On The Mark: Why Ukraine matters to us as Americans

Listening to portions of Congressional testimony this past week, I realized how little most of us know about Ukraine. It’s important because of its strategic economic and geopolitical position in Europe, its exit from the Soviet Union, and its struggle to emerge from corruption and build democracy.

With a group of North American regional scientists, I spent most of a week in Ukraine in 1991, when it still belonged to the Soviet Union. We traveled by bus to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, where for decades, the USSR built huge military industrial factories and imported and resettled hundreds of thousands of Russian nationals. To Yalta in Crimea, where, in a small wood-paneled room, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carved up the post-World War II world. To Kiev, where we spent several days in research meetings and in the evenings, wandered streets buzzing with young student activists who wanted to talk with us about democracy and their hopes and prayers.

The Jewish leader of our delegation, Andrew Isserman, and I played hooky from our boring Soviet Academy meetings to venture by streetcar to Babi Yar, where Nazi invaders in 1941 shot and killed more than 33,700 Jewish women, men and children over two days. The Ukrainian government installed a magnificent several-stories-high sculpture that depicts family members falling out of each other’s arms into the ravine. In Denver, a 27-acre Babi Yar Memorial Park park was completed in 1982.

We returned to the U.S., grateful for the learning we’d done and anticipating the liberation of Ukraine. A few months later, on Dec. 26, 1991, the Soviet flag no longer flew over the Kremlin. Ukraine, along with ten other former Soviet Republics, announced it would no longer be part of the Union. I’ve not been back since then, but now I’m madly reading up on what’s happened there since that cataclysmic event 18 years ago.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Ukraine is making good progress to become a democracy and to rid itself of the rampant corruption that was the legacy of Soviet domination. But it’s been a rocky road. Several elected presidents successively capitulated to corruption despite promises not to. Parliamentary representatives lowered themselves into graft as well. It was an old habit. But the country gained freedom of the press, and citizens exercised their rights to elect their leaders and to assemble and engage in protest.

Current president Volodymyr Zelensky is a standout, shoulders above his predecessors. He has an unusual biography, reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s — both major media stars. Zelensky, a comedian and political novice, defeated the disappointing incumbent, President Poroshenko, in a runoff this past April, winning more than 70 percent of the popular vote. Just two months later, his party won a majority of parliamentary seats, the first time since independence that the presidency and parliament have been aligned. Campaigning against corruption and poverty, he also committed to ending the war in Eastern Ukraine. His victory can be credited to Ukrainian voters prioritizing an end to corruption.

Zelensky’s election and his refusal to meddle in American presidential politics are heartening. Our presidents from Clinton through Obama, as well as our members of Congress have placed a high priority on honoring and nurturing Ukraine’s emergence from communism and corruption. I’m reassured by our diplomats’ and public servants’ understandings of the Ukrainian situation and their efforts to help this country thrive politically, economically and militarilyn.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives north of Cromwell.