Should this situation persist, there is no doubt the economy will only suffer more. Thus the conflict between the West and South-East, already ethnically and regionally charged, will gain a social dimension. It will become clear that the help the West and the IMF can offer is very limited—the money offered will be insufficient, while the measures taken to improve the economy will be crowned with opposite results.

This can lead to social protests against the government because of the sharp slide in living standards across the country that would exacerbate the existing tension.

There is the possibility of a third conflict that could arise both during and after the elections in Kiev. It would be between the self-proclaimed liberal pro-Western politicians in Kiev and radical nationalists with their armed groups, with the nonparticipation of the South and East in the elections. I doubt that the radicals will want to form any coalitions post-elections with the so-called pro-Westerners, but would rather try and take all the power in their hands. This can also lead to mass unrest both in Kiev and in Ukraine as a whole. Unfortunately, in such a situation, Russia would reluctantly have to intervene in the spreading chaos, ungovernability, weak institutions, and collisions between nationalists and liberals or nationalists and Russians (or Russian speakers). Such collisions could force President Putin’s hand and make him use the mandate to use force given him by the Council of the Federation to protect the lives of the Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. In such conditions, we cannot exclude the possibility that the Russian army might be deployed to restore stability first to the left of Dniepr, where Russians and Russian speakers are the majority, then in Odessa and the South, and all the way to Transnistria. This would grant Transnistria its dream of twenty-five years to finally be part of Russia, recently expressed again in yet another referendum, in which over 90 percent of the population in Transnistria voted for rejoining Russia.

Such turn of events would not be Russia’s choice, but unfortunately, it is a very real possibility so as to prevent mass violence and civil war on the entire territory of Ukraine. The Russian side will simply be forced to make such a choice. This would naturally escalate the tension in U.S.-Russian and EU-Russian relations that would likely be followed by calls in the West for more sanctions, though I am not convinced that the threat of sanctions or isolation against Russia has any point in today’s world.

As George Will recently said on TV, the only thing we know about sanctions from recent history is that they don’t work. He offered a demonstrable example, of Cuba, right in the backyard of the mighty United States and 90 miles off the coast of Florida, where Cuba has been living in isolation and under sanctions for already 50 years. The Castro brothers and their regime are still there unchanged. With this in mind, the threats to punish and sanction a powerful nuclear power seem laughable, especially when we are no longer living in the 1990s under the unchallenged primacy of the United States, but rather in an increasingly multipolar world, in which the U.S.’s abilities are decreasing with the rise of China, India, Brazil, Turkey and others.

Thus, if even at the level of the Crimean crisis the West is already at the end of its ability to impose sanctions, I am having difficulty imagining what other sanctions it can come up with in order to “punish” Russia for its protection of Russians and Russian speakers in the East and South of Ukraine. It is hard to say what the fate of these regions will be after a potential intervention of the Russian military. They can hardly be annexed to Russia, and yet, a lot will depend on how the Kiev authorities will act, if there even will be any Kiev authorities, and on how Russia’s Western partners will behave. This is why I think that for the sake of avoiding this risky scenario, it will be good if Washington, Moscow, Berlin and Brussels already sat down to discuss the first option, the conditions for which are not so far from what the most realistic Western analysts propose, and have even to an extent been accepted by acting prime minister Yatsenyuk, who at times speaks Russian and says that the desire for wider autonomy for the East and South has to be taken into account if Kiev wishes to avoid the disintegration of Ukraine.

I would like to end the article with a few very important statements.

First, Russia does not want to escalate the conflict with the West. Second, Russia does not want a collapse of Ukraine and does not want to take over the East and South. Third, even after the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. and EU, Russia is willing to engage in constructive cooperation with the West to save the Ukrainian state. This is why the politicians in the West need to be thinking of exactly this instead of lying to the whole world and themselves about laughable and unrealizable threats of “isolating” or “punishing” a country that remains a nuclear superpower. Russia is ready to cooperate, but as President Reagan used to say, “it takes two to tango.”

Andranik Migranyan is the director of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in New York, which works closely with the Russian presidential administration. He is also a professor at the Institute of International Relations in Moscow, a former member of the Public Chamber and a former member of the Russian Presidential Council.