How the West Won Ukraine.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)

Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova

It may not be joining NATO soon. But Kiev has much bigger goals.

In Brussels last week, NATO foreign ministers met to hash out details on whether Ukraine and Georgia should be allowed into the military alliance, and to figure out how even to make that decision without appearing to appease or provoke Russia, which has bitterly opposed it. Finally, after two days of diplomatic wrangling and 22 drafts of a communique, Western Europeans, led by Germany and France, finally succeeded in blocking U.S. efforts to offer Ukraine and Georgia a formal path into NATO. But this obscures a simple fact: support for NATO membership has been waning fast among Ukraine's political elite, with little more than 10 percent of parliamentary deputies actively backing accession. Meantime Ukrainians have their eye on a bigger prize. Close to 50 percent of Ukrainians, and all the major political parties, now favor joining the European Union--up from 30 percent four years ago.

If this trend continues, it would represent a fundamental shift in Ukrainian thinking. For years the nation has been split between a Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russian-speaking east. The sides are roughly matched in terms of population and share of GDP, and the divide has created a series of fragile coalition governments and the sense that it would be forever torn between its two big neighbors: the European Union and Russia. So why is this changing? In part it is the result of a concerted effort by the pro-EU, pro-Western parties that came to power in the Orange Revolution five years ago. They have done their utmost to create a Pan-Ukrainian consciousness, for instance by instituting a national holiday commemorating what Orange leader President Viktor Yushchenko calls a "genocide" of Ukrainians at the hands of Russian commissars during man-made famines in the 1930s, and by enforcing Ukrainian language instruction from kindergartens to universities. They have also, perversely, tried to draw Ukraine away from Russia and toward the West by some less-than-democratic means. Earlier this year Yushchenko tried to ban Ukrainian cable companies from showing Russia's Channel One, Rossia and Ren-TV, purportedly because of violations of advertising rules, but in reality because of a desire to cut off voters from Kremlin propaganda. In November Ukraine's security service forced Ukrainian lawmaker Valery Konovalyuk to cancel the showing of a pro-Russian film about the August conflict with Georgia, claiming that the film "disseminates unproved, untrue information prepared by the Russian secret services."

Another factor behind Ukraine's increasingly pro-EU orientation is the Kremlin's ...