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One afternoon in late February, Gennady Kernes, the mayor of Kharkov, Ukraines second largest city, pushed his wheelchair away from the podium at city hall and, with a wince of discomfort, allowed his bodyguards to help him off the stage. The days session of the city council had lasted several hours, and the mayors pain medication had begun to wear off. It was clear from the grimace on his face how much he still hurt from the snipers bullet that nearly killed him last spring. But he collected himself, adjusted his tie and rolled down the aisle to the back of the hall, where the press was waiting to grill him.

Gennady Adolfovich, one of the local journalists began, politely addressing the mayor by his name and patronymic. Do you consider Russia to be an aggressor? He had seen this loaded question coming. The previous month, Ukraines parliament had unanimously voted to declare Russia an aggressor state, moving the two nations closer to a formal state of war after nearly a year of armed conflict. Kernes, long known as a shrewd political survivor, was among the only prominent officials in Ukraine to oppose this decision, even though he knew he could be branded a traitor for it. Personally, I do not consider Russia to be an aggressor, he said, looking down at his lap.

It was a sign of his allegiance in the new phase of Ukraines war. Since February, when a fragile ceasefire began to take hold, the question of the countrys survival has turned to a debate over its reconstitution. Under the conditions of the truce, Russia has demanded that Ukraine embrace federalization, a sweeping set of constitutional reforms that would take power away from the capital and redistribute it to the regions. Ukraine now has to decide how to meet this demand without letting its eastern provinces fall deeper into Russias grasp.

The state council charged with making this decision convened for the first time on April 6, and President Petro Poroshenko gave it strict instructions. Some autonomy would have to be granted to the regions, he said, but Russias idea of federalization was a red line he wouldnt cross. It is like an infection, a biological weapon, which is being imposed on Ukraine from abroad, the President said. Its bacteria are trying to infect Ukraine and destroy our unity.

Kernes sees it differently. His city of 1.4 million people is a sprawling industrial powerhouse, a traditional center of trade and culture whose suburbs touch the Russian border. Its economy cannot survive, he says, unless trade and cooperation with the aggressor state continue, regardless how much Russia has done in the past year to sow conflict in Ukraine.

Thats how the Soviet Union built things, Kernes explains in his office at the mayoralty, which is decorated with an odd collection of gifts and trinkets, such as a stuffed lion, a robotic-looking sculpture of a scorpion, and a statuette of Kernes in the guise of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. Thats how our factories were set up back in the day, he continues. Its a fact of life. And what will we do if Russia, our main customer, stops buying? To answer his own question, he uses an old provincialism: Itll be cat soup for all of us then, he said.

Already Ukraine is approaching that point. With most of its scarce resources focused on fighting Russias proxies in the east, Ukraines leaders have watched their economy fall off a cliff, surviving only by the grace of massive loans from Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which approved another $17.5 billion last month to be disbursed over the next four years. But that assistance has not stopped the national currency of Ukraine from losing two-thirds of its value since last winter. In the last three months of 2014, the size of the economy contracted almost 15%, inflation shot up to 40%, and unemployment approached double digits.

But that pain will be just the beginning, says Kernes, unless Ukraine allows its eastern regions to develop economic ties with Russia. As proof he points to the fate of Turboatom, his citys biggest factory, which produces turbines for both Russian and Ukrainian power stations. Its campus takes up more than five square kilometers near the center of Kharkov, like a city within a city, complete with dormitories and bathhouses for its 6,000 employees. On a recent evening, its deputy director, Alexei Cherkassky, was looking over the factorys sales list as though it were a dire medical prognosis. About 40% of its orders normally come from Russia, which relies on Turboatom for most of the turbines that run its nuclear power stations.

Unfortunately, all of our major industries are intertwined with Russia in this way, Cherkassky says. So we shouldnt fool ourselves in thinking we can be independent from Russia. We are totally interdependent. Over the past year, Russia has started cutting back on orders from Turboatom as part of its broader effort to starve Ukraines economy, and the factory has been forced as a result to cut shifts, scrap overtime and push hundreds of workers into retirement.

At least in the foreseeable future, it does not have the option of shifting sales to Europe. Turbines arent iPhones, says Cherkassky. You dont switch them out every few months. And the ones produced at Turboatom, like nearly all of Ukraines heavy industry, still use Soviet means of production that dont meet the needs of most Western countries. So for all the aid coming from the state-backed institutions in the U.S. and Europe, Cherkassky says, those markets havent exactly met us with open arms.

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Why Ukraine Still Cant Break Ties With Russian Aggressor State