It’s been almost two years since pro-Russian unrest took hold in Ukraine, dividing the country along ideological lines and leading to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
As the second anniversary of the Euromaidan movement’s genesis approaches, nearly three million people are living in what The New York Times' Andrew Kramer describes as a “frozen zone.”
In the frozen zone, they live in ruins, amid a ruined ideology, in the ruins of the old empire. In government offices here, portraits of Stalin, looking avuncular and kind, gaze down at visitors. The secret police in Donetsk are called the M.G.B., separated by one letter from the K.G.B. The government in Kiev is depicted as neo-fascist in the local news media. “There is a lot of pompous celebration of the victory over fascism, a love for Soviet abbreviations, symbols and monuments,” Vladimir Solovyov, a journalist with the Russian newspaper Kommersant who was raised in Transnistria and left when he was 16, said of life in the frozen conflict areas, noting that the same trends were emerging in Donetsk.
Suzette Grillot, the dean of the University of Oklahoma’s College of International Studies, says neither Moscow nor Kiev seem interested in supporting the region, leaving eastern Ukraine without a patron.
“[There’s] a lot of homelessness and hopelessness. No kids are going to school,” Grillot said. “In fact, the young people have left the region leaving, largely the elderly, to try to survive. Food is in short supply.”
But Grillot says there’s actually a strategic purpose to this limbo.
“[It] provides this buffer to Russia regarding the eastward expansion of NATO if the western part of Ukraine is to become a member of NATO,” Grillot said. “So we see a significant burden being taken by the people living in that territory, and there are those that are just not really interested in helping out. So we've got a long-term crisis that's brewing.”
There is a precedent though, as The Times' Kramer reports:
This is a common arc of post-Soviet conflict, visible in the Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and in Transnistria, a strip of land on Moldova’s border with Ukraine. In each case, the Kremlin intervened or provided arms on the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians or local allies, then it installed pro-Russian governments that it has used to manipulate events in the host countries. The contested borders of frozen zones also effectively guard against any further expansion of NATO, since no country with an unresolved border conflict can join the alliance.
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