ANALYSIS: The key to reform in Russia is found in Ukraine (03/17/96)

ANALYSIS: The key to reform in Russia is found in Ukraine

by Taras Kuzio

President Leonid Kuchma visited the U.S. on February 20-22 while President Bill Clinton will visit Kyiv in April. Assuredly, high on the agenda of their talks are Western assistance to Ukraine, the forthcoming Russian presidential elections and Ukrainian security related to fears that President Boris Yeltsin will lose the elections. In contrast to neighboring Ukraine and Poland though, where Leonid Kravchuk and Lech Walesa were replaced by moderates still committed to reform, Mr. Yeltsin may be replaced by a new tsar or a commissar.

Ominous signs are emanating from Russia these days - particularly for its neighboring states, such as Ukraine. The new foreign minister, Yevgeniy Primakov, is the brainchild behind two documents that outline Russia's current policies of transforming the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a vehicle to recover its superpower status; these are titled "Russia and the CIS: Does the Western Position Need Correction?" (September 1994) and "The Strategic Course of the Russian Federation with Member-States of the CIS" (September 1995).

Back-room negotiations between Our Home is Russia, the party of power close to the current leadership, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats, held since the December 1995 parliamentary elections, have served to reinforce the evolution of the current Russian leadership away from reform towards more patriotic, anti-Western and integrationist policies. Russia no longer hides its plans to be primes inter pares (first among equals) within the CIS, and President Yeltsin in January was elected chairman of the CIS Council of Heads of States for the fourth year running.

With only four months left before the Russian presidential elections, it has become clear that it is not domestic factors that will decide whether Russia stays on a course of reform, but its relationship to Ukraine. If Russia were to reject nation-state in favor of empire-building policies after the June elections, this would spell the end of reform in Russia and the possible advent of a new Cold War with the West.

As President Kuchma has said, "Without Ukraine, there can be no Great Russia. I think that from all points of view an independent, economically strong Ukraine in the center of Europe is the best anchor of stability for the European continent."

Without Ukraine, any attempts by the Russian leadership to forge a new Eurasian empire out of the CIS that would challenge the West and NATO as a new military bloc would be doomed to failure. Both in the 1650s and 1920s Muscovy and Soviet Russia, respectively, became the Tsarist Russian empire and the USSR only after Ukraine joined Russia in a new union. In 1991 the former USSR disintegrated after Ukraine rejected Soviet and Russian calls to sign a new union treaty. Russia's great power status, therefore, relies completely upon coercing Ukraine back into a new alliance.

Since the end of last year, Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev has visited the three core CIS states to buttress Russia's plans to forge this anti-NATO military bloc by building on bilateral ties. Negotiations with Ukraine have proven to be the most difficult, and President Yeltsin publicly complained at the January CIS summit in Moscow that President Kuchma was not heeding his calls for tighter CIS integration into a new confederation that would be naturally dominated by Russia.

In contrast, Belarus and Kazakhstan have de facto become large Russian forward military bases, and Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the eccentric president of Belarus, has even offered to re-establish nuclear missile bases in his country if NATO expands into Central Europe. Russia's new draft military doctrine, prepared by the Institute of Defense Studies and published last September, already talks in such Cold War terms, threatening to invade the Baltic republics and deploy tactical nuclear weapons in response to the expansion of NATO.

The contrast with Ukraine could not be more different. These days U.S. officials repeatedly praise President Kuchma for his continued commitment to reform, de-nuclearization, peaceful resolution of domestic disputes over the constitutional process and the Crimea, and Ukraine's cooperation with Western institutions such as NATO's Partnership for Peace (PFP) program. Last year Ukraine, the first CIS member-state to join the PFP, participated in the largest number of PFP exercises within the program of any former Soviet bloc country.

"We want to be of help in any way we can as they stay on the path to economic reform. We are supporting the reform effort and will be supporting them in connection with the IMF," U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in February after meeting President Kuchma in Helsinki.

This strategic importance of Ukraine to Western security is at least being appreciated by Western policy-makers and leaders. It comes after three years of a 'Russia-first' policy (1992-1994). For the first time since the collapse of the former USSR, Ukraine now ranks ahead of Russia as a recipient of U.S. aid (and the third largest after Israel and Egypt). Russia, which obtained more than 80 percent of U.S. aid to the CIS in 1992, now receives less than 20 percent. U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said recently, "There is no government that is closer to us right now than Ukraine."

Under President Kuchma, Ukraine has made a conscious decision to adopt a pro-European orientation. Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk recently admitted that he travels as often to Brussels these days as he does to Moscow. Ukraine's support for an evolutionary expansion of NATO, membership in the Council of Europe and application to join the Central European Initiative, while restricting its involvement in the CIS to purely economic matters, clearly reflects Kyiv's preference for European - as opposed to Eurasian - integration.

"We consider the integration of Ukraine into the world's political and economic system to be one of the most important guarantees of preserving our sovereignty and independence," Mr. Marchuk said. He also proposed the formation of a club of Central European prime ministers that would ensure permanent consultation and regular meetings.

It is in the West's interests to ensure that these trends continue at a time when Ukraine could be facing one of the greatest threats to its security from Russia, three-quarters of whose population, according to a recent opinion poll, still find it difficult to accept Ukraine's boundaries or existence as an independent state. Nearly two years into the Kuchma presidency there still is no inter-state treaty that would recognize in international law the current Ukrainian-Russian border. Russia describes its borders with CIS member-states as "internal" and purely "administrative" - a concept that harkens back to the Soviet era. Ukraine refuses to accept this Russian policy of "transparent borders," which would only spur the proliferation of banned materials into Europe through Russia and Ukraine.

U.S. and Western policy toward Ukraine can no longer hide from these unpleasant facts; if Ukraine agrees to join a new Russian-led CIS military-political bloc now or after the June elections, Europe will be confronted with a new Cold War and higher expenditure on weapons. The West, therefore, should undertake four measures that could prevent this return to the past.

Agreeing to Russian demands that it be treated as a great power only serves to pander to its temptation to integrate the CIS into a new super-power bloc under its hegemony. Equal, bilateral relations respecting each country's sovereignty, a longtime demand of Ukraine's within the CIS, are forfeited every time Russia is given encouragement that it is a great power. Secondly, the U.S. should broker the completion of the Russian-Ukrainian interstate treaty as a matter of urgency that would serve to stabilize security in Central and Eastern Europe.

Russia should be put on the spot regarding the acceptance of Ukraine's borders which it, along with the other four nuclear powers, agreed to respect within the sphere of the security assurances they provided to Ukraine in December 1994 as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ukraine cannot be expected by the West to complete its de-nuclearization if Russia refuses to legally recognize their common border. If no Russian-Ukrainian treaty is signed before the June Russian presidential elections, it is doubtful whether one will ever be signed by Russian's new tsar or commissar.

Both Ukraine and Russia stand opposed to the deployment of nuclear weapons in new NATO member-states; this would be matched by Russian nuclear deployments in Belarus, Kaliningrad and even the Crimea, which would be highly destabilizing. NATO would be advised, therefore, to openly declare a policy of agreeing not to deploy nuclear weapons in the Visegrad quadrangle, the most likely new NATO members.

Finally, the question of Ukraine's future security and foreign orientation is a more urgent matter now than ever, squeezed as it is between two expanding blocks. Ukraine's strategic importance to the West should ensure it is either given assurances about the likelihood of its future membership in Western security structures or granted the status of "permanent neutrality" by the United Nations similar to Austria's after 1955 or, more recently, Turkmenistan's.

Taras Kuzio is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham and editor of Ukraine Business Review.

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