An An-30B surveillance plane with a group of Ukrainian People's Deputies
onboard flew several missions over Germany in late November under the multilateral
Open Skies Treaty. It remains to be ratified by the Ukrainian, Belarusian,
and Russian Parliaments, so missions like this one are carried out on an
ad hoc basis.
The Open Skies Treaty offers Ukraine an undeniable advantage and this
was unanimously acknowledged by officials of the Bundeswehr Verification
Center, German diplomats, Ukrainian military, diplomats, and Solons (Communists
included). Basically this advantage consists in the fact that the treaty
provides free and legitimate access to data relating to the performance
of clauses on conventional arms reductions in Europe, observance of their
nuclear-free status by non-nuclear countries, etc., without using spy satellites.
Bundeswehr officials pointed out that a surveillance plane costs 200 times
less than the manufacture, equipment, and orbiting of a single satellite.
The treaty stipulates that different countries may exchange information
received from their surveillance missions, in which case the expenses involved
will boil down to the cost of film. Such surveillance missions may help
combat natural disasters (as was the case with the flooding Oder in Poland
and Germany, and as could have been the case in Transcarpathia).
According to Dr. Hartmann, German government plenipotentiary for disarmament
and disarmament control, the Open Skies Treaty is probably the most important
component of the general system of confidence building in Europe. One German
diplomat pointed out that open skies should be logically followed by open
land.
Mykola Mychko, Deputy Chairman of Parliament's National Security and
Defense Committee, along with his Communist colleagues Valery Shtepa and
Volodymyr Symonov admitted to The Day's reporter that the Treaty
does not harm Ukraine's national security; on the contrary, delaying its
ratification in Verkhovna Rada will result in Ukraine's isolation, denying
it the possibility to receive information at token cost. Not so long ago,
parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee Chairman Heorhy Kriuchkov
spoke for ratification of the Open Skies Treaty.







