POV: Where Is Europe While Ukraine Burns? by William Keylor
In an essay published in BU Today this morning, William Keylor, Professor of International Relations and History and a member of our board, explains the origins of the conflict in Ukraine:
A European Union policy last year is at the root of the Ukrainian conflict that saw last Friday’s horrific downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane (by pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, according to the United States). The Union offered Ukraine an “association agreement” designed to tighten the political and economic links between the two parties. When the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown last February after rejecting the agreement in favor of closer relations with Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin forcibly annexed the predominantly Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula. He also provided military and economic assistance to the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, whose leaders launched an armed insurrection against the government in Kiev.
In the course of that war of secession in the past several months, one voice has been conspicuously muted amid the global debate about how to resolve this crisis: that of the European Union.
Read the rest of Keylor’s article at BU Today>>