Impasse Likely in Negotiations on New Constitution for Ukraine

It is unclear at this point the next time Kerry and Lavrov will meet. The Ukrainian presidential election is May 25. The conventional wisdom, as polled in a story today by Neil MacFarquhar, "Russia Plotting for Ukrainian Influence, Not Invasion, Analysts Say," is that Putin and Lavrov want a new constitution in place prior to presidential elections. I'm not sure. It seems that a new constitution would have to be ratified by a referendum coinciding with national elections for a new parliament and regional governments. It is unlikely that this could take place prior to the end of next month.

MacFarquhar's story starts off well by giving a reasonably clear picture of what Russia is looking for in a new constitution:

[T]he Kremlin has made one central demand, which does not at first glance seem terribly unreasonable. It wants Kiev to adopt a federal system of government giving far more power to the governors across Ukraine. 

“A federal structure will ensure that Ukraine will not be anti-Russian,” said Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political strategist who supports the Kremlin. 

Russian officials have said they envision a system in which regions elect their own leaders and protect their own economic, cultural and religious traditions, including the forging of independent economic ties with Russia.

Why federalization is important actually receives a bit of an airing in today's offering from Andrew Higgins on Donetsk's Peoples Republic, "In Eastern Ukraine, a One-Building, Pro-Russia Realm Persists Despite Criticism":

The government installed after Mr. Yanukovych fled the capital on Feb. 21 ended the dominance of Russian-speaking politicians from the east of the country — most of whom had opposed the pro-European protests in Kiev that toppled Mr. Yanukovych — and shifted power sharply to Ukrainian speakers from western and central regions.

State-run Russian television, which is widely watched here despite efforts by officials in Kiev to block access, has fanned fears that this shift will bring discrimination and even persecution by nationalist extremists. The Ukrainian Parliament contributed to this anxiety by voting in late February to scrap a law that allows Russian to be used instead of Ukrainian in schools, courts and elsewhere in regions where it is widely spoken. The decision was quickly reversed but left fertile grounds for pro-Russian activists to plant seeds of alarm. 

Few Donetsk residents can cite concrete examples of how life has become worse as a result of the change of power in Kiev, but opinion polls show that the eastern regions take a dim view of Ukraine’s new order. A recent poll commissioned by the International Republican Institute showed that 72 percent of people in the Russian-speaking east think the country is going in the wrong direction, compared with only 36 percent in the Ukrainian-speaking west. 

East and west are also sharply divided on where their future should lie. Ninety percent of those polled in the west want Ukraine to enter an economic union with Europe, while 59 percent of easterners want to join a Russian-led customs union.

Clearly this is a country at odds with itself. The putschists solution so far has been to appoint pro-Western oligarchs to run the regional governments in the Russian-speaking areas; that, and gradually militarize the East with mercenaries and fascists. This is a recipe for more instability.

As I see it, federalization is the only hope for Ukraine going forward. A rump government composed of Fatherland Party retreads and oligarchs and neo-Nazis cannot keep the country together, even if the chocolate king wins in a landslide.

The two other key Russians demands for a new Ukrainian constitution are 1) neutrality a la Finland, and 2) official status for the Russian language. All these demands seem reasonable to me.

But the U.S. desires at some point in the not-to-distant future to include Ukraine in NATO. So neutralization is going to be a sticking point for Kerry and the putschists. That is why I anticipate more unrest. The putschists are fundamentally unstable. They cannot govern without distraction and crisis. Russia holds all the cards, not the least of which is Gazprom's energy portfolio. Time is on Putin's side, not the putschists. The putschists can only create more crises and hope the West will arrive to the rescue. Barring some sort of dramatic shift in the status quo -- like massive violence in the East -- all this adds up to impasse in the negotiations for Ukraine's new constitution.