ANALYSIS: The Russian Duma resolution and Yeltsin's postponed Kyiv visit

by Markian Bilynskyj

The first meeting of the joint Ukrainian-Russian Cooperation Committee, formed in February, took place in Moscow on March 20 against the background of the Russian Duma's recent denunciation of the December 1991 agreement that replaced the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

During a joint press conference following the meeting, the committee co-chairmen, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk and his Russian counterpart, Viktor Chernomyrdin, made light of the Duma's action, claiming that the two governments had their own agenda regardless of what the Duma thought or did.

However, the Duma's action appears to have affected relations between Ukraine and Russia through its immediate impact on Russian foreign policy. Thus, President Boris Yeltsin's once confidently expected April 4 visit to Kyiv to sign the Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation was yet again postponed.

Over the past year or so, the two prime ministers have developed a relatively productive, pragmatic approach to common problems. They have managed fairly successfully to separate and shelter the economic dimension from the volatile political one. Lately, the principal agent of this volatility has been the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, himself.

In trying to salvage his credibility with an electorate displaying a growing nostalgia for empire (regardless, it seems, of its political hue), the Russian president has on several occasions threatened to link the complete normalization of relations with Ukraine - today Russia's principal foreign policy concern, in the words of Foreign Minister Yevgeniy Primakov - to concessions by Kyiv on the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) issue.

(More accurately, concession on the terms and condition under which Russia is to lease port facilities in Sevastopil. Last year the Duma declared Sevastopil a prefecture of Moscow with the heavy inference that a Ukrainian presence in the city was not welcome. This obviously casts a shadow on the dual-basing arrangement the two sides have seemingly agreed to and on which Ukraine is extremely unlikely to concede. The division of the fleet itself appears to be proceeding smoothly. On March 27, for example, the first ships were transferred to the Ukrainian navy ahead of schedule.)

Moreover, recent events have demonstrated a strong causal relationship between Mr. Yeltsin's blustering vacillation over Ukraine and the often bizarre foreign policy behavior of the Russian Duma - something of an irony given the Duma's minimal formal role in this policy area.

Despite the rhetoric, the essence of this latest confrontation between the Russian legislative and executive branches might in fact be little more than a case of the Yeltsin administration having been piqued that the president's principal election opponents had tried spectacularly to steal his thunder on the issue of closer ties with Russia's neighbors - an issue with widespread visceral appeal among the Russian electorate and one that has in fact been at the heart of President Yeltsin's foreign policy for approximately six months now.

The Kremlin certainly denounced the Duma resolution in the strongest possible terms. In practice, however, the reaction of the Yeltsin administration has been to turn the episode to the incumbent's advantage. In other words, President Yeltsin has tried to regain the initiative by proving to the Russian electorate that anything the Duma - or, more accurately, certain elements in the Duma - can think of doing in the area of foreign policy tomorrow, the Yeltsin administration can actually do better today.

The Kremlin launched a diplomatic blitz that has so far yielded impressive results. On March 9, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan signed an agreement intended to finally put some flesh on the badly emaciated frame of the CIS; while on April 2, Belarus and Russia signed a series of documents on an even tighter "voluntary" union. Tajikistan appears to be next in line.

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been something of a Godsend to those Russians who argue the possibility of voluntary integration, thus making the Belarusian case something of an anomaly. The other leaders probably felt that dealing with Mr. Yeltsin today would be easier than dealing with a post-election Russia - regardless of who wins. Indeed, making this clear has been one of the Kremlin's principal techniques for marketing President Yeltsin's vision of informal empire.

President Kuchma's support for Mr. Yeltsin's re-election bid, however, does not extend to having Ukraine join the integration bandwagon. Nor, to the Kremlin's frustration, is it likely to.

(Some Western commentators and political figures appear to have either failed to note the possibility that there might be less than meets the eye to the latest confrontation between the Russian president and Parliament, or have consciously downplayed developments so as not to be perceived to be damaging President Yeltsin's re-election chances. Thus, for example, while addressing foreign ministers from several Central and Eastern European countries in Prague on March 20, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher praised President Yeltsin for opposing the Duma resolution and added the curious - perhaps even remarkable given the audience and the evidence to the contrary - assertion that "He [President Yeltsin] and most Russians understand that Russia's interests lie in treating all its neighbors as equal, sovereign partners..." This Yeltsin-good, Duma-bad dichotomy - as well as its Ukrainian analogue - is as inaccurate as it is convenient.)

What kind of denouement does this latest turn of events in Russia suggest for the theater of the absurd that has developed around President Yeltsin's visit to Kyiv? At the March 20 press conference, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin declared that there were no insoluble problems between Russia and Ukraine. However, despite the Cooperation Committee's progress on some economic issues, the forum failed in its principal task: to resolve the outstanding BSF problems in time for President Yeltsin to visit Kyiv.

In the wake of this failure several additional steps were taken to try to reach agreement: a special "expert" committee was set up; the two prime ministers met again in Moscow on March 26; and the BSF was on the agenda when Ukrainian Defense Minister Valeriy Shmarov and his Russian counterpart, Pavel Grachev, met last week in western Ukraine. These efforts have so far been unproductive.

Early last week, as if buoyed by his latest diplomatic successes, President Yeltsin was quoted as saying that he would use his time in Kyiv to "clarify what was preventing Ukraine from participating in the process of tighter integration - something Ukraine, too, wants." On March 28, however, he declared on Russian television that he would not visit Kyiv unless the BSF issue was included in the treaty. This issue as well as the question of dual citizenship and the definition of the Russo-Ukrainian border were excluded from a copy of the treaty initialed in February 1995 by Deputy Prime Minister Marchuk and his Russian counterpart, Oleg Soskovets. Subsequently, President Yeltsin on several occasions approved of the approach.

(That Ukraine suggested such an arrangement seems, at first glance, rather curious. Any treaty on friendship and cooperation that failed to address the key obstacles to the normalization of relations with Russia would be little more than a parody of such a document. The Ukrainian willingness to risk such a trade-off might therefore indicate Kyiv's anxiousness - even desperation - to get the Russian president's signature on any document that even hints at the normalization of bilateral post-Soviet relations. The last such document was in fact signed in December 1990.)

Until late March, high level Ukrainian officials were still almost uniformly confident that President Yeltsin would travel to Kyiv as scheduled. On March 27, however, President Kuchma's press secretary announced that the Ukrainian side would not be surprised if President Yeltsin were to change the date of the visit.

However, there is still a slim chance that Mr. Yeltsin will show up - if not now then at least before the elections. There might be a point beyond which the by now routine postponements will threaten to become domestically counterproductive. Mr. Yeltsin's critics might, for example, try to claim that his conduct reveals an inability to handle relations with Russia's key neighbor, or that his inability to cajole Ukraine into a voluntary union betrays a lack of resolve. A visit would at least create a high-profile impression of a process moving in the right direction. Whether the benefits of such a trip would outweigh the risk of leaving Kyiv empty-handed and whether Ukrainians would agree to such a charade is another matter. The most, then, that Kyiv should perhaps expect for the foreseeable future is another (very likely fruitless) visit from Prime Minister Chernomyrdin.

Markian Bilynskyj is director of the Kyiv-based Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 14, 1996, No. 15, Vol. LXIV

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