PROвибір and other electronic instruments are helping Ukrainians to distinguish parties according to their political, socio-economic and cultural agendas

The Georgian Orthodox Church and Ukrainian autocephaly.

A list of issues for this year’s reform agenda and Kyiv’s relations with the West.

Zelenskiy’s likely success in Ukraine’s upcoming presidential elections will be an enormous aberration. It will create high risks because of the new president’s lack of experience, yet also provide new opportunities of integration between Ukraine’s state and society.

There is a dangerous scenario for the first round of Ukraine’s upcoming presidential elections: political-technological trickery could unsettle social stability in Ukraine. Cynical puppet masters are prepared to risk the outbreak of a major domestic civil conflict for the sake of securing re-election of Ukraine’s incumbent president.

Moscow has long exploited Ukraine’s far-right movements as scarecrows, inflating their political importance, in an effort to discredit the Ukrainian nation, as a whole. But in reality, ultra-nationalist parties in post-Soviet Ukraine have struggled to find support for several election cycles now. If the various groups cannot unite, they are likely to fail once again in the 2019 parliamentary elections.

The United States’ Baltic and Adriatic Charters could become templates for embedding Ukraine and Georgia, as well as possibly Moldova and Azerbaijan, into a provisional multilateral security network. Despite certain caveats, a US-GUAM Charter would be a small but symbolically significant step forward in making Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus more secure.

Could the jester become king?

The Kerch Strait incident in November 2018 indicates that the geographic focal point of the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict may be currently shifting from the Donets Basin to the Black and Azov Seas. Four factors in particular make further tensions between Moscow and Kyiv, along the shores of the Crimean peninsula and Ukraine’s southeastern mainland coastline probable.

A recent forum of democratic forces in Kyiv may have finally started the formation of a broad pro-reform coalition of largely untainted Ukrainian anti-corruption fighters.

Contrary to widely assumed western opinion, Ukraine is not pursuing decentralisation because the West tells it to, but because she has herself decided to do so. The reform helps combatting corruption and protecting Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Moreover, decentralisation practices in Ukraine can, in the future, become models for the entire post-Soviet space.

Hyperbolic warnings about allegedly disastrous consequences of a Tymoshenko presidency are demobilising western support for Ukrainian reforms and defence.