With Viktor Yushchenko out of office and Viktor Yanukovych preparing to take his place, fears in the West of a Russian resurgence in Ukraine have been revived. The next several months will bring “the de facto folding of Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence,” warned Stratfor, a U.S.-based strategic forecasting company.
The argument that improved Russian-Ukrainian relations inevitably means Kiev’s loss of sovereignty and departure from its Western orientation is misguided. On the contrary, good relations with Russia would bring Ukraine closer to realizing its Orange dreams.
What will most likely change is not the degree of pragmatism in Ukraine’s foreign policy, but the strategy. The new foreign policy will be characterized by two general trends. First, it will be softer on Russia, though continue to be more “pro-Ukrainian” than “pro-Russian.” The cold war between Kiev and Moscow under Yushchenko’s rule has further undermined Ukraine’s economy and image abroad. Today, Ukraine badly needs Russia to get the economy back on its feet.
Moreover, U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to abandon the U.S. missile defense plans in Central Europe shook up the Ukrainian foreign policy establishment. After nearly seven months of leaving vacant the post of foreign minister, Yushchenko suddenly pushed through a new candidate, Petro Poroshenko, who was previously head of the Central Bank supervisory board. The move indicated a shift toward a more commercially oriented foreign policy approach. Poroshenko is known as a “business diplomat,” someone who can make economic and commercial ties abroad. Immediately, he struck a new foreign policy tone, knocking back U.S. suggestions that Patriot missiles could be stationed in Ukraine, calling Russia Ukraine’s “most important partner” and describing European Union membership as Ukraine’s main strategic goal.
Thus, Ukraine will most likely move its orientation away from the United States and toward the EU. While NATO membership will be removed from the agenda, Ukraine will most likely try to get an associate membership agreement with the EU. NATO membership has been a contentious domestic issue, deeply dividing Ukrainian voters and politicians. In the interest of uniting the country’s political forces and the general public, which is essential for Ukraine to overcome the effects of the economic crisis, the new administration will set aside the issue of potential NATO membership without completely denouncing it.
The next Ukrainian president will not usher in a new era of realpolitik. Surprisingly, what has been widely overlooked is that Ukraine’s foreign policy has been pragmatic from the start. When Yushchenko assumed the presidency in 2005, his country was mastering the art of playing competing powers against one another. It presented itself as a bridge between the East and West while also being ideologically aligned with the West.
What separates the “pro-Western” Ukrainians from their “pro-Russian” counterparts is neither a heightened sense of nationalism nor greater concern for democracy, but a distinct view of the current global system. The former see the world as divided into two competing poles.
At the other end of the political spectrum, there is a view that Ukraine does not have to be pro-Russian, but it cannot be anti-Russian. Such an outlook generally yields a more flexible, less polarizing approach to the international system, which is also viewed as transitioning from unipolar to multipolar.
The vision of a bipolar world entrenched within Ukraine’s current foreign policy establishment has led to a foreign policy practice of relying on the differences and conflicts of interest between Moscow and Washington. Seasoned U.S. diplomats in Ukraine have become nearly desensitized to Ukrainian officials’ ornate arguments painting Ukraine as a victim of an alleged Russian plot to destroy or, even worse, absorb Ukraine into its neo-Soviet empire. Yushchenko’s term is now history, and Ukrainians find themselves sidelined and disillusioned with the old strategy, which was marked 15 years ago by Ukraine’s rejection of its status as the world’s third-largest nuclear power in exchange for a promise that it would soon join the elite club of Western powers.
Yelena Biberman is a doctoral candidate at Brown University.