Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s newly elected president, may well find during the next five years that he won much more than he bargained for, including an obstructionist parliament determined to relegate him to figurehead status and a large nationalist faction in Ukraine’s west angered by his promise to strengthen ties with Russia.
For its part, the Western world, having consistently downplayed Ukraine in its major foreign policy, might also get more than it bargained for: a politically unstable and significant nuclear power, isolated embittered and answerable to nobody. Indeed, Kuchma shrewdly capitalized on mounting anti-West feeling in Ukraine during his campaign. He argued convincingly that the Western world has ignored and humiliated Ukraine, that Russia is Ukraine’s natural ally, the most viable market for Ukrainian goods that the West neither wants nor needs, and the most important supplier of energy for the country.
Kuchma, a 55-year-old former Ukrainian prime minister and director of what was Ukraine’s largest Soviet missile factory, has his work cut out for him. He must unite an ideologically divided country into a cohesive national state, while reforming and rejuvenating a destroyed economy rife with rampant inflation. And how does he deliver on campaign promises made to his loyal following in the industrial east-home to a large majority of Ukraine’s 11.4 million ethnic Russians-to become Russia’s “little brother” once again, without alienating the nationalist and the country’s democratic west?
Kuchma is himself a Russified Ukrainian who speaks the Ukrainian language badly and who has worked alongside ethnic Russians all his life. These traits disturb many western Ukrainians, many of whom are terrified of Russian hegemony. He does seem to have found one way of appeasing the western nationalists: modifying his campaign promises. The new president has already qualified a campaign pledge to make Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet Russian, saying he will merely lease Sevastopol to the Russians.
As for Kuchma’s economic reforms, he favors a gradual move toward a freer market while maintaining strong government controls. This line limits his appeal in the more progressive democratic west, although it is precisely such a limited policy that Ukraine’s current anti-reformist parliament might be persuaded to accept.
Should the parliament refuse to go along with his reforms, however, the alternative could mean administrative deadlock. What then? It could lead to the socialist, pro-communist speaker of the house Oleksander Moroz, well known for favoring a tightly controlled political system, becoming interim president. He would then be free to abolish the office of president altogether, one of his stated objectives, and return Ukraine to a much more authoritarian government.
And even if this does not come to pass, Kuchma himself has threatened to deal harshly with those seeking to establish separate power bases. Likely recipients of this treatment are western Ukraine’s ultranationalists, who adamantly refuse to enter Moscow’s political or cultural orbits. Less nationalistic forces in western Ukraine have pledged that they will not actively oppose Kuchma, but neither will they participate actively in his government; they have no desire to bear the responsibility for his policies.
Conversely, should the anti-reform parliament modify its position and agree to support Kuchma’s limited reforms (and this is highly unlikely) the tinderbox of social unrest could prove to be the miners and workers in the inefficient industrial enterprises who voted for Kuchma. They will bear the brunt of whatever economic reforms Kuchma manages to institute.
But there is hope for Kuchma. The exemplary democratic course that the elections took shows that Ukrainians are capable of working peacefully toward the development of a civil society. Another hopeful sign was Crimea’s refusal to boycott the all-Ukrainian elections-Crimea had earlier elected its own president in an unsanctioned election. Of the more than half of Crimean voters who cast their ballots, over 90 percent chose Kuchma, although largely because of his promise to stay close to Russia. On July 14 Kuchma went on record to say that he intended to serve as president of a sovereign and united country. This would seem to rule out any serious political concessions to the pro-Russian east and south that supported him.
A stable and integrated Ukraine benefits us all, and the Western world must strive to support and encourage this. Our first step should be to take a more realistic look at that part of the world, and to begin to realize that events in Ukraine could have serious repercussions for all of us.
Then we need to re-examine our policy toward Ukraine and stop ignoring it in favor of Russian interests.
In the meantime, as one NATO representative recently remarked, let us hope that Ukraine does not turn its back on us. The result might be deadly.
