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.

Should the West start preparing itself for a Ukraine under President Tymoshenko?

Ukraine's decentralisation reforms are changing the organisational structure of the country. What about its Constitution?

An ideological platform that is bringing Russian and Western right wing revisionists closer together.

The recently intensifying memory conflict around the interpretation of some Second World War events between Ukraine and Poland is distracting the two intertwined nations from their main international challenges today.

Western decision-makers should signal to the new East-Central European NATO and EU member countries that they can, and should, engage in cross-border multilateral coalition building with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. There is an urgent need for institutional structures that will make Eastern Europe’s grey zone, between Russia and the West, less grey.

Most interpretations of the current geopolitical instability in Eastern Europe focus on the intricacies of the region’s peculiar past, recent resurgent Russian imperialism and Ukraine’s specific significance for the Kremlin. While these and similar approaches address important themes, many such explanations tend to miss, or dismiss, the first and foremost cause and crucial aspect of the issue at hand. The current international crisis in Eastern Europe has arisen due to concerns over the East European institutional structure – or lack thereof. One can easily explain and assess the current tensions in Eastern Europe without much knowledge about the region by simply pointing to the organisational underdevelopment of post-Soviet international relations.

An interview with Andreas Umland, Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv. Interview originally conducted by Rzeczpospolita (Poland).