Seven years to the day after Mikhail Gorbachev announced on television that the Soviet Union no longer existed, Russia’s leaders made a concerted effort on Dec. 25 to show that Moscow is not losing control of its former empire’s Slavic heartland.
Ending more than a year of delays, the Russian Duma chose Dec. 25 to ratify the so-called ‘big treaty’ between Russia and Ukraine that the two countries’ presidents had signed back in May 1997.
But the Duma was upstaged by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his Belarusian counterpart, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who announced in Moscow the same day a new agreement on merging Russia and Belarus into a common state.
‘Our countries are entering the 21st century in a new capacity, moving together toward a union state,’ a smiling Yeltsin, flanked by Lukashenko, told reporters after the signing ceremony.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who led the effort to persuade the Duma to ratify the treaty , was quick to connect the vote to the new Russian-Belarusian agreement.
‘December 25, 1998, has been a milestone in the effort for the unity of the three Slavic peoples,’ Ivanov said after the vote.
Before the Duma vote, Ivanov and pro-government deputies hammered home the point that unless Russia ratified the treaty with Ukraine, Ukraine would continue to move closer to NATO.
‘Yes, the town of Sevastopol has been and will be the town of Russia’s military glory. But juridically it now belongs to a sovereign state,’ Ivanov said. ‘If we start questioning Ukraine’s territorial integrity today and if the Russian-Ukrainian treaty on friendship and cooperation is not ratified by us today, that would reinforce those forces in Ukraine that are looking to the West.’
However, it was unclear what real effects either agreement would have, and the display of Slavic brotherhood seemed mainly intended for domestic Russian and Belarusian consumption.
All three of the former Soviet republics were heading into the new year in a deep economic crisis with few concrete proposals for improving their lots other than appealing for foreign help. For Belarus that means appealing to Russia, but for Russia and Ukraine it means appealing to the West.
Ukrainian Parliamentary Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko, who led a Ukrainian delegation to Moscow the previous week, said his meetings with Russian deputies paved the way for the positive vote. In a Dec. 17 speech in Moscow, Tkachenko said Ukraine seeks military and economic reintegration with Russia, provoking mild criticism from President Leonid Kuchma and outrage from the Ukrainian right wing (see story HEADLINE name of story title name, page 3).
Tkachenko said the Ukrainian and Russian parliaments ‘have made a gigantic stride not only toward one another, but also toward the peoples, the economies and the well-being of their states.’
‘Ukraine and the Russian Federation cannot develop their economies without each other,’ he said.
Tkachenko said he hoped the treaty’s ratification would enable Ukraine and Russia to settle issues surrounding the Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and the division of the Soviet Union’s assets and liabilities.
The Unian news agency reported on Dec. 18 that the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s debts to the city of Sevastopol and enterprises there had increased by Hr 16 million ($4.6 million) between Sept. 1 and Dec. 1 to surpass Hr 70 million ($20 million).
Kuchma also hailed the ratification, saying it showed Ukraine and Russia had ‘no unsolved problems’ and would allow the countries’ governments to focus on implementing a previously worked-out 10-year program on bilateral cooperation and elimination of trade barriers.
Kuchma, who was in Mykolayiv at the time, said he and Yeltsin had congratulated each other by phone after the vote and agreed to hold a meeting in the near future, but he did not name a date or venue.
For Russia’s part, Ivanov expressed hope that Ukraine would address ethnic Russians’ complaints about official disrespect for the Russian language in Ukraine.
‘There is no small amount of information about infringement of the rights of [ethnic Russians] in the course of the Ukrainianization that is being pursued in that republic,’ Ivanov said. ‘It would be ideal if the Russian language were declared the second official language of Ukraine.’
Ivanov admitted that Russia didn’t get everything it wanted in the treaty.
‘We might have wished for something more, but we live in a world of realities,’ he said. ‘We were guided by Russia’s national interests and proceeded not from abstract discussions, but from the political realities of today.
Ivanov won support from the Russian Duma’s large Communist faction, and was opposed only by the far-left Popular Power and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic faction, which protested the vote by leaving the building.
In an angry speech just before exiting, Zhirinovsky said the Communists ‘deserve to be shot’ for supporting the ‘anti-Russian’ treaty and said he believed that because of the treaty ‘Turkey will someday capture Crimea.’
The Duma afterward voted to censure Zhirinovsky and ban him from giving speeches to parliament for a month.
The Duma also passed a resolution asking Ukraine’s parliament to formally renounce any intention of ever joining NATO.
‘We hope that the Ukrainian parliament will take the right stance on this issue important for our mutual security,’ the resolution read.
There was no mention in news reports of any discussion by the Duma of Ukraine’s proposal to lease its giant Yavorivsky military training ground to NATO for division-size exercises. A Russian Embassy official in Kyiv said that arrangement is ‘impermissible’ to Russia.
The treaty stipulates that ‘None of the sides will allow the use of its territory to the detriment of the security of the other side.’
Two days before ratifying the ‘big treaty,’ the Duma ratified a separate Russian-Ukrainian agreement ensconcing Moscow’s control over the two Ukraine-based stations in the former Soviet Union’s early-warning system for missile attacks.
According to that agreement, Russia will pay for the Mukachiv and Sevastopol stations’ operating costs and is entitled to run them, while Ukraine will pay the operators’ salaries and is entitled to be kept apprised of what they see. The Interfax news agency said ratification entitled Ukraine to collect expenses for 1994 to 1997 amounting to $3.5 million.
