With the election at the second attempt of Viktor Yushchenko, the majority of Ukrainians have got the leader they wanted. If the new president is wise, he will immediately reach out to the sizable minority of electors, most of them in the Russian-speaking regions, who wanted his rival Viktor Yanukovich as head of state.
As president-elect of all Ukraine, Yushchenko needs to address the concerns of all Ukrainians. Just as his supporters are fed up with corrupt and inefficient administrations that since independence have failed to make genuine economic reforms, so many of his opponents fear the devastating effect those reforms could have on the inefficient heavy industries which are concentrated in their areas.
Yushchenko has a hard and difficult path to tread that requires open and statesmanlike leadership. In this regard Yanukovich’s announcement when his defeat became clear, that he would mount a powerful political opposition to the new president is to be welcomed. Gone, it must be hoped, is further talk of the breakup of the Ukraine. Left to their own devices, the people of this large and potentially highly prosperous country, will probably manage very well.
The question is whether the outside world will give them this chance. Russia has legitimate and historic ties with the country, not the least of which is the presence of the Russian Navy’s principal Black Sea base at Sebastapol in the Crimea. Oil and gas exports, crucial to the Russian economy flow in pipelines across the Ukraine to Western Europe. Moscow may be mildly concerned at the EU’s signals that negotiations for Ukrainian membership of the union could begin soon. Nevertheless on balance they may see a long extension of its border with the EU as an opportunity.
What is definitely alarming the Kremlin, however, is the talk from Washington that the Ukraine could soon be considered for membership of NATO. No Russian, whatever his political colors can see anything but danger from having the old Cold War alliance park its tanks on another of its frontiers. Polish NATO accession was accepted only through gritted teeth. Putin may take only marginal comfort from the new Ukrainian leader’s announcement that he will pull his country’s troops out of Iraq after next month’s elections.
The Bush White House appears once again oblivious to the sensitivities and complexities of another far-flung part of the world. While there was no way in which the Americans might have understood the blunders they were about to make in Iraq, they can, if they would but reflect for a moment, understand how President Putin and the Russian top brass are currently feeling about the apparently “pro-Western” sea change that is about to take place in the Ukraine.
In 1959 , the corrupt US-puppet regime of Gen. Fulgencio Batista was overthrown in Cuba by the Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro. Washington’s reaction was to isolate the island with political and economic sanctions, attempt to overthrow the regime with Cuban exiles, assassinate Castro with poison and exploding cigars while protesting the need to protect its naval base on the tip of the island at Guantanamo Bay. When Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev tried to protect Cuba with nuclear missiles, President Kennedy took the world to the brink of atomic war. This is a single syllable lesson from history even President Bush ought to be able to understand. Washington and Moscow must both keep their hands off Ukraine.
