Time will Tell

It is true that the weak are disliked, and very much so if they are always insisting on their exclusive importance and begging for money for no one knows what.

A neutral status would not be nonsense if Ukraine were a small state, fully integrated into European mechanisms, with neutrality as a boon for all sides, as is the case of Switzerland or Sweden (though its neutrality was not always intact).

The present neutral status of Ukraine is all the more nonsensical because its territory hosts naval bases of a foreign state which does not have the slightest desire to move them. In addition, Ukraine is in a position to control neither the quantity of armaments on its territory nor its supposedly sovereign Black Sea territorial waters. In the quite possible case that Moscow chooses to browbeat somebody with its naval aviation, Ukraine will automatically fall hostage to this action, and in the equally possible case that Russia decides to equip its Black Sea Fleet ships with nuclear weapons, Ukraine will automatically lose its nuclear-free status.

What guarantees and "special partnerships" are worth is evident from the example of Kosovo. The NATO operation against Yugoslavia seems to have been devised especially for Ukraine to announce from the highest rostrums that a joint defense space with Russia and, hence, a new standoff with the West, are necessary.

"Life will show where and with whom" sounds so philosophical and altogether out of context of the future elections. For our state's top leadership again seemed to assure us last week that it has no other option than the European one. But if this is so, if European security is indivisible, as Mr. Kuchma and his more or less Western colleagues would say, no questions should arise. But Ukrainian air defense is by no means integrated into the European system, and hardly anything will change here in the near future.

"Time will tell" might mean that there are some doubts, and nothing is irreversible. As, for example, the proclaimed course toward European integration, which is yet to start, with due account of at least the problems Ukraine faces vis-И-vis the Council of Europe.

Time could tell that it is far easier to return to something painfully familiar, known as "integration into the CIS," with the ensuing loss of our neutral and nonaligned status along with all hopes for any kind of being European.

I only wish today's life, included our foreign life, were more definite and certain.