345 years ago in the Treaty of Pereyaslav Cossack Hetman Bohdan
Khmelnytsky recognized the suzerainty of the Muscovite Tsar. A new version
of this, Ukraine's joining the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly and Russo-Belarusian
Union, is also quite possible today. Without this, ratification of the
Ukrainian-Russian Friendship Treaty is being held up, said Yegor Stroyev,
Speaker of Russia's Council of the Federation. This is also being ever
more vociferously pursued by the Ukrainian Left.
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






