Brzezinski's advice in Kyiv: make the EU want Ukraine as a partner (05/23/04)

Brzezinski's advice in Kyiv: make the EU want Ukraine as a partner

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, visited Kyiv on May 13-17 to speak with government and political leaders and to give a lecture on "Ukraine and the World" at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. The message he brought during his four-day stay in Kyiv: Ukraine should not wait for an invitation to enter the European Union; it must make the EU want Ukraine as a partner.

The Johns Hopkins University professor, who is also an advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, repeated his message several times - during his speech at the renowned Ukrainian university and during separate meetings with Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko. The latter two individuals are currently the favorites to succeed Mr. Kuchma in elections scheduled for October of this year.

Dr. Brzezinski's visit came after the previous week's comments by European Commission President Romano Prodi that Ukraine had no prospects for joining the EU, which were echoed by Gunther Verheugen, EU commissioner for enlargement, on May 12 during an interview on Germany's Deutsche Welle public radio.

Mr. Verheugen said that while Bulgaria and Romania could expect to enter the EU in 2007 and Turkey, Serbia and Croatia might gain entry some time later, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia had no chance, "even in the distant future." The best they could expect would be "very close economic ties."

Dr. Brzezinski, addressing students at the NUKMA, during his meetings with top leaders, as well as during a Sunday evening news show broadcast on Ukrainian television, stated that Ukraine had to take the initiative and not wait for an invitation from Europe to become a member of the European Union.

"That which Romano Prodi said regarding Ukraine is very typical for a European bureaucrat," explained Dr. Brzezinski during a press conference after his meeting with Prime Minister Yanukovych.

At the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Dr. Brzezinski told students: "You must not wait for an invitation. You must create the conditions to make Europe want you."

The former U.S. national security adviser used the case of the Baltic states several times to explain the degree to which remarks by politicians and bureaucrats should be taken with a grain of salt.

"A few years ago the same was said of the Baltic countries, but today they are part of the EU," explained Dr. Brzezinski to a nationwide television audience on Sunday night.

The visit by Dr. Brzezinski came as Ukrainian leaders were creating some distance of their own between Ukraine and Europe. A week prior to Mr. Prodi's remarks, President Kuchma said that he had lost patience with the EU because of its failure to take the simple step of recognizing Ukraine as a free market economy, even after five years of sustained economic growth by Ukraine.

Since the president's remarks came just after ratification by the Verkhovna Rada of the Single Economic Space treaty between Ukraine, Russia, Kazakstan and Belarus, political pundits in Kyiv have began to believe the current administration has lost all interest in any tangible further moves toward Europe. The lose of prospects was further felt on May 14 when President Kuchma dismissed First Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Oleksander Chalyi. Mr. Chalyi was the Foreign Ministry's top official for Euro-integration.

After his dismissal, Mr. Chalyi said that Ukraine had lost the window of opportunity that the EU had offered it. While he did not specifically mention the reason as being Ukraine's move into a common market with Russia and its eastern neighbors, he allowed that "a certain conflict of interest between Ukraine and the EU had arisen."

In both his speech before the university students and during the television interview, Dr. Brzezinski agreed that the SES agreement would hinder Ukraine's entry into the EU - especially since its ratification came just as 10 new member-states had entered the EU.

Dr. Brzezinski noted that Ukraine and the other SES countries would never be allowed to enter the EU together. However, he also pointed out that European Union officials should have realized that both Russia and Ukraine need to have prospects for entry into the EU in order for the region to maintain security.

He called Ukraine much further ahead in democratic development than Russia. He also said that as long as Ukrainians could not say with a high degree of confidence who would be their next president democracy exists in the country. He made a comparison to Russia, where it was widely understood that President Vladimir Putin would get re-elected months before the actual day of the vote.

"I do not know who will be the next U.S. president. I do not know who will be the next Ukrainian president. But I knew who would become the next Russian president," Dr. Brzezinski stated during a press conference on May 15.

On his last day in Kyiv, Dr. Brzezinski visited Bykivnia Forest, located on the outskirts of Kyiv, to take part in an annual commemoration for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian intellectual and cultural leaders who were slaughtered during Stalin's reign of terror in 1937-1938. An official U.S. delegation headed by Ambassador John Herbst was there for a memorial service and to lay a commemorative wreath at the site, which continues to be vandalized and still does not have an appropriate monument erected to the memory of the victims.

Dr. Brzezinski told the few hundred gathered in Bykivnia that he had thought he knew much about the crimes of communism, inasmuch as he had done his doctoral thesis on the work of the early Soviet secret police, but that he was taken aback by the horror of Bykivnia.

"Bykivnia has left a far deeper impression than all that I had heard beforehand," commented Dr. Brzezinski. "I am taken by the spirit of the members of the [Vasyl Stus] Memorial Society (which has fought to make the forest a national memorial complex). I believe that children and young people should travel here on an annual pilgrimage."

Dr. Brzezinski's visit to Kyiv came from an invitation from National Deputy Viktor Pinchuk and his industrial concern, Interpipe. Mr. Pinchuk, considered one of Ukraine's ruling business "oligarchs," and the richest man in the country, recently became a member of the international organization the Council on Foreign Affairs and sits on its Emergency Commission. Last month international philanthropist and financier George Soros was in Kyiv on Mr. Pinchuk's invitation.

On May 20-21 ex-U.S. President George Bush, the father of the current president, was scheduled to be in Kyiv on a private visit to meet with President Kuchma and give a lecture at Kyiv State University. Mr. Pinchuk, who extended the invitation to Mr. Bush, is President Kuchma's son-in-law.

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