Europe may not end up with the inspiring postwar democracy it imagines when it looks at Ukraine. It could instead inherit "a heavily armed, deeply traumatized, politically brittle country on its border - one that is anti-Russian, but not liberal, well-governed or easy to integrate." That is the blunt assessment of Alexander Rodnyansky, an economics professor at the University of Cambridge and former economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Rodnyansky argues that Europe's current approach - backing Ukraine militarily without demanding institutional reform - amounts to a dangerous gamble. European governments treat military endurance as the only measure that matters, while political dysfunction in Kyiv goes unaddressed, according to "Hvylya".
The possibility that prolonged war and "indulgent external backing" could produce a state whose pathologies are dangerous in themselves "remains taboo in many European circles," Rodnyansky writes. He insists it should not be. "It isn't anti-Ukrainian to say that democratic decay matters in Ukraine."
If Europe wants to avoid creating "the very outcome it claims to want to avoid" - a source of instability on its frontier - its policy must change. Rodnyansky calls for aid tied not just to battlefield needs but to institutional development: legislative function, transparency, anticorruption enforcement, limits on arbitrary power, and competence rather than what he calls the "blind celebration of supposed political savvy."
A buffer can buy time, Rodnyansky concludes, but if not handled carefully, "it can also become the next problem." He served as an economic adviser inside the Ukrainian government before moving to Cambridge - a vantage point that lends his critique a weight most external commentators lack.
Also read: how McChrystal explained the way "America First" dismantled the alliance framework that kept peace in Europe.