Much hung on the results of Ukraine's election last week. Citizens were not just picking the next president. They were choosing whether they would bow to the thuggery of Russian-backed rebels or whether they would assert their independence and demand a say in their and their country's future. Not surprisingly for a people who have endured six months — before and after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych — of sometimes bloody protests against a corrupt and antidemocratic administration, they opted for the latter, refusing to be intimidated by the threats from the East. Yet if the people's work is done, the responsibility now falls on the shoulders of newly elected President Petro Poroshenko to end the downward spiral of corruption and incompetence.
Since Yanukovych fled Ukraine in February in the face of mass protests triggered by his decision to scrap closer ties with Europe and instead link his country more closely to Russia, the Moscow government has worked to assert its influence over its neighbor. The re-annexation of Crimea provided a model for a surreptitious invasion in the eastern parts of Ukraine, areas that historically had closer ties to Russia and feel alienated from the more European-oriented western half of the country.
Russian-backed separatists who seized power in several cities declared the government in Kiev, as well as the elections last week, illegal. They held their own ballots that, not surprisingly, returned overwhelming results in favor of breaking with the central government. They refused to allow national election to proceed in areas under their control. That did not stop the ballot from proceeding, nor should it have. Rebel territory accounts for just 15 percent of Ukraine's population.