Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and the potential loss of Ukrainian exports – was the latest development to push commodity prices higher. And any fair treatment of Ukraine after the war should seek to compensate it through significant, long-term assistance.A number of factors have converged over the last 18 months to send global agricultural commodity prices to near-record levels. Any honest accounting of the war’s history must acknowledge this fact. But it is also true that the outside world contributed to the start of war in Ukraine by making the country the object in a geopolitical tussle between Russia and the West. External observers may be inclined to point to social division and corruption as the internal causes of the war, and argue that Ukraine has to fix itself before the outside world can intervene to help. The international community must be engaged in both crafting a settlement to the war and helping Ukraine deal with its consequences.

But in order for peace to endure after the war, the Ukrainian state must construct a broad-based, civic national identity, and it must tackle the country’s endemic corruption. The exhaustion and frustration of people in the separatist-controlled regions, Russia’s changing policy on the war-at least in part a result of rising frustration among the Russian public-and the election of a new Ukrainian government without regional ties or ties to networks of oligarchs all contribute to the possibility of peace. The war’s effects on Ukraine have been profound: the collapse of the post-Soviet Ukrainian political elite billions of dollars in direct and indirect losses to the Ukrainian economy a wholesale restructuring of the Ukrainian armed forces social dislocation and psychological trauma and unprecedented environmental damage.ĭespite these sad legacies, there are reasons to be optimistic that a settlement to the conflict is in view. The war was caused by inherent cleavages in Ukrainian society, combined with clumsy and self-interested intervention by outside powers. The war in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas has killed over 13,000 people, displaced millions, and led to the worst rupture in relations between the Russian Federation and the West since the end of the Cold War.

Ukraine civil war 2020