What Would President Luzhkov do with Ukraine?

More than even an overwhelming majority of those who supported the grand treaty regarded it, at least in words, as a step toward the reunification of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The maximum program is to gather all in a united state, the minimum program is to attract Ukraine to the Russian-Belarusian alliance.

It only the awareness of Russia's limited economic, military, and foreign political resources that seems to make its politicians recognize Ukraine and provisionally at that. If and when the Russian Federation picks up at least a fraction of its erstwhile might, it will direct it first against Ukraine, fondly recalled as Little Russia. Any statute of limitations is out of the question here. The reunification question could come up in 10, 50 or even 100 years. It emerged in the mid-seventeenth century after four hundred years of a separate existence of the Rus's which, incidentally, were incomparably more different then than now, after 350 years of sharing a melting pot.

This question could well be put on the agenda in one form or another as soon as eighteen months, after presidential elections in Russia (or even sooner, in six months, after a similar event in Ukraine). Two of the five candidates most likely to win, Yuri Luzhkov and Aleksandr Lebed, opposed the treaty. At least one of them, Mr. Luzhkov, when in power, may opt to renounce the treaty or arm-twist the Constitutional Court into proclaiming it contradictory to the Russian Constitution. Naturally, Kyiv cannot ignore such a gloomy forecast and should construct its line of defense precisely now. To do so, it has to reinforce the Western vector of its foreign policy. However, any step of Ukraine, no matter how small, toward the US, Europe, and NATO will now be blown sky-high by Mr. Luzhov, as if it were something equivalent to a declaration of war on Russia. The Moscow mayor now needs any argument, even a specious one, to prove that his radically negative attitude to the grand treaty was correct: he said that its ratification would give Kyiv a green light to NATO. Thus, he needs to bring into play a monstrous propaganda machine to create the image of Ukraine as a state hostile to Russia. Mr. Luzhkov's anti-Ukrainian campaign will be urging Ukraine to take preventive measures in case he comes to power, and the Moscow mayor will be using every such step Kyiv makes to motivate a stricter approach toward Ukraine, thus closing a vicious circle.

This is quite easy for Mr. Luzhkov. What Russia considers a criterion of friendliness is constant kowtowing on the international arena and a unilateral hypertrophied foreign-policy orientation toward Moscow. From the viewpoint of the average Russian politician, everything outside this framework is already a sign of enmity. Even the all too frequent meetings of Leonid Kuchma with Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski provoke Moscow's jealousy!

However, there is a different scenario for Mr. Luzhkov's behavior concerning Ukraine. The Crimean battle he lost will allow President Luzhkov (of course, if he becomes one, which is by no means certain) to conduct a dialogue with Kyiv from square one, with reference to the fact that in February 1998 the Sevastopol page was turned over contrary to his mayoral wishes. He did all he could to make Sevastopol part of Russia, but the bus has left, and relations should be built with due account of this heavy loss. There are some grounds to suggest that Mr. Luzhkov is now worried about the Ukrainophobic traits in his own image, and he has admitted that during the soccer match between Real and Dynamo Kyiv he supported the latter as "our" team. However, the Russians are known to consider as their own all Ukrainians except for the "Polonized" Galicians.

It is now hard to say which of these two lines will prevail: there are too many things still vague, at least three of which are crucial - the October 1999 presidential elections in Ukraine, December 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia, and July 2000 presidential elections in Russia. Ahead lies fog. I wonder what we will see when the fog lifts.

Moscow correspondent of Kievskie Vedomosti, special to The Day