Photo credit: Nicolas Raymond / freestock.ca¹
By Elizabeth Pond
Elizabeth Pond argues that Putin's undeclared war on once-fraternal Ukraine has destroyed Moscow's influence on Kiev, forged genuine Ukrainian identity in resistance and ended in a roughly stable stalemate in the eastern 3{5f0f57c44bc297437706deade099e6516fe1db1b31ab604b564d60e47f160dcd} of Ukraine that Russia now controls. However bitter that stalemate is to Putin, to Ukraine, and to the West, the least bad option may now be to prolong gridlock while diminishing casualties in Ukraine's Donbas coal region.
The full article was published on IISS - Politics and Strategy: The Survival Editor's blog and can be accessed here.
Elizabeth Pond is a Berlin-based journalist and author. She has contributed several articles to Survival, most recently ‘Serbia Reinvents Itself’, in Survival, vol. 55, no. 4, August–September 2013, pp. 7–30.
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1. Photo Title: "Ukraine Grunge Flag". Originally posted on: http://freestock.ca/flags_maps_g80-ukraine_grunge_flag_p1080.html at http://freestock.ca/. No changes have been made.