Wednesday afternoon Ukraine received two painful blows to
its foreign policy. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg
gave Kyiv a good dressing-down worthy of a stern teacher to a lazy schoolboy.
The Ukrainian delegation's powers were only renewed conditionally until
the next session in June. At precisely the same time the Russian Parliament's
upper house, the Council of Federation, refused to ratify the Grand Russo-Ukrainian
Treaty and deferred this issue for a month.
Leonid Kuchma said recently, "Where I am not hampered, where I am responsible
as President, there is progress." And he took foreign policy as an example.
The most recent events call this statement into question. The concept of
"multidirectionalism in foreign policy" in reality boils down to a complete
lack of any strategy and uncertainty as to what we really want and what
kind of state we are building.
The threat of Ukraine finding itself in a so-called gray zone is becoming
more and more real. Neither Moscow, nor Washington, nor Brussels fully
consider Kyiv truly one of their own. This was all too vividly demonstrated
last week as Russian Senators deferred friendship with Ukraine, referring
primarily to Kyiv's excessively pro-Western policies. On the other hand,
the words of Canadian Prime Minister Jean ChrОtien, who visited Kyiv last
week and represented, to an extent, the common opinion of the Western community,
showed, under the guise of diplomatic compliments, the West's utter disappointment
over the state of affairs in Ukraine.
A few years ago Mr. Kuchma, then Prime Minister, appealed to the Solons:
"Just tell me what kind of state to build, and I'll build it." Now the
head of state and guarantor of the Constitution ought to know the answer
to this question.
But all of us seem to have to wait for the answer until the October
presidential election. Yet, if somebody thinks we are being too strict
with the President, let them read attentively Mr. Kuchma's reaction to
the deferred ratification of the Ukrainian-Russian treaty. This fact caused
in our head of state a "feeling of disappointment and uncertainty in tomorrow."






