Ukraine’s Future Hangs In The Balance

MARMARI, Greece -- Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first president after the collapse of the Soviet Union, called upon all the country’s political forces to unite around specific key issues before the crucial parliamentary elections on September 30, 2007, to avoid a repeat of the prolonged political crisis that has troubled Ukraine since the Orange Revolution in 2004.

Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk
The political crisis cannot go on indefinitely, he said. “The moment will come that the Ukrainian political forces will understand either they are going to act in the interest of the people, otherwise they will have to go,” Kravchuk told New Europe in the resort town of Marmari on the Greek island of Evia, where he was attending a Ukrainian-Greek forum on September 7.

Kravchuk, who in December 1991, together with Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Stanislaw Shushkevich of Belarus, signed an agreement in the Viskuli government residence in Belarus’ Belavezhskaya Pushcha National Park, formalising the breakup of the USSR and leading to the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, agreed to leave his post before the end of his term in 1994 and holding an early election.

Today, he stressed, the three major parties -- Party of Regions, Bloc Yulia Timoshenko and Our Ukraine -- hold on to power for the sake of power and have lost their connection to the Ukrainian people.

Kravchuk said the elections have become the biggest issue and the biggest problem. Ukraine's 47 million people are tired of this situation, he said.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yanukovich have been wrestling for dominance since 2004, when Yushchenko led the Orange Revolution.

A hard-won agreement between the two leaders to hold early parliamentary elections on September 30 has eased the confrontation. But the truce may be only temporary.

Kravchuk leaned back in his chair pondering the conditions that led Ukraine into a political crisis. He said whether or not Ukraine will avoid another prolonged political stalemate after the elections “will depend on how all political forces, in Ukraine will view this issue. Not only the decisive Ukraine political forces which we define as Party of Regions, Bloc Yulia Timoshenko and Our Ukraine. These forces have monopolised today the shaping of Ukrainian political landscape. But they don’t represent the whole Ukrainian nation and even not all the Ukrainian voters.”

He explained that approximately half of the votes the three major parties received were through the system of allocation.

“These are the votes of other parties which could not pass the three percent threshold, so these three parties got automatically the votes of other parties,” Kravchuk said.

The soft-spoken politician called on Yushchenko to take into consideration the issues troubling the whole country and not only those concerning Our Ukraine party.

“If today all the political forces unite around some specific issues, and the president will take the position of the president of the whole Ukraine and not that of part of the country -- because today he is the president of the opposition -- then in this case Ukraine will be able to overcome these problems and follow the course which has been defined by the Ukrainian referendum,” he said.

Kravchuk said the issue of Ukraine’s accession to NATO, the European Union and its relations with Russia will definitely be the topic of very hot debates during the parliamentary elections.

He added that Ukrainians are not interested for the time being in their country joining NATO. He said, citing recent polls, that 87 percent of Ukrainians believe that Ukraine should not be a member of NATO.

Ukraine’s accession to the defence alliance may also complicate Kiev’s relations with Moscow. “Naturally, Russia is opposed to Ukraine’s accession to NATO. She doesn’t want the extension of NATO to be close to Russia. We should take this into consideration (and) not follow whatever Russia says, but to keep it in mind in order not to deteriorate relations between Russia and NATO, which can cause serious problems in European security. I’d like to say that some European countries understand this position of Ukraine and this position of Russia,” he said, adding that Ukraine alone should decide if and when it wants to join NATO.

A few hours earlier he admitted to Ukrainian journalists that if Russia cut off relations with Ukraine for one day, Ukraine would be wiped off the map economically. “Both our countries are very productive. We rely very heavily on them whether we like it or not,” he said.

“Regarding the European Union, I have said that Ukraine is not ready yet to become a member of the European Union. She has to solve a number of complex issues: legislative, economic, spiritual. And upon solution of all these issues it will have all the reasons to enter the European Union,” he told New Europe.

Ukraine has to get its own house in order first. “The most important issue today for Ukraine is to definitely solve its own internal problems. The sooner we will solve our internal problems, the more chances Ukraine will have to become a member of the European international organisations including the EU,” Kravchuk said.

Source: New Europe