Dialog of New Coordinates

On June 23-24 Odesa is hosting the Sixth Ukrainian-Polish Business Forum with Presidents Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine and Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland in attendance. The business elite of both countries are beginning a dialog on cooperation under new conditions: next May Poland will become a full member of the European Union with all the consequences flowing from it (not necessarily negative). Their next summit meeting is scheduled for July 11 in Volyn, in observance of the sixtieth anniversary of the tragic Volyn events, which have received broad publicity in both countries and seemed to threaten the Ukrainian-Polish partnership in general. The issue, complicated in itself, of commemorating the victims became politicized, not least due to the policy the Polish side has tried to implement. Finding a mutually acceptable form for marking the sad anniversary became one more problem in the Ukrainian-Polish relationship. The EU border safety requirements for its new members lead inevitably to the implementation of a visa regime, which affects Ukraine’s interests.

This problem will be a subject for the presidents to discuss in Odesa. It is expected that an international agreement on the border- crossing procedure will be signed there. The problems of Polish attitudes toward Ukrainians and of Ukrainian migrant workers, unemployed in their native land and trying to make some money in Poland, are far from remote. From time to time one gains the impression that the state bodies of the two countries thus far have failed to find the time to solve, say, the employment problems by defining certain quotas, possibilities, rights and duties of the parties in accordance with the EU legal regulations. Recently a new subject has been added to the traditional complex of Ukrainian-Polish issues, joint responsibility for international security.

Representatives of both Kyiv and Warsaw use grandiloquent phrases to characterize the future service of a Ukrainian brigade under Polish command in Iraq. Another relatively new issue is the prospects for the participation in the projects for alternative energy supply routes to the European market which, seemingly, has finally begun to move forward despite all Ukrainian, Russian, and international nuances.

Thus, both presidents and their nations have something to solve. Relations between neighbors are never simple. Now one of the partners is undergoing qualitative change, thereby changing qualitatively a relationship still influenced by historical stereotypes, as well as contemporary challenges and simply pragmatic calculations. Ukraine and Poland can impart a strategic character to their bilateral relations and increase their meaning for the system of international relations that is beginning to be built, but both sides have to work on this persistently and on a daily basis.