Can the “Crisis” Be Turned into a “Chance?”

A forum called EU-US-Canada: Policies toward Ukraine, was held April 2 in Washington. It was intended to find out if the Western participants understand the political situation in Ukraine and have unbiased information about the scenarios of its further development and if the Ukrainian side (representing both the leadership and the opposition) can reasonably explain its political behavior. An important (and, as the forum showed, not always comprehensible for Western experts and officials) topic was a discussion on the geopolitical consequences of the Ukrainian crisis. The extent to which Western partners displayed interest was evidenced by the coterie of US, Canadian and EU representatives: among them were Cameron Munter, Director for European and Eurasian Affairs, US National Security Council; Ann Collins, Director, Eastern Europe Division, Department of External Affairs and International Trade of Canada; Jim Wright, Assistant Deputy Minister (Global and Security Policy) of the same department; G. Burchardt, chief EU representative in the US; and Bernard Crow, foreign relations director general of the EU secretariat. Also participating in the function were representatives of the World Bank, IMF, US political scientists, and diplomats. The three meetings (the first was held in camera, with the EU, the US, and Canada being represented only by actual office-holders) were presided over by Martti Ahtisaari, cochairman of the East-West Institute and former president of Finland. Yevhen MARCHUK, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, discussed with The Day how the forum’s Western participants understood the situation in Ukraine and the reasoning of official Kyiv.

The unfolding political scandal in Ukraine has brought forth a host of misunderstandings. Representatives of the European Union, the United States, and Canada wanted to look into what is going on in Ukraine and above all into the way our leadership assesses the situation and what kind of opposition we have today.

The concerns of the officials we talked to can be grouped into approximately three points. First, it seems to them Ukraine has slowed down its march toward Europe. On the other hand, they also harbor a suspicion that Ukraine is more and more tilting toward Russia. Third, we must have fixated too much on this political scandal. It should be noted that our interlocutors showed a deeper understanding of the essence and key aspects of the crisis situation than did some representatives of our opposition who took part in the debate. Almost every foreign official and expert who took the floor clearly underscored that our problems essentially come down to two things: a consensus and the political parliamentary majority as a mechanism for achieving this consensus.

In my speech, I had to reveal the gist of what is now called improvement of relations with Russia, for this tendency causes certain alarm in the West. What is in fact going on is clearing the logjams that have piled up in Ukrainian-Russian relations, such as completing delimitation of the Ukrainian-Russian border, laying the final legal groundwork for a temporary basing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea, and easing tensions in bilateral trade and the energy sector. All this will help to further strengthen regional stability, as well as establish good neighborly relations between Ukraine and Russia. And, after all, this will make a common contribution to European stability as a whole. The solution of this and other problems require, of course, quite active diplomatic, both intergovernmental and interdepartmental, contacts, as well as meetings of the presidents. What was needed was a new dynamic of relations, which some interpreted with no reason apparent as changing accents in foreign policy.

As to the European vector in our foreign policy, the most convincing proof here is the message of the President Verkhovna Rada on Ukraine’s domestic and foreign-policy situation in 2001, which identifies measures to speed up Ukraine’s integration in Europe as a priority of its foreign policy. To support this idea, we offered several arguments to our Western vis-a-vis. One should not forget that Ukraine was the first CIS country to begin cooperation with NATO as part of the Partnership for Peace program and then conclude a charter on special partnership with the alliance. It will also be recalled that Ukraine is one of the countries which initiated the establishment of and is today playing a key role in GUUAM. Ukraine also plays an active role in peacekeeping operations on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Our state assumed and is doing its best to meet the onerous obligations for Council of Europe membership. Recently we passed our new Criminal Code free of capital punishment. In 1994 Ukraine signed an agreement with the European Union on partnership and cooperation, and the year 1998 saw a presidential decree which approved Ukraine’s eventual integration in the EU and set the main objectives the executive power should achieve by 2007 in order to create prerequisites for Ukraine’s full-fledged membership in the EU. Last January we approved and began to implement our second state program of cooperation with NATO for a period up to 2004. Stable contacts have been forged and are being further developed on a parliamentary level with NATO, the European Union, as well as the Council of Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I think these examples, which are just some of our achievements, provide sufficient arguments to state that European integration remains the main strategic direction of our official policy.

