19 Strategic Partners Is a Bit Much

Perhaps it was not merely by chance that President Leonid Kuchma’s statement about the necessity to revise the accents of Ukraine’s foreign policy that he made at the conference, Ukraine on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century, coincided in time with the appointment of Anatoly Zlenko as foreign minister. Zlenko in his first speech arranged priorities of the foreign policy as follows: European Union, Russia, and the USA. The same conclusion that the accents should be revised was put forth in a paper, “Strategic Partnership: Declarations and Reality,” by the Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Research. One can completely agree with the point that a country with a clearly defined foreign policy cannot have nineteen strategic partners, whose interests sometimes are diametrically opposed to each other. Incidentally, the USA has five strategic partners. Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Zlenko thinks, for example, that such a partnership should be based on the closeness of fundamental national interests. In an interview with The Daywhile still ambassador to France, he said partnership must provide for mutual understanding, mutual support and, depending on the situation, elaboration of a common position, but it cannot be a clich О established once and for all. In his opinion, relations with the USA, Russia, and Poland can claim to the level of strategic partnership. But, he adds, Ukraine cannot confine itself within the same limits. In the opinion of Ihor Ostash, head of the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ukrainian politicians are too often prey to using the notion strategic partnership like a magical incantation. In this context Ostash is convinced that we should also adopt a new basic concept of our security and new foundations of foreign policy, that Ukraine needs to actually become a strong state, and that is what the President called for. Incidentally, chief Kyiv representative of the Friedrich Ebert Fund Winfried Schneider-Dieters thinks that Russia’s decision to build natural gas pipelines bypassing Ukraine does not conform with the idea of partnership. According to the results of a public opinion poll, Ukrainians support as top priorities developing relations with Russia, USA, Germany, and Poland. The conclusions of the experts do not differ much: relations with other states, which Ukraine has declared strategic partners, are on a much lower level. The most unpleasant thing the experts conclude is that none of the countries mentioned, even Russia, considers Ukraine its strategic partner. For the time being, the talk more often is about strategic dependence.