Incidentally, if to take into account that on July 16, 1990 the Declaration of the State Sovereignty of Ukraine was adopted, then independent Ukraine is in fact more than 20 years old. As such, it is high time to tally the results and speak about the Ukrainian state as a phenomenon in contemporary world history
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| PHÎÒÎ: UNIAN |
In the first years of Ukraine’s independence many foreign political analysts expressed their fears that events in Ukraine will unfold along the Yugoslavian scenario: collapse accompanied by war and ethnic clashes. If to take into account that Ukraine is more than twice the size of the former Yugoslavia in terms of population and territory, one can imagine the degree to which a war in Ukraine would undermine peace and stability in the entire region from the Black Sea to the Baltic countries and from the Balkans to the Caucasus. The danger of such a course of events would be so severe that the territorial integrity of Ukraine would not only be up against internal threats (as in the case with Yugoslavia), but also external threats.
Immediately after Ukraine proclaimed its independence, Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s press secretary Pavel Voshchanov announced the possibility of reconsidering the demarcation of borders between Russia and Ukraine. Some political hotheads in Russia were intensely engaged in devising scenarios of the possible splitting of Ukraine in 2004-2005. Segregation of the eastern and southern territories of Ukraine from its core would first of all allow Russia to regain its former influence over the Black Sea region and, secondly, annex the runaway Transdniester region of the Republic of Moldova on the southwestern border of Ukraine, which is not recognized by the international community. This would cut Ukraine off from access to the Black Sea and deprive it from a major part of its industrial potential.
As for internal threats to the territorial integrity of Ukraine, it is worthwhile recalling the act of the proclamation of the state independence of the Republic of Crimea adopted by the autonomy’s parliament on May 5, 1992. The notion of separatism spread to several other neighboring regions. Considerable differences in national, linguistic and religious traits served as a precondition for inter-regional conflicts.
Despite this, Ukraine managed to bring Crimean legislation into conformity with Ukrainian law back in 1995 without applying any measures of force. And, in general, all those years Ukraine managed to avoid armed conflicts with its neighbors and internally and even did not resort to repressive measures (imprisonment, etc.) against the organizers of separatist addresses. This is testimony to the considerable durability of the Ukrainian state.
Furthermore, though Ukraine was one of the founding states of the CIS, it did not ratify the CIS statute and did not enter into any alliances (state, military, economic, customs, etc.) with Russia. Over the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many attempts were made to attract Ukraine into a union with Russia in one form or another. And though such attempts aroused impetuous and enduring political passion in Ukraine, in the end they produced no results. In this regard, Ukraine is strikingly different from Belarus, which, on the contrary, continued the process of integrating with Russia by forming with it a confederative state union.
Such a high degree of viability of the Ukrainian state and its steadfast immunity to unification with Russia to this day bewilders those foreign political analysts that are not versed well enough in the distinctive features of the composite of the Ukrainian political system. For them it is a mystery why Ukraine did not end up an analog to Yugoslavia or Belarus. The answer may lie in the following.
In Ukraine there are two political-geographic poles: Lviv and Donetsk. Ostensibly, they are diametrically opposed – residents of Lviv are mostly Ukrainian-speaking Greek-Catholic people that consider Ukrainian insurgents heroes that fought on two fronts – against the both Germans and the Soviet regime. Conversely, an overwhelming majority of residents of Donetsk speak Russian, are faithful to the Moscow patriarchy and consider heroes the Read Army.
At the same time, there is an even more powerful northern pole – namely, Moscow. As paradoxical as it may seem, Moscow was the deterrent to a possible conflict between Lviv and Donetsk. And thanks to it, political elites in Lviv and Donetsk during the perestroika years under Mikhail Gorbachev were equally interested in the downfall of the USSR and the independence of Ukraine.
Since 1972, Oleksandr Lyashko and Vitaliy Masol, both hailing from the Donetsk Oblast, headed the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Donetsk elite understood that in an independent Ukraine it would have much more political clout they did in the Soviet Union. As it turned out, their assumptions totally justified: Donetsk politicians headed the government of Ukraine from 1993-1995 (Yukhym Zvyahilskiy and then Vitaliy Masol), from 2002–2004 and 2006–2007 (Viktor Yanukovych) and finally in 2010 Viktor Yanukovych was elected president and Mykola Azarov was appointed premier. It is clear that the Donetsk business-political group has no interest whatsoever in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions being annexed to Russia. After all, the chances that a representative of Donetsk will head the government of Russia in the foreseeable future or even become its president are practically non-existent.
The Donetsk elite clan also has no interest in creating its own state that hardly would be recognized by the world community. This would block its ambitions on a Ukraine-wide scale and would deal a shattering blow to its business interests in the West. Unlike small pro-Russian regional elites (for example, in Crimea), the Donetsk elite considers Ukraine’s independence as the basis of its success, particularly now that it controls the reins of power in Ukraine.
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