ANALYSIS: U.S.-Ukraine relations: revitalization possible only after Kuchma retires (03/30/03)

ANALYSIS

U.S.-Ukraine relations: revitalization possible only after Kuchma retires

by Taras Kuzio

Since Ukraine became an independent state in December 1991, U.S.-Ukraine relations have undergone many changes, one reason being that U.S.-Ukraine relations cannot be treated in isolation from U.S.-Russia relations. In the post-Soviet era when U.S.-Russia relations were poor (1995-1999) U.S.-Ukraine relations were good. Conversely, when U.S.-Russia relations were good (1992-1994, since 2001) U.S.-Ukraine relations were poor. Washington's current disappointment in Ukraine, therefore, is little different to that of the early 1990s under President Leonid Kravchuk when the United States also placed priority on relations with Russia in the CIS.

There is little basis for poor U.S.-Ukraine relations at the popular level. Ukrainians do not hold great power ambitions like Russians and do not see their country in competition with the United States. Russians also inherited the Soviet-era superpower hostility to the United States.

A worldwide survey by the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project last year found that of the six post-Communist states surveyed, Ukrainians had the most favorable opinion of the United States (80 percent), with Poland coming in at second (79 percent). A December 2002 poll by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology (KIIS) found that 61 percent held positive attitudes toward the U.S., a figure still high but lower than the Pew poll. The KIIS poll showed that in the decade between 1992 and 2002 there had been a decline of 20 percent from the 81 percent positive view of the U.S. in 1992.

These positive views of the United States have not prevented a deterioration in U.S.-Ukraine relations in Ukraine because foreign policy is developed by its elites with no public input. A recent Razumkov poll cited in the March 8-14 edition of Zerkalo Nedeli found that 83.7 percent of Ukrainians feel they have no influence on the central government. The deterioration of relations, therefore, is to be laid at the feet of the Ukrainian elites and, to a lesser extent, the mishandling of this relationship by Washington.

Bilateral realtions in 1994-1999

During President Kuchma's first term (Kuchma 1), there was a coincidence of interests that elevated U.S.-Ukraine relations to what was then called a "strategic partnership" wherein Ukraine was described as the "linchpin" or the "keystone in the arch" of European security. U.S.-Ukraine relations improved in 1994-1996 because the U.S. saw a reformer elected (Kuchma), whose government program obtained support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Mr. Kuchma supported Ukraine's accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the country's de-nuclearization in 1994-1996. Ukraine supported NATO enlargement and became the most active CIS member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP). By the late 1990s Ukraine had the United Kingdom's largest bilateral military cooperation agreement and one of the largest military programs with the U.S. Ukraine also backed the creation of a pro-NATO and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regional group in the CIS, the GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova) alliance.

During this same period U.S. relations with Russia deteriorated. Russia stridently opposed NATO enlargement and was disinterested in cooperation within the PfP. Russia completely halted cooperation with NATO after its intervention in Serbia in the spring of 1999. The U.S. opposed Russia's neo-imperial intervention in the CIS and supported Ukraine as a buffer between central Europe, into which NATO was enlarging, and Russia. Ukraine was rewarded by becoming the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt.

Bilateral relations in 1999-2004

The United States under President Bill Clinton ignored many of the signs of the dangerous trends evident in Ukraine in the late 1990s. By any stretch of the imagination, the government of Valerii Pustovoitenko (1997-1999) could not be labelled "reformist." The entry of former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko in 1999 into the U.S. brought into the open the growing international recognition of the high levels of corruption in Ukraine.

This phenomenon was accentuated by many further details revealed by the Kuchmagate tapes made in 1999-2000 by Mykola Melnychenko. In 1999 the Western think tank Transparency International began placing Ukraine alongside countries such as Nigeria in its annual rankings of corruption.

The general state of democratization in Ukraine also began coming under scrutiny, non-governmental organizations and Ukraine began receiving a litany of bad reports from Western (Freedom House, Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch), international (Council of Europe, European Union) and government entities (U.S. State Department). The question of media freedom had already damaged Ukraine's reputation even before the murder of opposition journalist Heorhii Gongadze in the fall of 2000. Since then, the Gongadze issue has become a symbol of the lack of media freedom for Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations.

Yushchenko: a glimmer of hope

These negative trends in the late Clinton era were still sidelined by the U.S. In December 1999, a month after President Kuchma was re-elected as the savior of Ukraine from communism, Ukraine's only truly reformist government under Viktor Yushchenko began working.

The Yushchenko government (1999-2001) worked under difficult conditions. Its ability to maneuver became impossible within Ukraine's Byzantine political system after the Kuchmagate crisis arose only a year after it began working in November 2000. The government's parliamentary support rested on Ukraine's first attempt at creating in the Verkhovna Rada a non-left majority from pro-presidential centrists and center-right reformers. The Kuchmagate crisis destroyed this unity then, and since then.

