Partition or rise? Ukraine, Europe’s “big cake”

Abstract

Ukraine has been in a permanent social, economic and political crisis since its independence in 1991 and received little public attention in Hungary until 2014 when the socalled “Revolution of Dignity”, the Russian annexation of Crimea took place and the war in the Donbas, Ukraine’s important heavy industrial region, began. Since then Ukraine has occasionally even taken centre place in global politics. The reason is its pivotal geopolitically importance situation between Russia and the West. In 2014, Ukraine finally saw the post-soviet regional order disintegrate after two decades.

Ukraine became important for Hungary because of the increasing geopolitical attention on the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia in the wake of new controversial language and education laws in Ukraine and Russia’s increasing intelligence activity in the region.

Ukraine’s failed economic transition and its deep political crisis during the last two and half decades cannot be explained any more solely by its internal conditions, by the East-West dichotomy, by the structural problems of its economy or by a political system characterised by oligarchs who represent its economic-political power centres. The present paper attempts to explain Ukraine’s situation by investigating some external factors.

Ukraine has vast resources such as the agricultural land characterised by the highest agro-ecological potential globally and it still has an enormous, if ageing, labour force which has created desires among some smaller geopolitical actors. The Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia) view Ukraine as a potential source to cover their own lack of labour which again is caused by outmigration to Western Europe. Germany, the USA and especially China are keenly renting big stretches of Ukraine’s arable land.

The conflict with Russia in Eastern Ukraine put the coal-based heavy industry in an especially difficult situation. The former production lines collapsed. Ukraine lost a large part of its coal and steel production potential which in turn heavily affects the mechanical engineering sector (including high-tech fields such as aerospace industries), all aggravated by the trade embargo on Russia. The new free-trade agreement with the European Union could, however, attract new automotive industries to Western Ukraine thus adopting the reindustrialisation model of the Visegrad countries. The future of Ukraine depends also on external factors, particularly on EU-Russian relations. The currently increasing tensions between them are most harmful for Ukraine’s future.