Ukraine is very often criticized – especially, it seems, in the Kyiv Post – for being indecisive about its foreign-policy orientation. By aligning itself neither with the East nor with the West, the argument goes, Ukraine effectively isolates itself.
Ukraine is on a road to nowhere, that much is obvious. But Ukraine's lack of a clear orientation in its foreign policy is not the problem.
Now that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have joined NATO, the issue of when the next round of expansion will be and whom it will include is bound to intensify. Russia's politicians, hoping to impress the nationalist electorate and distract public attention from Russia's inability to hold its military positions in the Caucasus and Central Asia, have competed with each other to appear the toughest on NATO expansion. In the recent debate in Russia over whether to recognize Ukraine's sovereignty over Crimea, both sides stressed that their ultimate goal was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Meanwhile, Russia's government grows weaker, its economy more sickly, its people more desperate and its hate-mongering populists more powerful year by year.
This is a time for Ukraine to clearly and insistently assert its independence, but no time to ignore or disdain Russia. President Leonid Kuchma should not be criticized for his foreign-policy balancing act, which, while it was working, was one of his only successes. What he should be criticized for is undermining that success by failing in almost every other way.
The main cause of Ukraine's isolation is its corruption. Although that is largely an inheritance from the Soviet Union and the early post-Soviet era, Kuchma has aggravated the problem by fostering various corrupt power groups in order to play them off each other and thereby stay in control. He has done that by maintaining and even adding to Ukraine's maze of arbitrary rules and corrupt officials, which deters most investment but is a gold mine for the brokers who can guarantee safe passage through.
That system works very well on Russian gas and oil, and fairly well on imports of consumer goods and used cars. But word gets around, and those who can take an alternate route do. Ukraine's balanced foreign policy should have helped it attract investment into its proposed Caspian Sea oil-transit line; Ukraine's rapacious corruption has chased that potential investment away.
Now that NATO has enlarged, Poland is tightening its immigration controls along its eastern border, and there is a great deal of talk about the emergence of a 'new dividing line in Europe.' That dividing line runs, not coincidentally, along the former Soviet Union's western border, with one small gap: where Poland meets Lithuania. Lithuania tore down its old Soviet barbed-wire fences and eased its visa regime for visitors from Western countries. Ukraine, meanwhile, has maintained old restrictions while periodically introducing new ones.
Now Kuchma is up for re-election, and he is more dependent on the brokers than they are on him. Kuchma's foreign policy is increasingly concerned with courting and balancing ex-Soviet power groups, and long-term relations with Russia and Belarus are being risked for the sake of here-today, gone-tomorrow personal alliances. The cause of integrating with Europe, which is incompatible with Kuchma's ruling style anyway, has been relegated to the back burner.
Inviting Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to come to Kyiv during the NATO ceremony, and then standing silently by Lukashenko's side and declining to contradict him as he denounced NATO expansion, vividly illustrates both of those trends. Kuchma isn't catering to Lukashenko to impress eastern Ukrainians; he's catering to Lukashenko to court financial support for his campaign.
Poland's government has so far stood up for Ukraine and resisted pressure from the European Union to introduce visas on Ukrainians. But the Kuchma administration's preoccupation with erecting regulatory tollbooths at every possible trade junction is likely to alienate the Poles as well.
Although Poles can enter Ukraine without a visa, they are subject to the same foreigner-fleecing rules as the rest of us: visitors traveling by car can stay only 10 days without going through a complex vehicle-registration process; all visitors staying more than three days must register at the local Interior Ministry Department of Visas and Registration within 48 hours of entering Ukraine; and since last September, visitors often must show proof of valid health insurance to get registered. In a recent interview for Polish radio, a Polish deputy consul working in Kyiv said the various restrictions amount to a breaking of the Polish-Ukrainian visa-free travel agreement and complained that the Polish embassy's attempts to negotiate were being stonewalled.
Maintaining friendly ties to the East and West was a fine goal. Too bad no serious effort was made toward achieving it.
