What were Ukraine’s relations with the West and Russia in the first decade after independence?
The US government's treatment of Ukraine on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation encapsulated the policies that the administration of George H. W. Bush pursued toward the post-Soviet states.
The American authorities saw the region as a potential tinderbox and supported Russia as the regional power capable of maintaining peace and democracy there. Yet Yeltsin's Russia was moving quickly in a direction away from peace and democracy. After his economic reforms faltered and living standards collapsed in the early 1990s, Yeltsin found himself facing an opposition-dominated parliament, which he ordered his tanks to shell in 1993. After a brief ban, the Communist Party came back with a vengeance, its candidate coming a close second to Yeltsin in the first round of the 1996 presidential elections. Beginning in 1994, the inefficient Russian army became bogged down in the rebellious Muslim region of Chechnya. Amid all this turmoil, the Yeltsin administration increasingly embraced Russian nationalist rhetoric. The Russian position was also becoming openly anti-Western, which became clear by the time of the Kosovo crisis in 1998-1999.Starting in Bill Clinton's first term in the mid-1990s, US foreign policy gradually shifted from reliance on Russia to building strong relations with Ukraine as the key element in the new Eastern European security architecture. The conservative commentator Zbigniew Brzezinski succinctly summed up this new vision of Ukraine's strategic importance by saying that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.“3 In the late 1990s, Ukraine became the third-largest recipient of American financial aid, surpassed only by Israel and Egypt. President Clinton made two official visits to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma reciprocated with two official visits to the United States. It was also during Kuchma's first term (1994-1999) that Ukraine became the first CIS country to sign a cooperation agreement with NATO as part of the Partnership for Peace program (1995) and announced its desire to join the European Union (1996).
Improved relations with the West brought a number of benefits to the Ukrainian elites, not least of which was additional leverage in their difficult negotiations with Russia.
In the early 1990s, many Russian politicians questioned Ukrainian territorial integrity, especially its control over the Crimean Peninsula, which had been transferred from the Russian SFSR in 1954. In 1993 the Russian parliament (which was about to be dissolved and shelled by Yeltsin for unrelated reasons) voted to reclaim the Crimean naval base of Sevastopol as Russian territory. Talks between Russia and Ukraine over the question of control of the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet based there dragged on for years. Finally, in 1997, Kuchma skillfully exploited Russian anxieties about Ukraine's developing contacts with NATO to normalize Ukrainian-Russian relations. Shortly after the first joint NATO-Ukrainian military exercises in the Crimea, Ukraine and Russia signed a comprehensive treaty of friendship and cooperation. This June 1997 agreement repeated Russian recognition of Ukraine's territorial integrity and also divided the Black Sea Fleet between the two countries.As Kuchma's second term began in 1999, it seemed that Ukraine had succeeded in playing Russia and the West against each other in order to gain maximum benefits for the Ukrainian state and its elites. Ukraine's foreign trade, too, diversified successfully. Trading almost exclusively with other former Soviet republics in 1991, Ukraine arrived at a nearly equal division of its foreign-trade balance by the early 2000s: approximately one-third representing trade with Russia and other CIS states, another third with the European Union, and the final third with the rest of the world. However, Ukraine's continued reliance on imported Russian energy remained a glaring imbalance, which left it vulnerable to Russia's manipulation of the energy market for political purposes.