AHC: Visegrad Ukraine

[Polish Eagle]

The challenge is, starting with the first free elections in Poland at the end of the People's Republic (that is, June 4, 1989), to have Ukraine join the Visegrad Group as its fourth/fifth member, to drift much more closely toward Europe and integrate its economy with its western neighbors, and to join the EU with the rest of them before 2005. What would be necessary for Ukraine to commit to the West? Would Russia's economy have to tank even worse than IOTL? Is there even a place for Ukraine among the Visegrad states? And what would be the consequences of Ukraine joining the EU before Russia's late 2000s resurgence, and visibly moving toward it before Yeltsin's fall?

 

[Polish Eagle]

Ukraine's economy burned pretty badly in the early to mid 1990s. Is there any way for it to avoid the inflation and experience growth more along the lines of Poland or the Balts? Could more privatization have helped?

 

[Lord Of Tacos]

You'll need to prevent the formation of oligarchies and a shock therapy like Poland, along with a free market economy could becomea candidate and perhaps a member by 2012. And integrate it in NATO. Once in NATO Russia won't dare to attack it directly.

 

[rfmcdonald]

What happened to Ukraine from 2014 on has everything to do with the Ukrainian state's weakness. If Ukraine was as solidly united a country as Poland or Romania, with an effective military and a strong economy and a government capable of negotiating the country's entry into transatlantic and European institutions, none of this would have happened.

The thing is, there are good reasons for Ukraine to be divided, on grounds of language and region and history and even national identity. These can't be butterflied away.

If we can't have earlier PODs--have Ukraine secure its independence after the First World War and to keep its statehood until the Second World War, say--then the example of the Baltic States might be noteworthy. In the 1990s, these countries were able to radically reorient their economies away from Russia, partly by activating links with the Nordic countries and partly by allowing industries closely associated with the former integrated Soviet economy to decay. Could something similar happen with Ukraine? I'm skeptical: Poland in the 1990s is not much of an economic partner for Ukraine, and the decay of Soviet-era industries was closely associated with ethnic conflict and a real sense of existential threat from Russia that just isn't present in Ukraine.