NATO a Tough Sell at Home, Ukraine Official Says

The Ukrainian defense minister expressed confidence Sunday that Moscow would not try to block his country’s effort to join the Atlantic alliance, but acknowledged the difficulty of selling NATO membership within his own nation.

Russian officials have in the past expressed concern that NATO’s push into former Soviet territories and satellite states was a strategy to isolate Russia.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko said he did not expect Moscow to raise objections to Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and that his country posed no threat to Russia. The Kremlin’s fears about previous rounds of NATO expansion, including the addition of the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, turned out to be unfounded, Hrytsenko said.

Nearly a year after the launch of the Orange Revolution that swept Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko into power, NATO officials gathered in Vilnius to help move Ukraine’s membership forward.

Yet even as Ukraine’s government is aggressively campaigning to join NATO, officials here said public support for NATO within Ukraine could be as low as 20%, in part because of decades of anti-NATO propaganda during the Soviet era and fears that NATO membership could lead to deployment of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil.

Speaking with reporters after meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Hrytsenko said that both his government and NATO have the challenge of addressing a “lack of knowledge” about what alliance membership means.

Rumsfeld said he was confident that the government of Ukraine would be able to address the “myths, misconceptions and misinformation” about NATO membership with its people.

The NATO talks in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, were scheduled months ago, yet they have taken on some urgency in recent weeks. Yushchenko has fired several senior officials in his government, including Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in an effort to regain control of an administration wounded by infighting and allegations of corruption.

U.S. officials traveling with Rumsfeld said they were not concerned about the political instability in Ukraine, and that the recent housecleaning there was a sign that Yushchenko was serious about battling corruption.

In a speech Thursday in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said that membership would depend on Ukraine’s progress on economic, military and political reforms, as well as on the conduct of elections scheduled for March.

“The quality of the process, whether there will be a free and fair campaign, equal access to the media, unimpeded voting and an accurate vote count, will be a very strong indication of how much progress Ukraine has made in putting Euro-Atlantic values into practice,” De Hoop Scheffer said.

Hoping to better its chances of gaining NATO membership, Ukraine has increased its defense budget this year by 30%. Ukrainian troops have served in Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and military cargo planes have ferried troops and humanitarian supplies to Sudan’s Darfur region and to the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

Hrytsenko has also launched an initiative to replace Ukraine’s Soviet-era tank divisions with lighter equipment that can be deployed more easily to crisis spots.