Our Western colleagues learned with interest that Ukraine had approved last year and was already implementing the program of armed forces reform until 2005. Many of then did not know we had abolished the National Guard last year. NATO experts are assisting in working out an effective mechanism of civilian control over the military sphere and human rights in the armed forces, in streamlining and downsizing them, in delimiting more clearly the duties of the Ministry of Defense and General Staff. This was noted with great interest, as was information on the formation of an interdepartmental commission to reform law enforcement bodies.

I will stress that replacing the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Director of the Security Service is not yet the beginning of the reform. The interdepartmental commission is to submit by May the first proposals on the reformation of these law enforcement bodies. With no lesser interest was also heard the information about a recent decree on bringing the economy out of the shadows and liquidating out of bank money circulation. For this is a prerequisite for controlling corruption. The question whether we have fixated on the political scandal could be heard not only during this forum but also when I visited the Security Council, the State Department, and the White House.

I can conclude that the West is far better informed about the acute aspects of our scandal than about what the government, parliament, and president are really doing in Ukraine. It is for this reason that unbiased information about Ukraine is today as imperative as never before. The Belarusian experience is a good evidence of what serious consequences can follow a warped coverage of ourselves in the national media. Columbia University Professor Robert Legwold made an interesting conclusion that what threw US-Belarusian relations to an all-time low in January 1994, when the Supreme Council of Belarus dismissed Speaker Stanislav Shushkevich and this produced the US State Department official comment. According to Prof. Legvold, that statement was caused by a wrong impression based on the words of Zenon Pozniak, leader of the Belarusian Popular Front, that the overthrow of Shushkevich was the result of a communist palace coup. In addition, Mr. Pozniak told his American partners it was Vyacheslav Kebich, the advocate of integration with Russia, who benefited from the ouster of Shushkevich. So the US refused to cooperate with this moderate and liberal politician who enjoyed wide public support at the time. As a result, Prof. Legvold noted, the US has to deal today with the authoritarian regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

The newly independent states are facing a formidable challenge of building a democratic, law governed state and forming the full-fledged institutions of civil society. Indeed, support of the leading Western states can play an important role in these processes. But I told our Western interlocutors bluntly that the West more often than not chooses partners in these countries from among the radical politicians who uphold democratic values in words only but are in fact unable to conduct a constructive dialogue with society and the current legitimate leadership. The ten years of transformations in the post- Soviet theater have already provided rich material for an up-to-date analysis of the situation. The post-Soviet states of today are showing such a new specific as destructive opposition which quite often rallies together representatives of marginal and fringe political structures and those of criminal politico-financial groups. They appeal to the world public, calling on international organizations to actively interfere in the internal affairs of their own countries. But in reality, their activities aim to discredit the official authorities in the eyes of the world community. In essence, their actions will eventually discredit worldwide or even lead to international isolation the country and their own people. On the other hand, nobody in the West — and this was demonstrated by our interlocutors —casts doubt on the necessity of opposition in a democratic state. But this does not at all negate the problem of the opposition being patriotic. Meanwhile, some opposition members, busy solving their narrow problems at home, behave entirely differently abroad. The West can clearly see through this export-oriented version of the opposition. Nonetheless, our opposition, our authorities, and our scandals are problems of our own to be solved by ourselves. Incidentally, this was repeatedly emphasized by almost all speakers from the European Union and the United States. What deserves attention in this connection is Martti Ahtisaari’s opinion that it is worth turning this crisis situation into a chance for development and renewal. But this chance can only be seized under one condition: to sit at the negotiating table, throwing away all previous demands and ultimatums. The leadership has demonstrated such an initiative, now it is the opposition’s turn. To have unbiased information on the course of negotiations, our Western partners will have to listen attentively to both sides.”