Carlos Pascual is serving out the final weeks of an ambassadorial term that has coincided with the worst ever crisis in U.S.-Ukrainian relations
sy and returning to Washington, where he will take up the post of coordinator of aid to Europe and Eurasia.
Many of the Ukrainian officials who have observed Pascual at work have been impressed by the ambassador’s high degree of professionalism, energy and goal-directedness. These include Volodymyr Horbulin, an adviser to the president on national security issues.
“Pascual is able to think strategically and instantaneously identify the key to an issue,” Horbulin said of him after his appointment in 2000. “He always has his position, and he can defend it strongly.”
For some Ukrainians, Pascual will be remembered fondly as an ambassador who strived to promote the country’s integration into the European Union and NATO and bring it closer to democratic standards. For others, he will be resented as an American who blatantly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs.
Part of the reason for this ambiguous attitude is that Pascual’s term coincided with the most serious crisis ever in Ukrainian-U.S. relations.
Summing up his first ambassadorial posting in mid-April, Pascual told Korrespondent that this had been a difficult period and listed some of the scandals that have blighted bilateral relations.
“In the last two and a half years there has been a series of difficulties,” he said. “These were connected with such events as the death of journalist Georgy Gongadze; the dismissals of the governments of Viktor Yushchenko and Anatoly Kinakh; the situation with Ukrainian transfers of arms to Macedonia; and finally, the issues of the cassette scandal.”
Emigrant son
Pascual was born in the Cuban capital, Havana, in November 1958. When he was 3 years old, his family left Cuba forever, just as Fidel Castro’s socialist regime was beginning to repress dissenters.
“My parents wanted their son to grow up in a free country,” Pascual said. “They were alarmed that curbs on freedom were increasing in Cuba. We left six weeks before flights to the United States were suspended. If they’d decided to leave any later, my life would have been very different.”
Pascual graduated from Stanford University in 1980 and two years later received a master’s degree from the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Pascual attributed his desire to work as a diplomat to his conviction that the United States, as a wealthy country, has a moral obligation to aid other countries and to his desire to give people hope in their future.
Accordingly, Pascual began working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1983. At the time when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Pascual was working for USAID in Mozambique and the United States.
In the early 1990s, Pascual worked in the USAID department dealing with the newly independent states.
In 1995, he moved to the National Security Council, where he became director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs.
Before being appointed ambassador to Ukraine in October 2000, Pascual served as a special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia in the National Security Council.
Controversial diplomat
“Instinct and feelings attracted me to a career that would allow me to work with other peoples and other countries, and help them realize the principles of democracy and the market economy,” Pascual said. “It is also important that, in helping them, I am serving the interests of my own country.”
Many people outside the United States, however, are inclined to be skeptical about the sincerity of such declarations of the country’s good intentions. Against a background of rising anti-American feelings in Ukraine and frequent domestic political crises, Pascual has frequently been accused of meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs.
Left wing parties such as the Communists and the Progressive Socialists have repeatedly called for him to be declared persona non grata.
Communist Deputy Heorhy Kryuchkov explains the party’s position: “Our faction considers that Pascual went too far. He was behaving like he was in charge here. He took it on himself to say what Ukraine should and should not do. He has disclosed information that not even our own officials were ready to disclose.”
Meanwhile, Pascual insists that he has only ever defended the interests of his country.
“My role is to represent the foreign policy of the United States, and to implement and explain the position of its president,” he said.
Pascual has repeatedly stated that his country wants to see Ukraine a democratic, market-oriented country, and one that is fully integrated with the Euro-Atlantic community.
Representatives of the Ukrainian political and diplomatic establishment are divided over how far he has realized that aim. Some accuse him of conducting White House policy clumsily and ineptly. Others insist that he is relatively diplomatic, at least in comparison with Russian Ambassador Viktor Chernomyrdin.
Washington’s megaphone
The final months of Pascual’s term in Ukraine were played out against the background of the Kolchuga scandal, which first broke in September 2002, when Washington announced that it had confirmed the authenticity of recordings suggesting President Leonid Kuchma had approved the sale of a sensitive radar system to Iraq in defiance of United Nations Sanctions.
The nature of Pacual’s role in the Kolchuga scandal cannot be gauged. However, it is widely believed in Kyiv diplomatic circles that Pascual was not the initiator of the hard line that Washington initially took on the issue in October 2002.
However, with Kyiv and Washington looking at each other with ill-disguised suspicion, the ambassador was bound to play a key role.
“It seemed that he was trying to act as a brake, holding back the negative processes. But that was within certain bounds, of course, since he is obliged to conduct the policy of his country,” said Mykhailo Honchar, vice president of the Strategy-1 fund.
Pascual probably deserves some credit for the fact that the United States eventually announced in February that it would be putting the Kolchuga affair “in a box” allowing a thaw in bilateral relations. After all, Pascual was not just a transmitter of Washington’s position, he was also in a position to actively influence that position. Pascual even came under criticism for being excessively concerned about Ukraine’s problems.
“In general, Pascual’s activity as ambassador can be seen as fairly successful. We would give him his due. In many questions, he not only defended U.S. interests, but also the interests of Ukrainian-U.S. relations,” Honchar said.
This profile was originally published in Russian in Korrespondent magazine on April 29, as part of its series devoted to the Top-100 most influential people in the country.
