Ukraine not ready for NATO

Only about 22 percent of Ukrainians favor joining NATO.

McClatchy Newspapers

KIEV, Ukraine — The Bush White House has been pressing its European allies to accept Ukraine into NATO — over Russia’s bitter opposition — but the continuing political crisis in Kiev raises serious questions about whether this country is ready to join.

Viktor Yushchenko, the U.S.-backed president, was in New York last week, ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange and exhorting the U.N. General Assembly to contain Russia. Back home, his ruling coalition remains fractured, raising the prospect of a third parliamentary election in as many years.

Approval ratings for the one-time hero of the 2004 Orange Revolution are consistently below 10 percent. Despite Yushchenko’s strong condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month and his enthusiastic support for NATO, polls show that only some 22 percent of Ukrainians favor joining the alliance.

In the parliament, opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, considered by many to be close to Russia, has more than twice as many seats as Yushchenko’s bloc, which is anchored by the Our Ukraine party.

The political bickering has significant implications for U.S. interests in the area, including the drive to admit Ukraine into NATO.

If Russia can capitalize on the instability and help shape Kiev’s foreign policy, it could reassert some of the control it lost on Europe’s edge after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That would be a major step forward for the Kremlin in what Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has referred to as “regions where [Russia] has privileged interests.”

Yushchenko’s supporters accuse Russia of engineering the political crisis by brokering a Faustian deal with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, under which she split with the president and began cooperating with the opposition in return for backing in the 2010 presidential elections.

Earlier this month, Tymoshenko loyalists in parliament voted alongside Yanukovych’s Party of Regions to limit the president’s powers — a move Yushchenko said amounted to “a political and constitutional coup.”

Officials from both Tymoshenko’s and Yanukovych’s parties say that the country can’t afford to alienate Russia and aggressively pursue a divisive course toward NATO membership. They say Ukraine should focus instead on becoming part of the European Union and taking advantage of the country’s location between Europe and Russia to raise its economic profile.

But many pro-western politicians and analysts say that drawing close to Russia risks a slow loss of Ukraine’s independence until it became a de facto satellite state for the Kremlin.

“Russia is acting like an empire of gas and oil, it wants to harass Europe, to extend its territory to the post-Soviet region,” said Taras Stetskiv, a parliament member from Yushchenko’s political bloc, who has criticized the president’s track record. “There’s no need for war. Moscow has by its propaganda and its agents of influence made Ukrainian politicians fight each other — they are eating each other.”

For all the rancor about Russia, many analysts say the political turmoil in Ukraine mostly is due not to foreign meddling but squabbling politicians.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko quarreled often as they vied for support from Ukrainians in the west and center of the country who tend to be more western-leaning.

After Russian invaded Georgia last month, the pair appeared to take different paths to shore up political support, said Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, a NATO advocacy think tank.