A concerted drive by the Russian government and Ukrainian leftists to use the Kosovo crisis to reverse Ukraine’s turn toward NATO foundered badly over the first week of April.
The week began with President Leonid Kuchma flying to Moscow on April Fool’s Day to discuss a joint response by the Commonwealth of Independent States to NATO air strikes in Serbia.
Urging a ‘strategic partnership’ between Moscow and Kyiv to oppose NATO’s Balkan policy, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said that ‘we must act jointly and responsibly for the sake of stability in Europe,’ The Associated Press reported.
The leaders exchanged copies of the newly ratified Treaty of Friendship between Russia and Ukraine, but there were few NATO issues Yeltsin could agree on with Kuchma, who seemed to be using the meeting mainly as a photo opportunity for his re-election campaign.
According to Kremlin aide Sergei Prikhodko, the two countries ‘agreed to coordinate their efforts to achieve a swift end to NATO military action against Yugoslavia,’ the RIA news agency reported without giving further specifics.
And at the April CIS summit, Kuchma was spared from having to take any clear position by a deep division on the Kosovo issue between Russia and Belarus, which are siding with the Serbs, and Caucasian and Central Asian countries, who are either taking guarded positions or supporting the Kosovar Albanians.
On his return to Kyiv, Kuchma damned the summit with faint praise, as he has done after all CIS summits that he has attended. ‘The summit confirmed that the CIS exists,’ the news agency Interfax quoted him as saying.
Summit participants issued woolly pronouncements of goodwill that have characterized most CIS meetings, while the decision by the heads of state to sign off on the dismissal of now-exiled CIS executive secretary Boris Berezovsky provided comic relief.
The Kuchma administration has been openly critical of NATO’s air war in the former Yugoslavia, but is equally insistent that it will continue its cooperation with the alliance, particularly through its participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace joint exercises.
Meanwhile, at a meeting of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly in St. Petersburg, leftist parliamentarians from around the CIS did their best to upstage the heads of state gathered in Moscow.
Oleksandr Tkachenko, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, called on CIS states to provide military assistance to the government of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, telling reporters on April 2 that ‘it is not only a necessity, it is our duty’ to provide arms to the Serbs.
Although quickly rebuffed by Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Tkachenko’s call to arms was a clear attempt to steal the thunder from the CIS leadership summit.
‘The leaders of our states failed to demonstrate their resolve at a time when the most advanced countries of the world were delivering strikes on one tiny country,’ he said on April 2, the Russian Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Irakli Menagarishvili, Georgia’s foreign minister, countered on April 3 that left-leaning legislators, such as Tkachenko, were exploiting the Kosovo crisis to revive the Cold War.
Russia has formally withdrawn from Partnership for Peace, and Belarus has promised to follow suit.
Never shy about seizing the moment, Tkachenko also directed a few barbs at Kuchma, saying that ‘it is not serious for presidents to make statements presenting themselves as peacemakers after people have died.’
On April 6, however, Tkachenko failed to deliver on his promise to win passage of a parliament resolution calling for severing Ukraine’s ties with NATO, with leftist legislators mustering only 191 out of a needed 226 votes for a draft resolution that condemned the alliance’s ‘aggressive character.’
Tkachenko’s remarks in St. Petersburg ensured that Ukraine made a blustery debut in the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly, a largely symbolic talking shop that Ukraine’s legislature recently joined over the strenuous objections of center-right politicians.
Meanwhile, a curious episode played out in Kyiv. Berezovsky, en route to the Moscow summit from France, was forced to land in Kyiv after Russian air-traffic controllers refused his plane entry into Russian airspace.
While grounded at Boryspil airport, Berezovsky complained to reporters that ‘I cannot understand how the CIS Executive Secretary could be barred from the [summit] meeting.’
Had he made it to Moscow, he would have witnessed his formal firing. Berezovsky was effectively ousted in early March after Yeltsin said he had sacked him. Although several CIS heads of state, including Kuchma and Azerbaijani president Heidar Aliev, insisted that his firing could only be ordered collectively, they obediently ratified Yeltsin’s move at the summit, electing Yuri Yarov, a little-known Kremlin functionary, to take Berezovsky’s place.
During his Kyiv layover, an irate Berezovsky suggested to reporters that he might seek political asylum in Ukraine.
He later told Ukrainian reporters that his asylum comment was only an ‘April Fool’s joke.’ But on April 6, after Berezovsky had left Kyiv for France, Moscow issued a warrant for his arrest.
