D.C. CONFERENCE ADDRESS: Ukraine's image problem: complicated by the reality (11/03/02)

D.C. CONFERENCE ADDRESS

Ukraine's image problem: complicated by the reality

Following is the text of remarks prepared by Roman Woronowycz of The Ukrainian Weekly's Kyiv Press Bureau for the third annual Washington roundtable on "Ukraine's Quest for Mature Nation Statehood" held on October 8-9. The topic of this year's roundtable was Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic community. The Weekly editor was one of the panelists during a working lunch featuring journalists active in Ukraine, including correspondents from Ukraine-based media and the Financial Times. Paul Goble, senior adviser to the director of Voice of America, served as moderator for the panel.

As most observers of Ukraine will agree, Ukraine has been and continues to be looked at through a rather distorted prism, in which, first Chornobyl and now Kolchuha air defense systems, as well as corruption, air catastrophes and the dire plight of the Donbas miners are most quickly associated with Ukraine.

This has left the country with a grave image problem that is beginning to border on stereotype. The Ukrainian spouse of a friend of mine, who had just completed graduate studies at Georgetown University, went looking for a job. One headhunter to whom he turned, ostensibly no expert on Ukraine, told him "Just don't remind them that you're Ukrainian."

So when we talk about how NATO and the West consider Ukraine, and whether enough has been done to promote knowledge about other aspects of Ukraine in the Euro-Atlantic community, we need to begin with these perceptions.

Leonid Kravchuk, the former president of Ukraine and now a leading member of its Parliament, who has initiated an effort to improve Ukraine's image abroad through a public relations effort has the right idea: Ukraine must begin to talk itself up, to show how far Westward it has come on the political radar screen.

Yet positive P.R. will go only as far as the truth can carry it. P.R. alone will not suffice for the simple reason that what the world has chosen to see are not simple misperceptions. To a disappointing degree, they reflect very real problems within Ukrainian society, the government and the body politic.

And, I must admit that as I speak these words I am besmirching Ukraine's image further. But, at the end of the day, the fact remains that adjusting negative perceptions is one thing and changing reality is another. Ukraine needs to clean up its image by changing the reality. They, and we, have heard this all before: Ukraine needs to become more transparent in commercial transactions, tax collection, judicial decision-making and corporate governance, and it has to start combating corruption.

Ukraine finally needs to reinforce the notion of the rule of law, and it needs to show it will guarantee freedom of the press before clan and political interests. Only then can public relations be used to polish and proclaim the truth about Ukraine, instead of trying to create a baseless spin - a fog through which the West easily sees.

While Ukraine needs to make political and economic changes, and to get the word out that it has done so, the West needs to begin to look at Ukraine differently. The Euro-Atlantic community must stop looking at Ukraine through the prism of Russia. Too many continue to view the country as a region of the empire that was centered in Moscow for the past 300 years. In a world of commonwealths, economic unions and treaty organizations, too often states are grouped by geopolitical similarities and/or political ideologies. At times, this happens to simplify a complicated world, but ultimately it also maintains the status quo, and minimise risk, unpredictability and change.

Part of the problem for Ukraine lies in the historical record, as well. The Soviet Union, and the Russian Empire before it, did a very good job of downplaying and extinguishing Ukrainian history. How many people here know that Pylyp Orlyk, the head of the Ukrainian Kozak State, developed the first Constitution in Europe? How is it that so many scholars still have difficulty accepting that Muscovy and Russia were not the successor states to the Kyivan Rus' grand duchy, which actually moved westward after the Mongolian onslaught, not eastward?

The historical record needs to be corrected and, more importantly, recognized. The problem confronting contemporary Ukrainian spinmasters is how to break deeply ingrained habits, patterns and perceptions, which Euro-Atlantic countries - particularly their politicians and academics, need to do to get a proper perception of Ukraine.

It is the failure to accept the most basic, and oftentimes banal matters that is most disconcerting and irritating to me when I see how the West continues to view Ukraine. In regards to the press, a fair first step towards a proper perspective on Ukraine would be for the giants of foreign journalism, especially the Associated Press and The New York Times, to stop spelling Ukraine's capital as K-i-e-v, and begin using the officially sanctioned K-y-i-v. If they could make the change from Peking to Beijing, then going from Kiev to Kyiv should be easy. Yet, after 10 years of Ukrainian independence, and with a new, state-sanctioned spelling in place since about 1993, leading international media still have not adopted the change.

Ukraine, which had received some attention from the United States in recent years because Washington needed a partner in the region at a time when its relationship with Moscow was lukewarm at best, has lost that aspect of its foreign relations since George W. Bush became president. In the political atmosphere of post-9/11, Washington's strategic ties to Ukraine have weakened further as the U.S. has moved closer to Russia, and the job before Kyiv for NATO entry has gotten that much tougher.

