The Foreign Service Journal, March 2020

24 MARCH 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL percent. Eighty percent of the inhabitants of the Donbas region voted for independence, and more than 54 percent chose inde- pendence in Crimea. The next day, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic President Boris Yeltsin recognized Ukraine as an independent state. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sent a telegram of congratulations to Kravchuk, expressing hope for close coopera- tion and understanding in “the formation of a union of sovereign states.” On Dec. 7-8, Kravchuk met with Russian President Yeltsin and Belarusian Supreme Soviet Chairman Stanislav Shushkevich at Belavezhskaya Puscha in Belarus and announced the end of the Soviet Union as a “subject of international law.” To replace it, they created the Commonwealth of Independent States. On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and each of the former Soviet republics became truly independent. The United States had initially been cautious in recognizing the impending collapse of the USSR. There were serious debates within the George H.W. Bush administration about how quickly to move, fed by a fear that the demise of the USSR could lead to the fragmentation of the region and a potentially chaotic situa- tion with international implications. Command and control of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons was a major preoccupation of Washington. Secretary Baker famously said: “A Yugoslav-type situation with 30,000 nuclear weapons presents an incredible danger to the American people—and they know it and will hold us accountable if we don’t respond.” President Bush himself had warned against “suicidal national- ism” in his famous Aug. 1, 1991, speech to the Ukrainian Rada in Kyiv. Bush had put his hope in Gorbachev to reform and hold the USSR together. The two leaders had worked closely together on German reunification and other issues high on the White House foreign policy agenda. The Rada speech backfired. It outraged Ukrainians and many Americans who felt it was in the United States’ clear interests to more forthrightly support an indepen- dent Ukraine. One critic, New York Times columnist William Safire, criticized Bush’s speech as a miscalculation and dubb ed it the “Chicken Kiev speech.” Within a month, however, Gorbachev was severely weakened by a failed coup attempt, and the Ukrainian people had voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence. It now became clear at the White House and throughout the U.S. government that the USSR was coming to an end. Secretary Baker moved quickly to forge relationships with Russia, Ukraine and the other new states. From the start, the United States pursued a two-pronged post- Soviet strategy: trying to build a good relationship with the new Russia, marked by cooperation and even partnership, but at the same time making a major effort to create productive bilateral relationships with the new independent states. This approach reflected U.S. strategic objectives as well as American values. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard , former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski characterized Ukraine as a “geopo- litical pivot because its very existence as an independent country [means] Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Although not often publicly expressed by officials to avoid antagonizing Russia, this strategic recognition has undergirded much of U.S. policy to this day. Geopolitical objectives were augmented by a desire in the Bush administration to help build democracies and market econ- omies in the new states, as Secretary Baker had stated in his press conference. In the following months, he visited each new capital, meeting with each nation’s new leadership. Under his direction, the State Department moved quickly to create and staff new embassies in each capital, along with new consulates general in Map of Eurasia. DIKOBRAZIY/SHUTTERSTOCK