Yanukovych has moved with amazing dispatch in foreign policy, especially in mending fences with Moscow—one of his key campaign promises. (In the first round of presidential voting on Jan. 17, some 80 percent of the electorate supported candidates who called for improved relations with Moscow.) He promised sweeping change, and he has delivered.

During the campaign, Yanukovych promised to suspend Ukraine’s application for NATO membership. On taking office, he lost little time in notifying the world that Kyiv is officially non-aligned. That’s fine, but the president should seek a constitutional amendment enshrining non-aligned status, the better to impede a future administration from reviving the ill-advised NATO gambit. Thus, in the category of “Ukraine’s non-aligned status,” we have given Yanukovych a strong, but less-than-perfect score of 4-out-of-5.

The president scores a perfect 5-out-of-5 in the category of “renewal of friendly and mutually beneficial relations with Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.” He has acted to assuage Moscow’s (legitimate) fear of strategic encirclement by taking NATO membership off the table, endorsed Moscow’s call for a new European security treaty, and renewed Russia’s lease on its Black Sea naval base in exchange for reduced charges for Russian gas — earning Ukraine a financial windfall. Like them or not, these steps have fulfilled Yanukovych’s campaign pledge to improve relations with Moscow, and to do so in a manner beneficial to both Ukraine and Russia.

Supporters of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych guard parliament, forming a barrier to keep opposition forces away from the Verkhovna Rada entrance, on May 11. Some 2,000 protesters led by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko were also kept in check by police. The tension came after an April 27 session of parliament in which lawmakers in Kyiv engaged in fistfights, threw eggs at each other and lit smoke bombs. (Peter Byrne)

Closely related to this issue is the status of the Russian language in Ukraine. Yanukovych promised to elevate Russian to the status of Ukraine’s second official language, and yet, since his election, has declared that Ukrainian will remain the only official language of state. His backsliding on this matter has been ameliorated somewhat by moves to curtail the mandatory dubbing of Russian-language films in Ukrainian, and expand the use of Russian in schools.

The fact is, virtually 100 percent of the population speaks native or virtually native Russian (and Kyiv, of course, is a Russian-speaking city), whereas a significant portion of the population has next to no Ukrainian or none at all. Although only 5.5 percent of the population of Finland speaks Swedish, it has co-equal legal status with Finnish. Surely a similar arrangement would make sense in Ukraine. For now, we give the president the barely passing grade of 3-out-of-5.
On relations with the United States, we have given Yanukovych a 5-out-of-5. Vilified by the U.S. media since 2004, he occupied center stage at the April nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C. His offer to swap Ukraine’s stockpile of enriched uranium for non-weapons-grade materials pleased a White House eager for good foreign policy news after many months of corrosive debates on domestic issues.

And Yanukovych did not come away empty-handed: he won a U.S. expression of support for International Monetary Fund assistance to Ukraine.

That’s all well and good, but, over time, Yanukovych will have his hands full with the United States. U.S. President Barack Obama may seek to reset relations with Moscow and abhor the in-your-face foreign policy style of predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Jr., but the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy elite remains enamored with strategic dominance or benevolent global hegemony or empire, or what you will.

Yanukovych has given impetus to a new European rapprochement involving Berlin, Paris, Kyiv and Moscow, an incipient concert of the main powers that may yet include Warsaw.

It is based on this calculus: The key to Ukraine’s European interest is Moscow (as Europe will never embrace Ukraine as long as it is at loggerheads with Russia); the key to Moscow’s concern to prevent strategic encirclement is Ukraine; and the key to Europe’s desire for energy security is Russo-Ukrainian rapprochement.

This is a potentially powerful political and diplomatic combination made possible, let’s face it, by Yanukovych’s election. It is vastly in Ukraine’s interest.

But the U.S. foreign policy elite have other criteria. Writing in Foreign Affairs while still U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice expressed the mindset of much of this elite: “We prefer preponderances of power that favor our values over balances of power that do not. We have dealt with the world as it is, but we have never accepted that we are powerless to change to world.”

In other words, we are out to remake the world—if we can get away with it. We aim to secularize Islam, prevent the climate from changing, extirpate evil, redesign global politics to our liking, and whatever else comes into our head.
How to square Washington’s hubris with an emerging European concert very much in Ukraine’s interest is Yanukovych’s challenge for the balance of his term of office. If he sticks to his guns, Washington may well come to appreciate that a balance of power is preferable to a preponderance of power, which can only be achieved at vast cost to the U.S. Treasury, to our reputation abroad, and to the constitutional foundation of our republic.

Yanukovych’s other great challenge—his greatest really—is the economy and the fight against corruption, which we will address in our next report.

But for the time being, Yanukovych is off to a good start.

Anthony T. Salvia is executive director of the Kyiv-based American Institute in Ukraine. Previously he served as an appointee of President Ronald Reagan to the US Department of State and at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Moscow. He can be reached at [email protected]. The organization’s website iswww.aminuk.org.