By Viktor ZAMYATIN, The Day
You can see with the naked eye that over the past two years the newspapers
and television have in fact been free of debates over the CIS and Ukraine's
place in this mind-boggling formation. Only the People's Deputies debate
and then only to resolve some essentially internal problems.
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.






