Foreign Affairs

In 1654 Khmelnytsky and Russian boyar Fedor Buturlin concluded, on behalf of Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, a treaty on Russia's military aid to Ukraine against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This in fact launched the Russian Empire that would be formerly proclaimed almost seven decades later by Peter I, despite attempts by the Cossack officer corps to preserve the autonomy the treaty stipulated. Now, too, it is quite possible that the comprehensive treaty between Ukraine and Russia, signed in Kyiv in 1997 after five years of negotiation and indispensable to their relationship, could end up in something entirely different from what was thought.

Moscow is already openly demanding from Kyiv, as payment for ratification, broader involvement in "integration processes," admission to the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, signing the CIS Charter, or even joining the Russo-Belarusian union which envisions the creation of a single state. If we go by what is being said not only by deputies in both houses of Russia's Parliament but also by certain presidential advisers and diplomats, this is the only condition for solving the Sevastopol problem which in fact slows down ratification of the treaty by the Council of Federation.

"The Treaty of Pereyaslav was a historic landmark that determined our further actions at the time. What we have now is a new stage and, accordingly, a new choice. Our main strategic vector is different," Director of the Institute of
Ukrainian-Russian Relations Serhiy Pyrozhkov told The Day.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian-Russian relations are full of too many ideological factors which preclude a purely rational look at the problem.

"Bohdan Khmelnytsky's greatest achievement was that he persuaded Ukraine of the need to sign the Pereyaslav pact," confidently states Communist Party of Ukraine's Volodymyr Moiseyenko, "The comprehensive treaty on Ukraine's cooperation with Russia is, of course, a much more superficial document, for it draws a borderline between fraternal peoples, while the Treaty of Pereyaslav abolished that border. I am deeply convinced that our nations will unite. We are today on the eve of concluding renewed union treaties."

The Rukh's Ivan Zayets expresses a diametrically opposed view of the relations between the two countries and of the Pereyaslav Council: "Ukraine is an independent state. We must proceed from the idea that there was no council as such, for there are no documents. We cannot build our ideology on myths sown among us by the northern capital. We must take care of ourselves, we must return to our roots, for we have had our soul taken out of us and sold to Satan for the past 300 years."

However, the problems of Ukrainian-Russian relations lie in the rational and economic, rather than ideological or historical, plane. In Russia itself, there are sober voices warning against too rapid "integration processes," for example, with Belarus. These processes, apparently too onerous for Russia itself, do not seem to have yielded the desired effect in Belarus, either. And we can hardly hope that, once we become part of Russia, its enterprises (e.g., Gazprom) will write off our debts. For this reason we have to rely on our own forces. As for those who want to join Russia at any price or those who blame "Moscow's hand" for every manner of misfortune, they only try to hide own their ineffectuality and pass the buck.

By Viktor ZAMYATIN, The Day