Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has moved to halt a major a friendship treaty Ukraine has had with Russia for more than 20 years.
On Sept. 17, Poroshenko signed a decree of the country’s National Security and Defense Council to halt the effect of the “Agreement on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation” for 10 years, according to statement on the Presidential Administration’s website.
The idea of halting the agreement – more commonly known as the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty – was initially proposed by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry. A concrete document on suspending the treaty was worked out at a session of the National Security and Defense Council, which passed the decree on Sept. 6.
The friendship treaty was signed on May 31, 1997 in Kyiv by then Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin during the Russian leader’s first trip to Ukraine. The signing came at a time when NATO was looking to expand eastward, sparking concerns in Moscow.
“We respect and honor the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Yeltsin said at the signing, according to a contemporary report by the New York Times.
The statement was important. Only a few years earlier, Yury Meshkov, who served as the only president of the Republic of Crimea from 1994 to 1995, had attempted to drive the peninsula further into Russia’s orbit against the will of Kyiv.
Amongst other things, the friendship treaty declared “strategic partnership” one of the foundations of the two countries’ relations and stated that they “respect each other’s territorial integrity and confirm the inviolability of the borders existing in between them.”
It also stated that Moscow and Kyiv would build relations based upon sovereign equality and the peaceful resolution of conflicts, while rejecting the use of force, external interference, and economic pressure — plans that now appear impossibly rosy after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military intervention in the Donbas.
By Sept. 30, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry will send a note informing the Russian side of its intent to halt the treaty, according to the Presidential Administration statement. The president will also initiate a draft law on the matter in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
The Rada must also agree to halt the friendship treaty because it ratified the document 20 years ago, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Sept. 17 at the 7th Euro-Atlantic Forum in Kyiv, according to news website Evropeiska Pravda.
