The Near Abroad

OPENING SCENE

Kyiv, November 21, 2013. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych announces that he is suspending negotiations on a Ukraine-EU Association Agreement and turning instead toward a Russian counter-offer of $15 billion in loans and reduced gas prices. Protests begin within hours in Kyiv's Independence Square — the Maidan — a few hundred students with signs and tents. Within days there are thousands. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands.

The protests are not simply about a trade deal. They are about which future Ukraine chooses: European integration, with its anticorruption standards, rule of law requirements, and gradual normalization of political life, or continued dependence on Russia, with the crony-capitalism and political subordination that the Yanukovych administration represented at its most concentrated. For Putin, the question has an entirely different valence. Ukraine choosing Europe is not a trade policy question. It is a geopolitical catastrophe — the permanent loss of the most important buffer state in Russia's strategic perimeter.

What happens over the following three months will trigger the most consequential geopolitical crisis in Europe since 1991.