These divisions between centrists and national democrats, coupled with the growth of opposition from pro-presidential centrists towards Mr. Yushchenko's reforms led to the removal of the government on the 15th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear accident in April 2001. According to a study since then by a former Ukrainian government adviser, Anders Aslund at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, until the Yushchenko government began working, Ukrainian oligarchs made a net income of $2 billion a year on gas trade. Mr. Aslund calculated that the total funds earned from insider energy trading due to good links to the state were in the range of $4 billion, or 13 percent of Ukraine's GDP. Little wonder they became hostile to Mr. Yushchenko.

U.S.-Ukraine-Russia relations after 9/11

The removal of the Yushchenko government followed the replacement seven months earlier of Borys Tarasyuk as Foreign Minister. With Messrs. Tarasyuk and Yushchenko gone for the first time since 1992 Ukraine no longer had pro-Western figures within the government or presidential administration.

This removal of pro-Western influence in 2000-2001 coincided with the Kuchmagate crisis. These events in and of themselves helped deteriorate Ukraine's relations with the United States. They reinforced a trend which had already been evident of a re-orientation of Ukraine's multi-vector foreign policy from West to East between President Kuchma's first and second term.

Under Kuchma 2 both the executive and his centrist allies felt increasingly more comfortable in the CIS where their non-transparent and corrupt business practices and authoritarian tendencies were never criticized but instead were accepted. By Kuchma 2, Ukraine's oligarchs also felt financially secure and in a strong enough position to deal with Russia's oligarchs - something that had not been the case in the 1990s. Russian investment began to be welcomed into Ukraine, unlike in the 1990s, when it was discouraged.

If these trends were not bad enough, the election of George W. Bush and the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States signalled a change in U.S. views of Ukraine's strategic importance in comparison to the second half of the 1990s. The U.S.-Russia strategic relationship of the early 1990s was revived, and Ukraine became less significant to the United States. Dmytro Tabachnyk, the first head of Mr. Kuchma's presidential administration in 1994-1996 and currently a vice prime minister, began to warn that Ukraine would re-orient itself towards Russia, a warning made continuously in the 1990s to obtain U.S. attention. Mr. Bush refused to follow Mr. Clinton's lead of annual presidential summits until the Gongadze affair was resolved. These summits, however, may have ended even without the Gongadze affair.

In contrast to his refusal to meet with President Kuchma, President Bush held a meeting with Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin in December 2002. Mr. Voronin is head of the Moldovan Communist Party, and is re-orienting his country towards Russia. Arguably, Moldova is neither a "keystone" nor a "lynchpin" of European security.

Post-Kolchuha relations

The U.S. has not always played its cards right on Ukraine. In April 2001 the U.S. undercut support for the opposition by agreeing to Mr. Melnychenko's asylum in the same month as the parliamentary vote on Mr. Yushchenko's government. In addition, the U.S. publicly released details of the decision by President Kuchma to sell Kolchuhas to Iraq just after opposition protests in September 2002.

Ukrainian authorities reluctantly admitted that the July 2000 meeting where the Kolchuha authorization was given had indeed taken place. This is bad enough in and of itself. At the same time, the U.S. has also admitted that it still has no proof that the Kolchuhas were dispatched to Iraq.

The Kolchuha affair was handled publicly because of the dire strait of U.S.-Ukraine relations and the U.S. obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. If relations had been good, this problem would have been handled behind closed doors. After the November summit of NATO, which Mr. Kuchma was encouraged not to attend but did so anyway, the U.S. began sending out signals that it wishes to improve relations. The Kolchuha question was "put in a box," at least for the time being.

Will U.S.-Ukraine relations now improve? One factor working in their favor is the likely collapse of the U.S.-Russia partnership created after 9/11 because of Russia's backing of France against military action in Iraq. The U.S. is seeking allies wherever it can find them, and most of its new allies are in Central-Eastern Europe. Ukraine could find a niche for itself here; hence it is sending the anti-chemical warfare and clean-up battalion to Iraq.

On the other hand, Ukraine's leaders fail to understand that the very fact that President Kuchma authorized the sale of Kolchuhas only three months after President Clinton met with him in Kyiv is sufficient in and of itself to sow complete and continuing U.S. mistrust in Mr. Kuchma. The January visit of the Ukrainian government to Washington failed to obtain the same high level of meetings as Mr. Yushchenko had the following month.

The United States outlined what is required to improve relations with Ukraine in four key speeches by U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (April 2002), European University (December 2002) and at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in January. The following month Steven Pifer, deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs at the U.S. State Department and former Ambassador to Ukraine, also spoke at the CSIS. What is required to improve U.S.-Ukraine relations, therefore, is not a secret.

Kyiv will find it impossible to fulfill these U.S. recommendations to Ukraine until the post-Kuchma era after the fall of 2004. Mr. Kuchma's priority is searching for ways to obtain immunity from prosecution after he steps down - not fulfilling U.S. conditions for improving relations. Mr. Kuchma's fate is also closely tied to the political culture of his centrist allies, which cannot change while he remains in power. Both of these factors mean that, while there may be small tactical improvements in relations, a full blown revival will have to await President Kuchma's retirement.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto. His latest book is a volume co-edited with Paul D'Anieri titled "Ukrainian Foreign and Security Policy" (Praeger, 2002).

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