President Yushchenko: What about NATO?

By Taras Kuzio

President Victor Yushchenko is campaigning for a second term. In the 2010 elections, Yushchenko’s election program is interesting more for what it does not include than for what it includes.

Yushchenko’s 2010 program follows his 2004 program in both not mentioning NATO in any format. Yushchenko may have had to stay silent on NATO because of the close corrupt links of his family to Rosukrenergo which was introduced into Ukraine in the January 2006 gas deal signed by the only government that Yushchenko had good relations with headed by Yuriy Yekhanurov.

The sixth of nine main points in Yushchenko’s 2010 program states that his aim is Ukraine’s membership of the European Union (EU). This is good, but every presidential candidate supports EU membership except the candidate of the left and Communist Party leader Piotr Symonenko.

Yushchenko’s 2010 program supports the installation of a visa free regime with the EU; again this is a policy that nearly every Ukrainian politician supports. [His] re-election program ignores the more important free trade zone that Ukraine will sign with the EU in 2010. A free trade zone with the world’s largest economic trading bloc – the EU – became possible after the Yulia Tymoshenko government successfully negotiated Ukraine’s membership of the World Trade Organisation last year. 

If Yushchenko were to be re-elected for a second term, on what moral grounds could he devote his presidential time to NATO membership which was not in his election manifesto? Ukrainian voters would not have given him a mandate to promote Ukraine’s NATO membership. More importantly, on what moral grounds could a re-elected Yushchenko lobby NATO members such as Germany, France, Netherlands and Belgium who are the most skeptical about making Ukraine a NATO member?

In the section entitled “Ukraine will be strong” in Yushchenko’s 2010 re-election program there is nothing about Yushchenko’s foreign policy or his attitudes to NATO and the EU. His program indirectly refers to NATO in “Ukraine will be free” where point 7 states, “Together with our European neighbours we will build a Euro-Atlantic system of collective security”.

Yushchenko’s program is merely proposing the continuation of a deep level of cooperation between Ukraine and NATO that Kravchuk and Kuchma already instituted prior to 2004. The fact is that Yushchenko’s campaign for NATO membership during his first term in office was more virtual than real, as with all aspects of his policies. There has always been a big gulf between what he promises, says, and actually does (or does not).

Western European members of NATO have raised two objections to Ukraine’s membership of NATO. Firstly, low public support for membership and secondly, an end to perennial political crises.

Public support for Ukraine’s membership of NATO has not significantly increased during Yushchenko’s presidency. Four governments in five years have not permitted them to launch information campaigns on NATO or launch serious struggles against corruption (assuming the governments had wanted to adopt these two policies).

Yushchenko sought to undermine two Tymoshenko governments in 2005 and 2008 after first campaigning for Orange governments and supporting Tymoshenko for the position of prime minister. Ukraine’s best and most pro-NATO Defence Minister Anatoliy Grytsenko was not returned to this position in December 2007 because Yushchenko supported his Chief of Staff Viktor Baloga in his conflict with Grytsenko over Baloga’s corrupt schemes on Ministry of Defence land.

Political crises and ensuing instability have dominated Yushchenko’s entire presidency leading to Ukraine fatigue in Western Europe, mainly because of the poorly prepared constitution introduced in 2006 (that he agreed to in December 2004 at round tables) that produced executive-government conflicts and instability.

Ukraine had a unique opportunity to enter a Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Riga NATO summit in November 2006. But, what was more important for Yushchenko was to not let Tymoshenko return to the position of prime minister which led to negotiations by Yekhanurov for a grand coalition, the collapse of a hastily produced last minute Orange coalition, the defection of Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz and the return of Yanukovych to government. Prime Minister Yanukovych told NATO that Ukraine was not interested in a MAP. That was the end of Ukraine’s NATO membership drive following the optimistic predictions that flowed from the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko’s April 2005 visit to Washington.

Ukraine will never move closer to the goal of joining NATO under President Yushchenko as he does not understand the close correlation between domestic and foreign policies. Only a president willing to be honest to Ukrainian citizens during elections to campaign in support of Ukraine joining NATO can ever hope to take the momentous step of taking the country into NATO membership.

Taras Kuzio is a senior fellow in the chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto and editor of the bi-monthly Ukraine Analyst. He can be reached at tkuzio@rogers.com