1
" La sfârșitul lui august (1991 n.n.), la scurt timp după ce Parlamentul ucrainean votase în favoarea independenței, Elțin își instruise purtătorul de cuvânt să anunțe că, dacă Ucraina și alte republici își declarau independența, atunci Rusia avea dreptul de a deschide discuția despre granițele ei cu aceste state. Purtătorul de cuvânt al lui Elțin a subliniat că Peninsula Crimeea și regiunile estice ale Ucrainei, inclusiv regiunea minieră Donbass, ar fi putut face subiectul unei asemenea discuții. Dacă Ucraina insista să devină independentă, atunci urma să se confrunte cu o amenințare: împărțirea teritoriului ei.
Elțin a trimis o delegație deosebit de importantă, condusă de vicepreședintele său, generalul Alexandr Ruțkoi, ca să forțeze Ucraina să-și retragă declarația. Dar ucrainenii s-au ținut tari pe poziții, iar Ruțkoi s-a întors la Moscova cu mâna goală. Șantajul eșuase, iar Elțin nu avea nici ambiția politică, nici resursele necesare pentru a-și duce amenințarea la bun sfârșit. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
12
" Like many post-Soviet countries, during its first years of independence Ukraine underwent a major political crisis caused by economic decline and social dislocation and focused on relations between the presidency and parliament, both institutions having been created in the political turmoil of the last years of the Soviet Union. Russia resolved the conflict in September 1993 when President Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the Russian parliament building and the Russian authorities arrested Russia’s vice president and the head of parliament, both accused of instigating a coup against the president. Yeltsin’s advisers rewrote the constitution to limit the power of parliament, turning it into something more of a rubber stamp than an active agent in the Russian political scene. Ukraine resolved the emerging conflict between the president and parliament with a compromise. President Kravchuk agreed to call early presidential elections, which he lost, and in the summer of 1994 he peacefully transferred power to his successor, Leonid Kuchma, the former prime minister and erstwhile rocket designer heading Europe’s largest missile factory. Throughout the tumultuous 1990s, Ukraine not only managed its first transfer of power between two rivals for the presidency but also maintained competitive politics and created legal foundations for a viable democracy. In 1996, President Kuchma rewrote the Soviet-era constitution, but he did so together with parliament, which secured a major role for itself in the Ukrainian political process. One of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy was its regional diversity—a legacy of both distant and more recent history that translated into political, economic, and cultural differences articulated in parliament and settled by negotiation in the political arena. The industrialized east became a stronghold of the revived Communist Party. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
13
" As often happens with former colonial administrators, a strong inferiority complex afflicted the Kyiv elites vis-à-vis their Russian counterparts, and they initially followed models developed in Russia to deal with their own political, social, and cultural challenges. It took them a while to realize that the Russian models did not work in Ukraine. Ukraine was different. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Ukrainian religious scene. By 1992, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which accounted for 60 percent of all Orthodox communities in the former Soviet Union, had split four ways: there were Greek Catholics who had emerged from the underground, Orthodox who remained under Moscow’s jurisdiction, adherents of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Kyiv Patriarchate, and, finally, the Autocephalous (self-ruling) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had its roots in the 1920s and also did not recognize the authority of Moscow. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
16
" The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2003, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia. THE MAJOR CHALLENGE to the democratic nature of the Ukrainian political process was the catastrophic economic decline that followed the declaration of independence and was often blamed on it, making not only the Leonid Brezhnev era but also the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms look like a paradise lost. In six years, between 1991 and 1997, Ukrainian industrial production fell by 48 percent, while the gross domestic product (GDP) lost a staggering 60 percent. The biggest loss (23 percent of the previous year’s GDP) occurred in 1994, the year of presidential elections and the signing of the first cooperation agreement with the European Union. These were figures comparable to but more significant than American economic losses during the Great Depression, when industrial production fell by 45 percent and GDP by 30 percent. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
17
" Bush took Gorbachev’s side in his address to the Ukrainian parliament, dubbed by the American media his “Chicken Kiev speech” because of the American president’s reluctance to endorse the independence aspirations of the national democratic deputies. Bush favored setting the Baltic republics free but keeping Ukraine and the rest together. He did not want to lose a reliable partner on the world stage—Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that he represented. Moreover, Bush and his advisers were concerned about the possibility of an uncontrolled disintegration of the union, which could lead to wars between republics with nuclear arms on their territory. Apart from Russia, these included Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, President Bush appealed to his audience to renounce “suicidal nationalism” and avoid confusing freedom with independence. The communist majority applauded him with enthusiasm. The democratic minority was disappointed: the alliance of Washington with Moscow and the communist deputies in the Ukrainian parliament presented a major obstacle to Ukrainian independence. It was hard to imagine that before the month was out, parliament would vote almost unanimously for the independence of Ukraine and that by the end of November, the White House, initially concerned about the possibility of chaos and nuclear war in the post-Soviet state, would endorse that vote. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
