Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has scrapped a state body set up to oversee the country's eventual accession to NATO, a presidential decree on his website said on Apr. 6.
The move, which was in line with statements by Yanukovych that membership of the U.S. military alliance was no longer on the agenda, was certain to please Moscow with whom he is trying to establish warmer relations.
The decree said he had wound up a presidential commission for preparing Ukraine for membership of NATO — a body set up by his pro-Western predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, who was on poor terms with Moscow.
A separate decree said he had also closed down an allied body overseeing Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration.
Though both bodies were formal in nature exerting little influence on political reality, the move by Yanukovych to shut them down seemed like a strong message to Moscow.
"The dialogue with Russia has become a more comfortable one," said analyst Mikhailo Pashkov of the Razumkov centre. Ukrainian entry into NATO is no longer on the agenda, above all because neither side is ready for it …".
Yanukovych, elected to power last February after a bitter contest with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, says he is committed to keeping his country of 46 million people out of any military blocs and steering a middle course between Russia and the Europe.
"I am convinced that the non-bloc policy is the most adequate and fairest answer to the geo-political situation in which Ukraine finds itself today," he told a session of the national security and defence committee on Tuesday.
But he was careful not to close off all cooperation with NATO. "Ukraine has to organise cooperation with NATO and cross over from short-term programmes to middle-term ones," he said.
Under Yushchenko, military cooperation and joint operations with NATO in areas such as peacekeeping and civil emergences increased, though opinion polls often indicated there was little real enthusiasm among Ukrainians for NATO membership.
NATO, however, kept Ukraine at arms length on the issue of membership, holding out the prospect of entry only at some unspecified moment in the future.
Ironically, some of the boldest moves in Ukraine’s ties with NATO came when Yanukovych was prime minister for a time under former President Leonid Kuchma in the early 2000s.
NATO was allowed to set up an information centre in Kyiv to raise the image of the alliance in the ex-Soviet republic and the first joint operations were undertaken. A draft law which may go to parliament soon could enshrine Ukraine’s non-bloc status, but a 2003 law on national security which still sees Ukraine’s future within NATO remains in force.
