The title you appended was “How to get it right on Ukraine”.
I don’t see this article as offering solutions, so much as explaining why the problem isn’t solvable and saying that we can’t do much.
Ukraine needs prosperity to lure voters away from a Russian orientation, except no one is going to offer enough to help, and world bank loans would do more harm than good.
How can the west do much about Ukraine’s energy dependence, when Russia sells it there far below market rates.
Corruption must be solved, except it’s endemic and can’t be because the moneyed interests (Oligarch) are too strong. The article doesn’t get around to admitting that the previous government was just as corrupt as the Yanokovich one, which is why Tymoshenko lost the election.
I hope these events slap us and our allies awake to the idiocy of our energy policies. It’s an urgent national security issue that will cost us terribly the longer we wait to fix it.
Geography is a hard fact to overcome. Our work would be easier if Ukraine had smaller and more tolerant neighbors to its east. We forget that we’re dealing with a nuclear superpower. This is not some Third World country we can walk over. Russia is a major adversary. We should deal with it without illusions but cease have any fond hopes it will be like us, wish us well or think that we have a great say in what it does in what it considers to be its own backyard.