Ukraine muddled through 2015, meeting neither the exalted expectations of the country’s boosters nor the malevolent hopes of its detractors. Its major accomplishment for the year sounds rather minimalist, but is important nonetheless: the country survived. Since the retreat from Debaltseve in early 2015, Ukrainian forces have managed to stabilize the front in the Donbas, and the military situation looks much better for Kyiv at the start of 2016 than it had a year ago. The rest of southern and eastern Ukraine has been spared the destruction and depopulation that have befallen Donetsk and Luhansk. Mariupol, …read more
Source: The American Interest
