U.S. to Press Ukrainian on Nuclear Issue

Last December, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Secretary of State James A. Baker III rushed to the capitals of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to win promises that they would quietly give up their nuclear weapons--thus heading off an arms race with their giant neighbor, Russia.

The promises haven’t held. In the months since, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have added troublesome conditions to their pledges to destroy their nuclear arsenals or turn them over to Russia.

As a result, as Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk arrived Tuesday for his first-ever summit meeting with the United States, U.S. officials prepared for tough talks on the nuclear issue--instead of the celebration of U.S.-Ukrainian friendship they hoped for.

“Obviously, we are concerned . . . (about) potentially three new nuclear states, with our whole emphasis in this Administration on proliferation,” State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Tuesday.

“We think it’s very important to nail down an understanding on that issue,” a senior official said. “We think it would be very important for the world to have a country start out with nuclear weapons and give them up voluntarily. . . . But we aren’t there yet.”

President Bush and his aides planned to show Kravchuk a good time during his two days in Washington, including a Pentagon welcoming ceremony and a visit to the presidential retreat at Camp David designed to convince the Ukrainian that Bush values his friendship as much as that of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who had lunch at Camp David in February.

“We want Kravchuk to come away with a sense that he has a personal relationship with George Bush,” the official said.

“In the early months of this year . . . we were not sufficiently attentive to the needs of a new, independent Ukraine,” another official confessed. “We want . . . Ukrainians to understand that we are serious now in dealing with them directly,” instead of favoring their traditional adversaries, the Russians.

But the relationship must first get past the nuclear issue--and both sides have strong feelings.

Kravchuk, a Communist-turned-nationalist, still says he plans to get rid of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. But his nation of 52 million people is nervous about living next door to a nuclear-armed Russia; the two countries have been feuding over who owns the Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was given to Ukraine in 1954 even though most of its inhabitants are ethnic Russians.

So, in the past few weeks, Kravchuk began demanding formal “security guarantees” from the West--pledges that the United States and other countries would come to his aid if Russia tried to seize the Crimea. Bush and Baker rebuffed that request, telling the Ukrainians that the only way they could gain real security was to work out solid ties with the West and what one official called “a mature relationship with Russia.”

Ukraine, along with Kazakhstan and Belarus, has also demanded that it be added to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which the United States and the Soviet Union signed last year. U.S. officials oppose that idea because it would complicate the treaty--and, worse, might imply that the three retain the right to be nuclear powers.

As late as last week, U.S. officials thought they had Kravchuk’s agreement to a deal under which Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia would all sign an agreement binding each other to observe the terms of the treaty. But then Kravchuk raised new demands, one official said, including a timetable for further reductions in Russia’s weaponry.

Tutwiler said Baker has been negotiating by phone with the republics’ leaders “at a pretty steady clip” for several weeks, “some days as many as three or four of them.” But she admitted his efforts have not succeeded.