PROGRAMS

HISTORY

Amidst millennial celebrations and expectations two decades ago, Ukraine and the United States began an exchange of increasingly strong signals intimating that their ties should be closer—that, in fact, their relationship should ultimately take on strategic coloration.

In December 1999, both the executive and the legislative branches of Ukraine’s government—the Presidential Administration and the Verkhovna Rada—took clear steps to indicate a serious interest in pursuing a course of ‘eventual integration into the structures of the Euro-Atlantic world’. Their ‘message’ was answered by Secretary of State Madeline Albright during a speech delivered at Johns Hopkins University in January 2000 in which she named Ukraine as one of the four key countries with whom the US had to deepen bilateral economic and security relations.

In short order, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk responded with an energetic embrace of Secretary Albright’s position and proceeded to append a dimension to the envisioned links—coordinated responses to diplomatic issues of common concern. In June 2000, President Clinton, during his final visit to Kyiv, raised the ‘engagement’ bar significantly higher by referring to US-Ukrainian relations as a ‘strategic partnership’. The Ukrainian leadership lost no time replying; it wholeheartedly endorsed the assessment. President Bush’s inaugural trip to Europe in June 2001, and particularly his visit to Warsaw, yielded one more message on the subject, possessing what might be characterized as ‘critical mass’. The newly elected American leader expressed a clear desire to retain the term ‘strategic partnership’ to describe the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, emphatically underscoring the bipartisan nature of US support for Ukraine’s “Western” geopolitical aspirations. (1) (2)