By Viktor ZAMYATIN, The Day
"The status of Ukraine as a neutral state is nonsense," President Leonid
Kuchma said, "but this is a way to avoid an even more complicated situation."
And time will presumably tell "where and with whom to go." First, we have
to stand on our feet, for in this world nobody likes the weak.
It is true that the weak are disliked, and very much so if they are
always insisting on their exclusive importance and begging for money for
no one knows what.
A neutral status would not be nonsense if Ukraine were a small state,
fully integrated into European mechanisms, with neutrality as a boon for
all sides, as is the case of Switzerland or Sweden (though its neutrality
was not always intact).
The present neutral status of Ukraine is all the more nonsensical because
its territory hosts naval bases of a foreign state which does not have
the slightest desire to move them. In addition, Ukraine is in a position
to control neither the quantity of armaments on its territory nor its supposedly
sovereign Black Sea territorial waters. In the quite possible case that
Moscow chooses to browbeat somebody with its naval aviation, Ukraine will
automatically fall hostage to this action, and in the equally possible
case that Russia decides to equip its Black Sea Fleet ships with nuclear
weapons, Ukraine will automatically lose its nuclear-free status.
What guarantees and "special partnerships" are worth is evident from
the example of Kosovo. The NATO operation against Yugoslavia seems to have
been devised especially for Ukraine to announce from the highest rostrums
that a joint defense space with Russia and, hence, a new standoff with
the West, are necessary.
"Life will show where and with whom" sounds so philosophical and altogether
out of context of the future elections. For our state's top leadership
again seemed to assure us last week that it has no other option than the
European one. But if this is so, if European security is indivisible, as
Mr. Kuchma and his more or less Western colleagues would say, no questions
should arise. But Ukrainian air defense is by no means integrated into
the European system, and hardly anything will change here in the near future.
"Time will tell" might mean that there are some doubts, and nothing
is irreversible. As, for example, the proclaimed course toward European
integration, which is yet to start, with due account of at least the problems
Ukraine faces vis-И-vis the Council of Europe.
Time could tell that it is far easier to return to something painfully
familiar, known as "integration into the CIS," with the ensuing loss of
our neutral and nonaligned status along with all hopes for any kind of
being European.
I only wish today's life, included our foreign life, were more definite
and certain.






