or British military defense of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

MANY OF the hot-button issues that troubled bilateral relations during the 1990s, and would flare so badly again after Kyiv’s Maidan revolution in early 2014, reflected some deep-seated problems in Ukraine’s political makeup. Western analysts typically dismiss the post-Maidan separatist rebellions in the Donbas as artificial creations that Moscow has exploited for its own expansionist purposes. But such explanations are not wholly persuasive. Sharp political, economic, religious, and linguistic divisions between Ukrainians were already apparent in the 1990s, and the estrangement would only grow more pronounced.

Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, describes the gap between the two leading perspectives held by Ukrainians. One approach 

...thinks in terms of a Ukraine that can finally fulfill its destiny as a nation state, officially mono-lingual, culturally autonomous from other Slavic nations and aligned with “Europe” and the Atlantic security community. I describe this as a type of “monoism,” because of its emphasis on the singularity of the Ukrainian experience. 

The opposing perspective, Sakwa concludes, embraces “a rather more plural understanding of the challenges facing Ukraine, recognizing that the country’s various regions have different historical and cultural experiences, and the modern Ukrainian state needs to acknowledge this diversity with a more capacious constitutional settlement.” Indeed, for that faction, “Ukraine is more a ‘state nation,’ an assemblage of different traditions, but above all one where Russian is recognized as a second state language and economic, social and even security links with Russia are maintained.”

To make matters worse, those complex divisions also had a significant geographic component, with the first orientation being much stronger in the west and the second in the east. The 1994 parliamentary elections highlighted the problem. Voters in the Russified eastern regions of the country voted heavily for parties that favored closer ties with Moscow. Western regions, on the other hand, elected candidates overwhelmingly from strongly nationalist Ukrainian parties that favored closer economic and political relations with the West. The country’s geographic division was so stark and bitter that the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly warned the Clinton White House that there was the serious possibility of Ukraine’s fragmentation, perhaps even accompanied by civil war. Passage of the unauthorized secessionist referendum in Crimea (along with an equally illegal March 1994 poll in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas) further underscored the bitter divisions afflicting the country.

The political chasm between western and eastern Ukraine recurred in later elections, especially the fateful 2010 presidential election from which Yanukovych emerged victorious with a narrow 1.48 percent margin over pro-Western candidate Yulia Tymoshenko. He drew overwhelming support from Crimea, the Donbas, and other portions of eastern Ukraine. His performance became worse the farther west in the country one went, and it was utterly anemic in jurisdictions near Lviv and other regions close to the border with Poland, where he sometimes earned less than 10 percent of the vote.

Such a chronic split in the voting patterns was logical and predictable, since the differences between eastern and western Ukraine are extensive. Most inhabitants of the east are Russian speakers who align with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Economically, the region is the center of heavy (increasingly obsolescent) industry with crucial trade ties to Russia. Western Ukraine tends to be nationalist, with a pronounced anti-Russia bias and a strong commitment to the Roman Catholic Church. Economically, the area features much more light industry and service sectors than one finds in the east.

IT IS hardly surprising that a country with such a geographic division based on multiple factors would experience a fragile unity, at best. The numerous fissures became acute in the post-2014 period, and Putin exploited them for his own purposes—ultimately using them as an excuse for a full-fledged invasion of Russia’s neighbor that has simultaneously wreaked devastation upon Ukraine and exposed the limitations of the Russian army. Indications of trouble both within Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia have long been apparent. Unfortunately, many in the West failed to discern the warning signs, much less recognize their significance.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The National Interest, is the author of twelve books and more than 950 articles on international affairs.

Image: Reuters.