The Ukrainian Shatter Belt: A New Cold War

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The Ukrainian Shatter belt: A new Cold War.
The pro-Russian Yanukovich government was powerless against the popular movement of the Ukrainian people who demanded European Integration after the government’s decision to halt talks of the association agreement with the European Union and instead focus on the accession of Ukraine to The peaceful demonstrations that started in November 2013 lasted for months and turned violent in 2014. The Pro-European opposition clashed with the pro-Russian government. In regions where the European influence was strong the local governments were occupied by protestors. The culmination of the Euromaidan was the February Clashes, which became a revolution later on. Even though the movement ended with the signing of the association agreement, the new government had to deal with the difficult aftermath.
With the fall of the pro-Russian government Russia had lost basically a very important ally to the European Union and NATO. President Vladimir Putin took a great risk and invaded Crimea that resulted in strong reactions from the West. Even Russia’s closest allies supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The information war between the West and Russia had intensified once again and reached levels higher than the levels of Russo-Georgia war (2008). Russian media naturally is defending its annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol as a democratic referendum and justifying the military intervention as the protection of rights of the Russian population of Crimea. The referendum was very controversial since it had an unusually high voter turnout and the Pro-Russian vote has created speculations that the referendum has been falsified by the Russian government. The Western media condemns Russia for the anne...

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...nternational community, but isolating the government does not mean isolating the people of Russia, because of the current technological development that was not present on time, even though the government is trying to suppress the freedoms. (McFaul, 2014)
The current events showed that there are far more potential shatterbelts in the World that it may seem at first. The Ukrainian shatterbelt although is still potential, it created a deterioration in international relations that they have not seen since the Cold War. Russia’s economy cannot potentially last another Cold War. The current events will most likely lead to Russia’s relative isolation from the international community and lead its economy to stagnation, because there is no sight that Russia will give up Crimea. The “sanction war” between Russia and The West will continue on until a consensus is reached.

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