Walter Mitty In Cossack Garb

Today's official Ukraine says it wishes the state quite a different, European, future, and its diplomacy seems slightly more successful than at the end of World War I. Even if the European Union does not take us seriously, fine, we'll wind up there anyway! But maybe we should start by creating the preconditions.

Let us take, for example, Baltic-Black Sea cooperation. The idea, nurtured in the heads of national democrats back in Soviet times and then drifting oblivion, is now being reborn, which is also testified to by the results of Foreign Minister Borys Tarasiuk's trip to Helsinki and Tallinn. The idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem, for it is no longer based solely on political considerations. If the practical-minded Estonians and Poles really invest, together with Azeris and Georgians, in the construction of the Odesa oil pipeline (the subject of recent talks in Warsaw and Tallinn), if the Finns are really interested in profits from a Black Sea transportation corridor to the Caucasus and Central Asia, then they will inevitably be joined by others as well. Oil and trade are sure to foster a more political than economic South-North axis where the North (Scandinavia and the Baltic states) is already treating the South (Ukraine) with sort of affection. Ukraine's central place in this case cannot but inspire Kyiv to lay serious claims to be reckoned with by not only Moscow.

James Thurber's timid Walter Mitty was always fantasizing himself a hero. Such Mittyish reveries obviously characterized Ukrainian diplomatic efforts while it was losing territory to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War as well as the claims laid by the post-Soviet Ukraine in the early 1990s. Much has already been written to the effect that diplomacy, even if performed by aces of the art, is not omnipotent, especially when the state faces the rampant corruption of its civil servants, reluctance of its leadership to keep its promises, and overall instability. Much has also been said about Ukraine's slowness to implement free-trade treaties, which does not contribute to others trusting it. This is simply how it is

Mr. Tarasiuk's Baltic junket simply shows that Ukraine has made some short-term decisions, and these decisions are not to the liking of many those in Russia, Belarus, and inside Ukraine itself who are trying to build a new USSR. For my part, I wish these decisions were backed by something concrete.