Ukraine’s Zakarpattia Oblast is comparable in certain key respects with Bessarabia in the Odesa Oblast (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, May 28). Zakarpattia is another outlying territory where Kyiv’s influence is weak, local power brokers well-entrenched, the infrastructure desolate and ethnic mino­rities – in this case the local Hunga­rians – left largely to their own devices by an under-resourced central government.

As a further similitude, Zakarpattia is also wedged narrowly between several countries. But its strategic location is even more interesting and more promising, surrounded as it is by four European Union member countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania), with the potential to be turned into a Central European logistical hub on Ukrainian territory.