Looking beyond the contest of ideas exemplified by the current Crimea crisis, I was chatting a couple of days ago with Grzegorz Ekiert about another lesson Myanmar might draw from Ukraine.

Grzegorz reminded me that this is a country that secured independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and set about undertaking a transition to democracy. Little more than one decade later, it had fallen into such deep trouble that it experienced a peaceful Orange Revolution in 2004 and embarked upon a fresh democratic experiment. A little less than one decade on from that, it again found itself gripped by political convulsions that triggered the Euromaidan (or Eurosquare) revolution earlier this year.

Feeding this serial turmoil is an inability to engineer meaningful reform of a corrupt and decrepit state. As Stephen Sestanovich recently noted in the New York Times (while in fact writing about a different issue), “Ukraine’s institutions function poorly across the board, from its military to its police and border guards, from local government to political parties”. This has been the case ever since the collapse of Communism more than 20 years ago. In key respects, then, the country has made very limited political progress. It is not precisely where it was in 1991, but the distance traveled is deeply disappointing.

The moral of the story appears to be clear. It is essential to keep up the momentum of political reform, for once that begins to tail off it is difficult to avoid slipping back pretty much to where things originated – as has happened repeatedly in Ukraine over the period of a single generation. Then you have no choice but to undertake the difficult task of starting all over again. In particular, it is necessary to propel reform right into the heart of the state and institute real change there.

The third anniversary of Myanmar’s switch to quasi-civilian government at the end of last month saw others make parallel points. In Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab (and also in the Irrawaddy a few days later), Min Zin explained “why Burma is heading downhill fast”. He focused particularly on the country’s leadership crisis, and mounting social unrest. In the Irrawaddy, Aung Zaw argued that the “shine’s off the apple”. He held that across the society it is understood very clearly that power has scarcely changed hands at all since 2011.

The Ukraine case suggests that the Myanmar people have every reason to be worried about their country’s faltering reform dynamic. Unless there is renewed forward drive, everything could soon move into reverse.