Explanations of Ukraine’s vibrant democracy usually focus on two factors. First, there is the vitality of its civil society, the grass-roots initiatives and nongovernmental organizations that produced the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Maidan Revolution of 2014 and that are still keeping the heat on the authorities and forcing them to play by democratic rules. Second, there is pressure from the West in general and the United States, the European Union, NATO and, in particular, the International Monetary Fund, which has made diplomatic and financial support conditional on continued democratic development in Ukraine.
These explanations are correct, but they miss what may be the most important driver of Ukrainian democracy: Putin’s war. The annexation of the Crimea and the occupation of the eastern Donbas have had several important consequences for Ukraine and its ability to sustain democracy.
Most obviously, by seizing these territories, Russia effectively disenfranchised Ukraine’s most authoritarian, pro-Soviet and pro-Russian populations. People who traditionally voted for authoritarian parties were denied a say in Ukraine’s post-revolutionary politics, thereby enabling the democrats to pursue their agendas without obstruction from the parties that historically opposed democracy. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – a powerful machine that paid U.S. political consultant and Donald Trump confidante Paul Manafort $17 million for his political advice – has practically disappeared from Ukraine’s political landscape.