Ukraine after the Presidential Elections: How the West Should Respond

Was the election of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine an opportunity to correct Western and U.S. policy and free it of past illusions? Or was an event that should give the West pause and grounds for apprehension? Bruce Jackson and James Sherr take very different views on what this election meant and how the West should respond.

In Jackson's view, Washington's policy toward Ukraine needed to be reset and liberated from fallacies that had guided our policy in the past. Above all, we needed to see Ukraine as it was and not as we wished it to be.

Sherr supports a warm Western embrace of Yanukovych yet warns that the new president and his supporters had an ambivalent view of Western values and would seek to join the West on their own terms. He also warns that Ukraine was too vulnerable to maintain the neutrality that Yanukovych aspired to, and that it was naive to believe that Ukraine's relationship with the EU could be a substitute for a strong relationship with NATO