Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said that President Viktor Yanukovych has yet to show whether his administration will put national interests first – or whether the business interests of Yanukovych’s powerful backers will triumph.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said that President Viktor Yanukovych has yet to show whether his administration will put national interests first – or whether the business interests of Yanukovych’s powerful backers will triumph.
Pifer, America’s representative in Kyiv from 1997-2000, said Ukraine watchers are still “waiting to see how that is going to play out.” His comments came ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Kyiv on July 2, her first visit to Ukraine since U.S. President Barack Obama took power.
While Yanukovych is “an efficient person at getting things done,” Pifer said, the jury is still out on whether the decisiveness and action will yield “good policies or bad policies.”
“[Acting in the national interest] may require sacrificing the interests of people around the leadership who are corrupt or may suffer if they face more competition.”
– Steven Pifer, Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
By acting in the national interest, Pifer said the Ukrainian president will have to decide whether his administration will create a climate that is open to investors, predictable, reduces corruption and strongly follows the rule of law. Ukraine has been anything but that kind of place for most of its 19 years as an independent nation.
“I am not sure they have to solve every crime in the past,” Pifer said. “This goes to the motivations of those who are running the country. [Acting in the national interest] may require sacrificing the interests of people around the leadership who are corrupt or may suffer if they face more competition” in the economy.
Without naming names, Pifer expressed doubts about whether some on Yanukovych’s leadership team are capable of or interested in the reforms that would strengthen a free-market, rule-of-law-based democracy. He did, however, single out Deputy Prime Minister Sergiy Tigipko as a bright spot in the administration’s lineup. “Certainly Sergiy Tigipko knows how to do it [reform],” Pifer said. “He certainly wants to do it.”
One such market reform would be to end the subsidies on the price that Ukrainian households pay for natural gas. While such a step would be politically unpopular, Pifer said, it would benefit the nation in the long run if the higher prices promote increased domestic production of natural gas – thereby reducing heavy reliance on Russian imports – and if they curbed wasteful energy consumption. The best time for an administration to make such tough policy decisions, he said, is now – early in Yanukovych’s term, so that the president can show the benefits of the policy before the next election.
Pifer said that it is “partly true” that “Ukraine is still making up its mind” about its foreign policy direction, although the majority of Ukrainians seem to agree on the direction they want the nation to take. Most Ukrainians polled are pro-European Union, Pifer said, while they are opposed to joining the NATO military alliance. “Most Ukrainians don’t want to rejoin Russia, but they don’t want to have bad relations with Russia,” Pifer said.
The former ambassador, now a senior foreign policy fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said he doesn’t agree with sentiment that improved U.S. relations with Russia means that U.S. relations with Ukraine will suffer. Yanukovych’s strong and quick tilt to Russia is “not the course I would choose or Washington would choose, but it seems to have the support of the elite and the public; so the [Obama] administration has to figure out a way to work with that. I have tried to push back when people say Yanukovych is a pro-Russian politician. He pursues policies that Moscow would appreciate.”
But Pifer thinks that Yanukovych has Ukraine’s national interests foremost in mind, although the priorities of some of the president’s leadership team are “hard to sort out.”
“If Ukraine remains a democratic state, I am comfortable it will come out right in the end,” Pifer said. “People in power in Ukraine understand the Western angle gives them balance, vis-a-vis Moscow,” unlike Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, “who doesn’t have Western connections,” Pifer said.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]
