Tom Coupe, Associate Professor, Senior Economist at KSE and Eric Livny, ISET Director: “Handling Frozen Conflicts: the Economic Angle” for ISET Economist blog, Voxukraine, KyivPost and Georgia Today.

It now seems more and more likely that Eastern Donbass (the area currently controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics) will become a frozen conflict zone, a territory in which the Ukrainian government will have little power to enforce its laws and where slowly a parallel governance system, an unrecognized ‘quasi-state’, will emerge. In the absence of a viable military alternative, one option likely to be considered by Ukraine and its Western allies is to exercise ‘strategic patience’.