The “Finland option” is no longer a viable one for Ukraine because of Russia’s own actions.

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, scholars who associate with the realist school of international relations have suggested turning the country into a neutral buffer state between East and West.

It’s too late for that.

Nonaligned

John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, most recently made the case in The New York Times , arguing that Russia can never accept a Ukraine that is aligned with the West. Rather, “It should look like Austria during the Cold War” — culturally and economically Western but unaligned to either bloc.

Toward that end, the West should explicitly take European Union and NATO expansion off the table and emphasize that its goal is a nonaligned Ukraine that does not threaten Russia.

Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski first suggested in the Financial Times last year that Ukraine should imitate Finland’s Cold War experience, meaning “mutually respectful neighbors with wide-ranging economic relations with Russia and the EU; no participation in any military alliance viewed by Moscow as directed at itself but expanding its European connectivity.”

One of Brzezinski’s predecessors, Henry Kissinger, agreed, writing in The Washington Post that Ukraine “should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland.”

Divided country

Kissinger recognized that Ukraine is a divided country. The Catholic and Ukrainian-speaking west favors integration with the rest of Europe. The Orthodox and Russian-speaking east prefers closer relations with Russia. Efforts by either side to impose their will on the whole country have marked Ukraine’s post-independence politics.

The West, argued Kissinger, should “seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction.”

Meddling

Russia’s meddling in Ukraine has changed the situation. Since the majority of the Crimea’s residents voted in a referendum last year to join the Russian Federation, public opinion in the remainder of Ukraine has turned decidedly against Russia. Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for parties that advocated EU and even NATO membership in an election in October. Ukrainians don’t want to be “Finlandized.”

If Kissinger still believes that “Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe,” he cannot at the same time maintain that “Ukraine should not join NATO.”

Russian subjugation

Of course, it’s up to existing NATO member states to decide if they want to let Ukraine into their alliance, and doing so now would be problematic.

But what matters here is that by far most Ukrainians want to be Western, having experienced — again — that the alternative is Russian subjugation.

Russia cannot allow a neutral Ukraine slowly tilting toward the West, like Austria and Finland did, for the reasons Mearsheimer, Brzezinski and Kissinger pointed out: It regards Ukraine as vital to its national security. Russia must dominate Ukraine to defend its heartland against an imagined Western threat and in order to project power into the Black Sea and beyond. Having a nation of forty million on its frontier, nominally neutral but clearly more interested in joining the West than serving its interests (even if that is the result of its own actions), won’t do.