Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin is one of the longest-serving members of the Cabinet of Ministers, taking over in June 2014, just four months after President Viktor Yanukovych fled the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Klimkin is on his third foreign minister from France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as his third U.S. secretary of state. He’s traveled to dozens of countries for hundreds of days outside of Ukraine. Even the ministry has trouble keeping an up-to-date list of his travels.
“It was a great opportunity and a great honor to work with a number of really great guys,” he told the Kyiv Post in a Nov. 6 interview at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a day before he departed to Helsinki, Finland for the European People’s Party congress.
Kyiv Post chief editor (R) interviews Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin on Nov. 6 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He claims no special secret for why he’s outlasted so many other ministers. Some say he stays in place because of his loyalty to President Petro Poroshenko as well as the career diplomat’s lack of personal political ambitions.
Whatever the reason, there’s no sign that he’ll be out anytime soon as long as Poroshenko remains in power, even though critics say the real power in foreign policy belongs to the president and deputy head of the presidential administration Kostiantyn Yelisieiev.
The last four years have been “a very important time, not for me, because my humble person does not mean anything in this sense, but in the sense of the world understanding Ukraine, understanding what is at stake here in Ukraine, why it’s important, why you should care about Ukraine at all, why you should care about Ukrainians at all,” Klimkin said.
“Foreign policy is about values, about principles and also about the personal touch,” he said. “You should be able to go along with people who like you and you should be able to press people who don’t like you… Whatever opportunity I could use to have Ukraine better up in this world, and Ukrainians, I will take it.”
One of those people who does not make Klimkin’s description of “great guys” he’s worked with is Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has served the Kremlin in this post since 2004. Lavrov is a non-stop promoter of Kremlin lies and propaganda, especially in denial of Russia’s war against Ukraine and other crimes.
Klimkin has had many meetings involving Lavrov as part of the stalled peace talks to persuade Russia to end the war that has killed more than 10,500 Ukrainians. When asked if the Russian foreign minister is as distasteful in person as he is in public, Ukraine’s foreign minister replied:
“I am not envious of him in any way. He’s a career diplomat. He made his choice. I made mine. My choice is to further Ukraine as a country where people do matter. It’s about people who love freedom, who can’t basically live in the reality like the Russian one. I believe that fighting for Ukraine also means fighting for the transatlantic community because Ukraine is now an indispensable part. It’s about building solitary around Ukraine. I believe Russia did not expect such solidarity holding for such a long time.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin (L) speaks with his Hungarian counterpart, Peter Szijjarto, on June 22, 2018, in the village of Nyzhne Solotvino in Zakarpattya Oblast in western Ukraine. (Ukrinform)
Troubles at home
Klimkin’s definition of Ukraine abroad as a modern, democratic European state keeps hitting snags, however, when domestic realities don’t square with this image.
Ukraine takes more than a public relations beating when activists and journalists are murdered with impunity. The latest is the Nov. 4 death of Kateryna Gandziuk, a Kherson activist who died from injuries in an acid attack on July 31.
Others call attention to what they regard as neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian armed forces, specifically the Azov Battalion.
And then Ukraine, in a bid to promote use of the Ukrainian language that was suppressed for centuries by Russia, has alienated neighbor Hungary with the requirement of public school instruction in the Ukrainian language. About 150,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, primarily in Zakarpattya Oblast.
Moreover, a draft language law that won initial approval in parliament puts news organizations like the English-language Kyiv Post at risk because of the costly requirement to duplicate publication in Ukrainian. Some lawmakers have amended the law to be less punitive and more promotional of the Ukrainian language.
Besides the poor PR, Ukraine’s democratic shortcomings are routinely seized upon by the Kremlin and other foes as evidence of a failing state.
“Of course it’s damaging, if you have to be absolutely honest about it,” Klimkin said. “If we are not able to find out who is behind (the murder of anti-corruption activist Kateryna Gandziuk) and all other activists’ cases, basically our war against Russia is lost and our war for Ukraine is also lost.”
He said that Ukraine must “defend every member of our society, regardless of nationality, religion and everything else.”
As for promoting the Ukrainian language, Klimkin is all for it, “but we need to do it in a smart way.”
Among those ways, he said, is helping ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine learn the Ukrainian language so they don’t feel alienated. When it comes to the Kyiv Post, he said, “in Ukraine, you are special” and urged the newspaper to persuade members of parliament to make an exception to the dual-language requirements for the English language.
He believes making English a universal language in Ukraine will speed the nation’s path to prosperity and global integration.
“It’s going to have a transformational impact on our society,” he said. “Everyone in Ukraine should speak English.”
That’s why, he said, promotion of Ukrainian must be “a very positive drive” rather than exclusionary.
“We care about our language,” Klimkin said. “It’s a big emotional point for many people here. It’s about promoting Ukrainian as a DNA for our mentality.”
Much progress seen
Despite the problems, Klimkin said that Ukrainians have taken more pride in their nation since 2014. “More and more people feel themselves as real members of our society,” he said, including in Odesa, Kharkiv and other cities that had been labeled as “pro-Russian” in the past. “It’s not the case anymore,” he said.
He also said foreigners outside Ukraine “definitely” know more about the nation. Before the EuroMaidan Revolution and Russia’s war, Ukraine was known by the three “Cs” — Chornobyl, corruption and chaos. The world is “discovering Ukraine as a community of people who are able to fight,” he said.
The battle ahead
With an annual budget of less than $150 million and 2,000 employees, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs doesn’t have enough money to do everything it wants to do — particularly the promotion of Ukrainian business abroad. Klimkin said getting $1 billion a year would be “an absolute dream” for the ministry.
With such a small budget, Klimkin carries out a lot of his diplomacy abroad and on Twitter, where he has 332,000 followers and where his profile photo shows him looking out a window while seated in an airplane.
“We need to have more budget for helping Ukrainians and Ukrainian businesses abroad,” he said.
As a nation, however, winning the war against Russia and getting international support remain priorities.
The challenges are immense, besides militarily, and include countering Russian propaganda and cyberattacks.
“Ukraine is like a mixed martial arts fighter,” he said. “We need to be good in countering Russia in a military sense, conventionally, so to say, and we need to be good in countering non-conventional threats, but a fighter with values of honesty, with principles, with dignity. Our success is not to win against the Russian military machine. Our success is to be able to hold off the Russian military machine.”
And in this endeavor, Ukraine is key to the democratic world — especially Europe.
“There are no red lines for Russia anymore. Nobody is safe from Russian conventional or non-conventional threats. To be able to feel safe you have to come to Ukraine and help us fight against Russia. In order to have safe elections in two years time, you have to learn Russian tactics on cyber, disinformation and everything here in Ukraine in the run-up to the (March 2019 presidential) election. The Russian goal is to not to create a more pro-Russian reality here. The goal is to weaken up and fragment Ukraine.
“The fact that everybody recognizes this reality far better than three years ago is an achievement of all Ukrainians who were able to hold off Russia and fight against Russia now, but also understanding that any kind of future for Ukrainians is about the community of values. It’s about the European Union. It’s about NATO. It’s about understanding you are safe only with people who share your principles and values.
“It took a war here in Ukraine to come up with a reasonable set of sanctions and the clear basis for solidarity,” he said. “In this sense, Ukraine is playing a very important role in keeping European and transatlantic solidarity.”
If nothing else, Klimkin knows how to stay on message.
