Washington Post - 04.02.2001

 

The Washington Post

Cold War Chills in Ukraine

By Jackson Diehl

Picture a country at a strategic crossroads where an unpopular and unpleasant ruler is besieged by his opposition. He wants American political support; in exchange, he promises to back U.S. strategic interests in his region. He threatens to turn to Moscow if he is spurned. The "realists" of the foreign-policy establishment want to back him, but it's not easy: After all, there's pretty good evidence tying him not just to large-scale corruption and electoral fraud but to murder.

It sounds like the kind of Cold War dilemma the United States used to face in what was called the Third World, but this is happening now, in Europe, in Ukraine -- the center of a region where a smaller, 21st-century version of the contest for influence between Washington and Moscow is quietly being played out. Ukraine is one of a half-dozen unstable countries between Poland and the Caspian Sea that are torn between the aspiration to join a prosperous and democratic Europe and the undertow of their history as former Soviet republics -- a pull recently reinforced by the rise of an ambitious Russian president.

You'd think their choice would be easy, but as Ukraine shows, it hasn't turned out that way. A decade after declaring independence, Ukraine -- a country the size of France with a population of 49 million -- still is desperately poor, its economy hamstrung by corruption and the monopolies of Russian-style oligarchs, its political system dominated by former Communist apparatchiks. Since last fall, President Leonid Kuchma, a former missile factory manager, has faced mounting criminal allegations, including tape recordings linking him to the murder of a journalist whose body was found beheaded.

As an opposition coalition has mounted unprecedented street demonstrations in the capital, Kiev, both sides have dispatched emissaries to Washington to plead for support from the Bush administration. Kuchma's foreign minister, Anatoliy Zlenko, was in town last week, and his message was blunt: Ukraine's regime, he volunteered, was inclined to believe that a one-superpower world led by the United States "has a lot of advantages" and was even sympathetic to the Bush administration's missile defense plans. "What weighs more," he appealed to an audience at the Heritage foundation. "America's national interest or confidence" in a government's democratic credentials?

Should America make the wrong choice, Ukrainian officials are quick to point out, an alternative is readily available. Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Ukraine last month and literally embraced Kuchma before offering a series of deals to tighten the economic and military bonds between Ukraine and Russia. "The big problem," says the Clinton administration's former ambassador to the region, Stephen Sestanovich, "is that you have got a president who is facing a murder rap and the Russians are prepared to hold their nose and offer him friendship."

Similar dilemmas are to be found across the region. In Georgia and Moldova, post-Communist governments have tried, and mostly failed, to build democracy, free markets and ties to NATO and the European Union; now, with Russia growing stronger, they are being tugged backward. Moldova, rejected by the European Union, recently restored to power a Communist Party that has proclaimed its intention to build a new union with Russia; Georgia recently gave in to incessant pressure from Moscow and renounced a plan to pursue integration with NATO. Despite Zlenko's overtures to the Bush administration, Kuchma complied with a Russian demand last fall that he fire his foreign minister, Boris Tarasyuk, the most prominent pro-Western politician in Ukraine.

Putin's aim is not to reestablish the Soviet Union but to draw such countries as Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and Azerbaijan back into a Russian sphere of influence -- a zone where a phone call from Moscow can cost the foreign minister his job or, as happened last month, cancel a regional summit meeting. Rather than extend the zone of European integration and Western influence, this band of countries could drift into a separate, Russian-led camp -- magnifying Moscow's leverage over both the EU and NATO.

Does the Bush administration care about all this? That it does is vividly demonstrated by the fact that Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has distanced himself from peace talks between the Arabs and Israelis, is hosting a summit meeting in Key West, Fla., this week for the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia, who hope to strike a peace deal. Azerbaijan's president, Heydar Aliyev, is a classic strongman who stifles opposition, steals elections, and is grooming a son to succeed him; but his country also has large oil and gas reserves and is prepared to allow the construction of a pipeline that would carry Caspian Sea energy to the West by a route that bypasses Russia.

Azerbaijan's beleaguered democrats don't get very far with either party in Washington. "On the merits we are on Aliyev's side and shouldn't be shy about it," says Sestanovich. Putin, after all, is also working Aliyev hard.

Ukraine offers a harder test. There is no oil there, but much geopolitical weight, and the chances that democracy could triumph over the apparatchiks and oligarchs are considerably greater. Powell, says a senior official at State, wants to "find a way to resolve this in a way that strengthens Ukraine's democracy." That seems right, but does that mean backing Kuchma, or his opposition? So far, there is no clear answer to that.