It is hard sometimes not to sympathize with the foreign policy team behind U.S. President Bill Clinton. Even when they pull off a striking success, as they have with their Ukraine policy, they get little credit and find their achievement almost immediately overtaken by their political predicament at home.


The arrival in Washington this week of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma should have been cause for great rejoicing. The vote by the Ukrainian parliament to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty set the seal on a consistent U.S. policy to help Ukraine become a non-nuclear state.


This opens the way for Russia to start implementing the START treaty, and for both Russia and the United States to ratify START-2.


But what really boosted the White House national security staff was that something even more important happened: Russia has at last become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.


The hidden key to Kuchma's success in persuading the legislature to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty was the International Monetary Fund's economic support package for Ukraine's reforms. And the IMF package would have failed had not Clinton privately persuaded Boris Yeltsin to help fund it.


Last autumn, after two lengthy phone calls between Clinton and Kuchma, the U.S. president realized that there was a $1 billion financing gap in the IMF package for Ukraine. Clinton then wrote to Yeltsin, following it up with phone calls, to say this offered Moscow an extraordinary opportunity.


Normally seen as a supplicant before the IMF, this was Russia's chance to act as a creditor, Clinton argued. If Russia agreed to defer payments for energy exporters to Ukraine, the IMF package could go ahead, giving Russia a far better chance of being repaid later, when Ukraine's economy recovered.


"A weak and unstable Ukraine that cannot pay its bills is not in Russia's national interest," Clinton told Yeltsin. The Russian leader agreed to defer the payments, and the IMF package came together.


Yeltsin proved more helpful than the Europeans, who are dragging their feet over joining the United States in providing another $100 million in balance-of-payments support for Ukraine.


"We are putting a lot of pressure on the European allies," confides one senior White House official. "For us, the rationale of supporting Ukraine is so clear. It's a major building block for European security in the next century, and to have Russia acting in such a far-sighted way is one of the most dramatic achievements of current diplomacy."


But a shadow falls across Kuchma's visit to Washington.To be frank, America has bought its diplomatic successes with Ukraine. There was last year's $150 million and another $350 million this spring, and then Clinton's persuasion of this year's Group-of-Seven economic summit to come up with another $4 billion.


"If the outside world passively observes what is going on in Ukraine without getting involved in the situation, then a Yugoslav-style scenario is the most likely outcome," Kuchma warned as he left Kiev.


And the purse strings in Washington are held by the new Republican-controlled Congress, where Senator Jesse Helms is the parsimonious and exceedingly conservative new chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee.


Many of Helms' Republican colleagues understand the prize at stake in a stable and democratic Ukraine. And getting Jesse Helms to see sense will be up to them.