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What Alliance Will Make You Happy, Ukraine? 

22 December, 00:00

There have been repeated attempts to arrange an alliance among Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. At first Boris Yeltsin would not even hear of an agreement with Ukraine unless it acceded to the CIS Customs Union (including, apart from Russia and Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). Afterward, Aleksandr Lukashenka came up with a series of statements, stressing that the Russian-Belarusian alliance would not work without Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian people had long been actually in favor of such union. And then Russian Speaker Gennadi Seleznev visited Ukraine and spoke in the same vein. This time Ukraine is playing host to his second-in-command Sergei Baburin, another champion of imperial revival and a Russian politician who refuses to recognize the Commonwealth of Independent States.

He and others like him argue for reviving an East Slavic version of the USSR or Russian Empire by maintaining the crisis cannot be overcome and encroachments from the external enemy be withstood without combining the efforts of the fraternal peoples. This sounds about as convincing as a news story giving the actual size of the Loch Ness monster or how aliens are portrayed in sci-fi. Moscow has always started by "gathering the lands" around it, while the United States or Europe (the latter's adoption of the euro is graphic evidence of its deep-going unifying trend) have adhered to somewhat different principles. Be it as it may, quite a few Ukrainian politicians seem prepared to start playing purely Russian games, which makes one wonder.

If someone is being insistently invited to join an alliance, there must be something deeply wrong with it. No one has ever heard of the European Union or NATO using such a tactic. At any rate, in Ukraine no one objects to the motto "Forward to Europe" - not the government and not even its opponents - yet no one is inviting Ukraine to join the European Union. In fact, no one has ever hinted that her presence would be welcome there. Austrian Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schuessel made a fleeting remark at the last EU summit in Vienna that the Union will "reduce" its relations with Croatia, Bosnia, and Ukraine to partnership agreements. Well, we are what we are, with our Lazarenko scandal threatening to grow into something even bigger, with everything going down - production, trade, people's confidence in the political leadership, and hopes for a better future. Nothing can be accomplished in Ukraine without a stern overseer. Perhaps if we continue in this manner someone will eventually use us to forward his own imperial or other plans.

Newspaper output №:

№46, (1998)

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Day After Day