Basic Factors in the Foreign Policy of Ukraine

For many Russians—from the conservative former vice president of the Russian Federation, Aleksandr V. Rutskoi, to President Boris N. Yeltsin’s political advisor, the democratic reformer Sergei B. Stankevich—the very existence of Ukraine as an independent state is fundamentally illegitimate. ¹ On the other hand, many Ukrainians—beginning with Ukraine’s first popularly elected president, Leonid M. Kravchuk—see in their country’s independence the only salvation from Soviet-imposed genocide. ² Despite its thousand-year history, the Ukrainian nation was nearly wiped out under Soviet rule. It is also an unspoken assumption among many Ukrainians that, as a nation, it is the Russians who profited from the genocide of Ukrainians, albeit indirectly. The Ukrainian government bears most of the responsibility for the economic, political, and diplomatic problems that in mid-1993, only two years after the Ukrainian parliament’s Act of Independence of 24 August 1991, have brought the country to—or, in the opinion of some, even over—the brink. ³ But Russia’s aggressive policy of economic and political destabilization and diplomatic isolation has helped in pushing Ukraine to the brink. As early as mid-January 1992, Vladimir Lukin, then chairman of the Russian parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Economic Relations, and later Russia’s ambassador to the United States, formulated what might be called the Lukin Doctrine. In a letter to Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, then chairman of Russia’s parliament, Lukin advocated that Russia exert simultaneous economic and diplomatic pressure on newly independent Ukraine: by immediately cutting off Russian defense contracts to plants located in Ukraine and by raising at one and the same time the issues of the return to Russia of Crimea and of the entire Black Sea fleet, together with adjacent portions of the littoral on the Ukrainian mainland. Significantly, the strong pressure on Ukraine on all fronts was praised as a device to help the citizens of Russia weather the inevitable hardships arising from economic reforms. ⁴