Parliament voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ratify a landmark friendship treaty with Russia that ended years of bickering between the world's two largest Slavic nations. The vote of 317 to 27 in favor of ratification brought together the government's supporters with their foes on the left, the center and the moderate right. Only diehard nationalists opposed the pact signed by President Leonid Kuchma and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in May. '[The treaty] fully corresponds to Ukraine strategic interests and ensures its security,' Foreign Minister Hennady Udovenko told lawmakers before the vote. 'The treaty contains absolutely no threat to Ukraine,' said Parliament Deputy Yevhen Marchuk, a former prime minister who helped negotiate the pact before exchanging his government post for a seat in the opposition benches. 'Had Parliament rejected it, Ukraine would have demonstrated short-sightedness in planning its future.' The pact was signed last year during Yeltsin's first visit to Kyiv as president of an independent Russia. It followed agreement between Russia and Ukraine on the division of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and a 20-year lease for Russia on naval facilities in Crimea.
It ended years of mutual recriminations over Russian attempts to defend the rights of the ethnic-Russian majority on the peninsula and Ukrainian efforts to slow down the integration of the Commonwealth of Independent States under Russian leadership.
'To declare independence is easier than [for Russia to] get rid of the complex of the Фeternally first' country and [for Ukraine of] the Фeternally second' country,' said Borys Oliynyk, chairman of Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs and Relations with the CIS. 'The importance of this treaty is that it signals a radical change in a both political and psychological sense.'
Trade relations also suffered in recent years before improving dramatically in the wake of the summit that culminated in the friendship treaty. Ukraine, dependent on Russia for nearly half of its total trade turnover and 80 percent of energy imports, has been hit hard by trade restrictions and the end of heavily subsidized deliveries of Siberian natural gas.
Recently though, the two nations agreed to cancel the value-added tax on each other's exports, negotiated a new gas supply contract and inked a pact lifting import duties on some deliveries of Ukrainian sugar.
Hope that good relations would bring additional economic benefits appeared to swing many Ukrainian lawmakers behind the treaty.
According to Udovenko, the pact will help the two nations work out effective tax and customs policies that will boost bilateral trade between border regions.
Opposition to the treaty came only from nationalists who wanted to debate it in concert with the accords dividing the Black Sea Fleet and spelling out the extent of the Russian navy's presence in Crimea.
'These two issues cannot be debated separately because the signing of the treaty became possible after Ukraine made big concessions to Russia in dividing the Black Sea Fleet,' said Deputy Oleksy Shandryuk.
The government denied it had engaged in horse-trading, and said it would submit the Black Sea Fleet agreements for ratification after the March 29 parliamentary elections. 'The agreements will be submitted for ratification as soon as they are finalized,' said Udovenko. 'As for the [friendship and cooperation] treaty, it was signed separately and needs to be ratified so.'
Despite Wednesday's vote, the friendship treaty will not come into force until it is also ratified by the Russian Duma.
Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev said Thursday the accord would be examined by Russian lawmakers on February 6.
