Gerrymandering Ukraine? (2018)

This article contradicts speculation over prospects for settling the Ukraine war by partitioning off the majority ethnic Russian region. People falsely assume that Putin would accept it and that the Ukrainian leadership would be steadfastly against it.

The truth is that even before 2014, at least some Ukrainian leaders favored the idea of ejecting Crimea and the Donbas from Ukraine in order to make the country more "Ukrainian". The problem for them is that public opinion would be strongly against it. A 2015 survey showed only 6% willing to allow the Donbas to secede.

So...We can imagine that the Ukrainian leadership will continue to voice support for regaining the occupied territories, but not try very hard to actually bring it about. In interviews conducted in Kyiv in the summer of 2018, several elites asserted that while Ukraine cannot declare a policy of surrendering the territory, recent changes in law and in practice indicate a de facto policy of stabilizing the status quo rather than trying to reverse it.

On the Russian side, Putin wants to maintain influence over the whole of the Ukraine, and he sees the Russian-Ukrainian population as his leverage for doing so. While he has encouraged violence in the Donbas, he has thwarted attempts at formalizing independence.