Political, economic, and cultural divorce from Russia, integration with the world, and alliance building with eastern Europe, Turkey, and the United States are the three components of a grand strategy that could ensure Ukraine’s security and survival in the next two decades, argues Rutgers University’s Alexander J. Motyl. If and when the Putin regime ends, Russia possibly collapses, and the dust from this time of trouble settles, Ukraine may need to rethink its grand strategy. Until then, its priority has to be the one foisted on it by Putin—divorce, he writes for Foreign Affairs:
Ukraine must counter Russia’s use of soft power to subvert Ukraine. Key to Russia’s soft-power assault is the notion that there is a “Russian World” consisting of all Russians and Russian speakers, whom the Kremlin is obligated to protect. There is only one way for any country trapped in this “Russian World” to break out of it: by gradually reducing Russian-language use and replacing it with native-language use. So, too, Ukraine must, like the Baltic states, attempt to make Ukrainian and English the languages of everyday public discourse and reduce Russian to a household tongue increasingly confined to an aging population. Such a shift can be introduced without violating human or cultural rights by effectively making Ukrainian the sole language of the armed forces.
