The Ukrainian Factor

Adrian Karatnycky

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1992

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Adrian Karatnycky is Special Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO and coauthor with Nadia Diuk of The Hidden Nations: The People Challenge the Soviet Union.

After centuries of colonial anonymity Ukraine is finally making its mark on world affairs. Although relegated to secondary status by the West, Ukraine is rapidly emerging as a forceful and important actor in defining the contours of post?Soviet Europe. Russia and its President Boris Yeltsin may have taken the lead in defeating the August 1991 putsch and the Soviet Communist Party. But it was Ukraine, led by President Leonid Kravchuk, that ultimately provoked the unraveling of the Soviet empire: Ukraine’s refusal to sign Mikhail Gorbachev’s union treaty precipitated the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the creation of the new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Ukraine emerged from the Soviet Union’s dissolution as a strategically significant state. Its 700,000?strong armed forces are continental Europe’s second largest—nearly 50 percent larger than Germany’s Bundeswehr. That is even larger than British and French forces combined and two and a half times the size of the entire complement of U.S. forces in Europe. Moreover, although it has agreed to remove them, Ukraine still possesses tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.

Ukraine’s weight in post?Soviet geopolitics comes as a consequence of its large population (52 million). It is Europe’s second?largest state in terms of territory, an expanse that strategically hugs the shores of the Black Sea and divides Russia from its former east European satrapies: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The state is not only a major agricultural producer but also an industrial center, in 1990 accounting for 16 percent of the U.S.S.R.’s economic output.

Since its December 1, 1991, referendum, in which 90 percent of the population voted for independence, Ukraine has acted quickly to demarcate its sovereignty. It created its own army, moved to establish a currency, introduced the Ukrainian language into state offices and schools and secured diplomatic recognition from more than 100 countries. But the emergence of the new state has not been free of conflict—the most significant of which remains with Russia over disposition of nuclear weapons and control of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet. Remarkably, however, Ukrainian statehood was achieved without bloodshed or upheaval.

The loosely confederated CIS was cobbled together hastily on December 8, 1991, primarily to satisfy Ukrainian concerns. Yet Ukraine has turned out to be the Commonwealth’s most reluctant partner; from the outset Kravchuk pursued a policy aimed at ensuring a weak confederation. Ukraine consistently opposed attempts to create permanent CIS coordinating structures and blocked efforts to build a central CIS bureaucracy. All coordination, Kiev insisted, should come through bilateral and multilateral discussions among independent states. Kravchuk declined to attend the group’s May 15 summit.

The main theme of Ukrainian statecraft has thus been to define the contours of sovereignty and to assert and test that sovereignty at every turn. It has reminded the other new republics, as well as the rest of the world, that the CIS is no state or subject of international law. At the March 1992 CIS summit in Kiev, for instance, Kravchuk rejected all but four of 18 treaties and ...

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