the conflict in eastern Ukraine intensified.60 In early May, scrambling to raise an army, Kiev was forced to reintroduce conscription. As the oligarch Petro Poroshenko took office as Ukraine’s president in the last week of May 2014, he faced the impossible challenge of implementing an IMF austerity program while fighting a war; a war, moreover, that Russia would not let Ukraine win. Kiev’s only hope was that while military escalation placed ever greater stress on Ukraine’s fragile economy, it would also clarify the political stakes of the conflict and suck in the West.
