The ongoing geopolitical shift in the post-post Cold War era (2014-present) is likely to progress further, and possibly accelerate, in 2016.
The EU has just extended its sanctions against Russia, while Ukraine and Russia are now in a full-blown trade war. All this while Russia struggles with persistent low oil prices and Ukraine has apparently hit a big obstacle on its road to reform, as entrenched oligarchic interests are all but stymieing the much-needed restructuring of the economic system that has its roots in the Soviet era.
Unfortunately, unless there's a magical conversion of powerful and influential hearts and minds in Kiev and other Ukrainian power centers (hey, it's Christmas), this "last chance" at reform, as US Vice President Joe Biden recently put it, is unlikely to end well for the strategically crucial country that is the focal point of the East-West confrontation.
That's because there's no quick fix to corruption in Ukraine - at least, not one that doesn't wipe out most of the ruling class overnight. In an environment where just about everyone has dirty laundry and skeletons in their closets - or, at least, effectively enable people that do - it takes a very brave soul to put his or her personal interests below that of the country, because in practice this means letting yourself be eaten alive by rivals. It's therefore unrealistic to expect corruption to be eradicated in the short term: Ukrainian leaders, like those anywhere, have no natural inclination to put themselves on the chopping block.
Perhaps it's not so important that the present corruption be rooted out as it is that future practices be cleaned up through incentives and disincentives, but it's hard to see how the former can be decoupled from the latter. Ukraine's fundamental problem is the very nature of its system as it actually runs every single day: a network of powerful rent-seeking oligarchs, i.e. local or regional monopolists and magnates, whose support for the government is absolutely contingent on their private operations remaining essentially unimpeded by the bureaucratic regulators. No matter how many papers get shuffled, how many laws and regulations get rewritten, and how many judicial and administrative posts get restaffed, so long as the oligarchs' supreme position in Ukraine's socioeconomic hierarchy is unchanged, these will only be cosmetic fixes.
But after a quarter century of broken promises, of dashed hopes and dreams, the Ukrainian people can hardly tolerate the status quo any longer. Their patience was wearing very thin two years ago during the Euromaidan uprising; should that revolution now devolve into yet another failure to change, i.e. little more than another rotation of members of the same corrupt ruling class, then Ukraine will be effectively lost to the West without a single additional hostile act by Russia.
After all, if corruption can't be resolved through democratic reforms, but can't be tolerated any longer, a ruthless dictatorship is waiting in the wings. In Ukraine, that looming threat of fascism has been ever present in the current crisis: the Right Sector, the Azov battalion, and the ultra-nationalists in general are circling overhead like hungry vultures, ready to feast on what may soon be the carcass meat of the dying post-Soviet Ukrainian state. As I have said before, this is the pretext Putin needs to launch a full-blown invasion - one that he clearly cannot have any other way.
So 2016 - the centennial of the preliminary angel apparitions at Fatima - promises to be a key year. This analyst sees something giving way in Ukraine - not in the West's favor, but in the Kremlin's.
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