This has happened even as Ukraine has contributed much to the war on terrorism by allowing more than 4,000 flyovers of Western aircraft in the last year, in addition to providing its own transport carriers.

Now with the Kolchuha controversy added to the mix, Ukraine is in very real danger of completely losing credibility - and even becoming a pariah state. If it is proven that Ukraine sold a missile defense system to Iraq, Ukraine's path to NATO becomes a song title: it's either "the long and winding road," or perhaps "the endless journey."

Not helping is President Bush's attitude towards President Kuchma, which has led some Ukrainians to believe that the Kolchuha allegations are a political effort to further destabilize Ukraine and perhaps affect regime change in Kyiv as well as in Baghdad.

Prof. Michael McFaul, a Hoover Institute fellow at Stanford University and a colleague of Condoleezza Rice, pointed out during a press conference in Kyiv in June that President Bush is a straightforward person who quickly and instinctively, even reflexively, decides whether or not he likes a politician. While Mr. Bush has taken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he considers to be as straightforward, he considers Mr. Kuchma deeply untrustworthy, mildly put.

And that's that. Ukraine has been left in the geopolitical dust as Russia has surged forward in relations with the U.S. One result is that Presidents Kuchma and Bush have not met a single time in the nearly two years of the Bush administration, and why they will not meet in Prague in November.

To change the current reality, Ukraine needs a real public relations effort backed by deeds and accomplishments. It has to stop making unrealistic declarations and cease using unbounded spin for spin's sake. It needs to prove that it follows through on its promises, as it did when it closed Chornobyl. That action, and the pomp with which it was carried out, raised Ukraine's standing in the West, even if only briefly.

Kyiv also needs to show that it is building democracy in very concrete ways. It must ensure the rule of law by completing judicial reform and resolving the Gongadze case and other unsolved high-publicity crimes. The Kuchma administration must also stop using heavy-handed tactics in suppressing public demonstrations. It must exercise patience and show tolerance for opposition movements. It must stop its blatant control and intimidation of the press.

Finally, it needs to pass corporate governance legislation and complete tax and administrative reform to bring in Western investors and their business partners. These people could become wonderful P.R. ambassadors for Ukraine. They would put out the good word that Ukraine is a truly European country.

In the end, however, nothing may help. It simply may be too late. With a cloud of Kolchuhas hanging over its head, Ukraine may find it nearly impossible to create a positive atmosphere in time for the NATO summit in November. While both parties have expressed a desire for a new NATO-Ukraine agreement, that may not be a priority for Brussels after the latest events. Ukraine's place at the Prague summit could become a small stool in a dark corner.

That, however, is not the only problem. Even while NATO has repeatedly affirmed that it wants to be an all-inclusive defense alliance, there are some experts, including at least one at the Rand Corp. with whom I spoke, who believe that the West has not had much interest in Ukraine as a full NATO member for sometime, that today a good many NATO diplomats believe that with Ukraine free of nukes and with a NATO-Ukraine charter on a special partnership firmly in place and a second agreement on the way, relations between Kyiv and Brussels should remain as they are for now.

Unfortunately, this attitude supports in a basic way the improperly formulated supposition that Ukraine should remain part of Russia's sphere of influence. It brings us back to where we started, that the West must begin to look at Ukraine apart from Russia.

In the end, the decision on whether and how to proceed towards NATO remains Ukraine's to make. If it wants to go the road, it must prove beyond a micro-smidgeon of doubt that it had nothing to do with illegal arms sales to Iraq. Its declarations of its readiness to allow complete inspections and calls for transparency and open cooperation on the matter were a good first step, both in the public relations realm and from a tactical point of view.

There are those who believe the Kolchuha crisis will pass quickly. One is Bruce Jackson, the president of the U.S. Committee on NATO, an NGO, who believes that Ukraine should gear up for beginning the process to full membership around 2006, with entry sometime around 2012

Officially, NATO has not given up on Ukraine either. While Secretary General George Robertson said that Ukraine could have problems if it is proven it was complicit in arms sales, he also made it clear that, for the moment, the Atlantic Alliance stands by its desire to see Ukraine as a member, eventually. So, hope remains.

Another matter is whether the Kuchma administration is capable of the new attitude and the honest changes required. There is also concern about whether the administration realizes that the best perception to develop of Ukraine in the West is of a country with something to offer NATO, and not merely as another underdeveloped entity to be nurtured. With proper reforms and preparations, Ukraine could state its case strongly. At the moment, however, much still needs to be done.

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