Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — For former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, there are many versions of what peace in his homeland could look like, but only a few are acceptable.
“We hear the word ‘peace’ very often,” Yushchenko told a crowd at the Hoover Institution on September 24. “We can repeat this word over and over,” he said. “But ‘peace’ is a consequential term. It comes after a war, but more important is whether it comes after victory or after defeat.”
A former central bank governor, prime minister, and president of Ukraine, Yushchenko sat down with Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice in the George P. Shultz Building’s auditorium, where they reflected on his homeland’s path to freedom and the challenges it faces more than ten years since Russia seized Crimea and parts of Donetsk Oblast, and more than two years after it launched a full-scale invasion of the whole country.
They discussed Ukrainian culture—especially how difficult it was to sustain a unique Ukrainian identity in the Soviet system. And they also spoke about how Yushchenko, who as a politician supported greater integration with Europe, faced great personal hardship because of his advocacy on behalf of his people.
Less than two months before Yushchenko contested the first round of Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, he fell ill after dining with representatives of the security services.
He was flown to a hospital in Austria, where toxicologists discovered extremely abnormal levels of TCDD dioxin in his bloodstream, at one point measuring 50,000 times above what is considered normal.
He had been poisoned.
The dioxin left his face visibly scarred and severely damaged his pancreas. But he made a substantial recovery and continued to serve as Ukraine’s president until early February 2010.
Though Russian agents were blamed for the poisoning, no one was ever held criminally responsible.
“We are very fortunate he survived, because he continues to be a voice for freedom, for democracy, for market reform, for European integration, and for national consciousness of Ukrainian people,” Rice said.
Speaking through a translator, Yushchenko reminded the audience of the sheer level of repression exercised by authorities in Russia today.
“If you take a plain piece of paper and go on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, where there is a monument to Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, and you stand there with a blank piece of paper . . . you will not survive for thirty seconds,” he said, referring to how the police instantly detains anyone in Russia even remotely believed to be engaging in public protest. “You will be grabbed from the left, from the right, or from behind by the police.”
Rice reflected on when she, as US secretary of state, met Yushchenko in Davos, Switzerland, just before the Bucharest Summit of 2008. On that occasion, the two were preparing to advance a plan in Bucharest that would see Ukraine join NATO.
“I remember—and I relayed this to President Bush—that you were almost in tears when you told me that Ukraine would not survive as a democracy unless it became part of Europe, a part of the European Union, and a part of NATO,” she said.
Yushchenko said that he met with President Bush and was happy to hear that Bush supported a plan for Ukraine to join NATO. But when he received the final communiqué from that summit, one that said Ukraine “will become” a NATO member at some undetermined point in the future, he was frustrated.
“It was shameful to read that document,” Yushchenko said.
Rice asked if there was any possible postwar security arrangement for Ukraine, other than joining NATO, that would ensure the Russians would not try invading again after regenerating their military capacity.
Yushchenko replied that any arrangement where Ukraine would have to live side by side with a Putin-led Russia was unacceptable. “This would be merely a prolongation of our existence, a continuation of the sorrows we have been enduring,” Yushchenko said.
For Yushchenko, the definition of success for the future is clear, complete, and total victory over Russia’s forces.
“For Ukraine, victory consists of two parts. The first part, to restore unconditionally [Ukraine’s] boundaries of 1991 and to expel the last Russian soldier from Ukrainian land,” Yushchenko said.
But in conjunction with expelling Russian troops, he said there must be a global effort to rebuild and repair Ukraine’s peacetime economy.
“In other words, we need economic renovation,” he said. “We need many economic recovery projects, an army of recovery projects.”
