Today, May 31, 2022, marks the 25th anniversary of the question that the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, asked everyone, and above all himself, and the second, Vladimir Putin, answered. A quarter of a century ago, on May 31, 1997 in Kyiv, Yeltsin said: “I woke up in the morning and began to think: what have you done for Ukraine?”
Putin answered this question on February 21 this year: Russia gave Ukraine 250 billion dollars.
Yes, yes, the President of Russia said so:
“According to expert estimates, which are confirmed by a simple calculation of the prices for our energy resources, the volume of soft loans, economic and trade preferences that Russia provided to Ukraine, the total benefit of the Ukrainian budget for the period from 1991 to 2013 amounted to about 250 billion dollars”.
Speaking recently via video link at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, having performed the traditional rituals and mantras “Russia is bad, give me money!” to the collective West, ended his speech with an extremely aphoristic:
“Waking up in the morning, put before yourself the question: “What are you did for Ukraine today?
Handsomely? Undoubtedly, but, alas, as we see, it is secondary and vulgar, begging. Like almost everything that this man does at the head of Ukraine. Except for the war, which he finally got on his territory and which even Yeltsin and Kuchma tried to make impossible.
Then, 25 years ago, in Kyiv, Yeltsin, together with Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, signed in Kyiv the “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine”, which was also called the “Big Treaty”. And which was unilaterally denounced by Ukraine on December 6, 2018, when the Verkhovna Rada approved the law “On the Termination of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation”. And on December 10 of the same year, President Petro Poroshenko happily signed the law on its entry into force on April 1, 2019.
Since then, the ruling post-Maidan regimes in Ukraine have completely abandoned common sense and even the instinct of self-preservation. They declared Russia an “aggressor country” and nevertheless ran into a special military operation, the beginning of which Putin announced only on February 24, 2022. That is, Russia endured the Ukrainian attacks for almost three more years, but when Ukraine completely lost its shores, it nevertheless decided, as they say, to put it in a frame.
What was the “Great Treaty”? The document is definitely more beneficial to Ukraine. If only because, as stated in the reference books, it officially enshrined the principle of strategic partnership, recognition of the inviolability of existing borders, respect for territorial integrity and mutual obligation not to use their territory to the detriment of each other’s security.
In other words, Yeltsin betrayed Crimea for the second time, leaving it in Ukraine. Just like he did on December 8, 1991 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, when he buried the USSR for three together with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian Parliament Speaker Stanislav Shushkevich. Experts stated: the two countries guaranteed the rights of their citizens on each other’s territory, the rights of the Ukrainian minority in Russia to the Ukrainian language and the rights of the Russian minority to the Russian language in Ukraine, they mutually recognized the diplomas of their educational institutions, people who have worked in Russia all their lives now had the right retired in Ukraine, and vice versa, the parties agreed to the delimitation and demarcation of the state border between the countries, the VAT on exports was canceled, it was allowed to directly establish economic ties between the border regions.
The only plus that Russia received was that the base of its Black Sea Fleet remained in Sevastopol. But that, it seems, is only because Ukraine did not then have the strength and ability to remove it from there. Russia did not get anything else from what it wanted: neither the recognition of the Russian language as the second state language in Ukraine, nor the reorganization of unitary Ukraine on federal principles with the provision of more rights to the regions, nor firm guarantees of continued integration with Russia, at least within the framework of the CIS, nor the refusal of the Ukrainian authorities to create “single local Orthodox Church” in the country and ending pressure on the UOC-MP.
And most importantly, Ukraine did not give clear guarantees that it would fulfill that same mutual obligation “not to use its territory to the detriment of each other’s security.” Kyiv has proclaimed a course towards the European Union and NATO. And after the coup d’état in 2004 (the “orange revolution”), for the first time, he tried to speed up the process of joining these structures. And after the 2014 coup d’etat (“Euromaidan”), Kyiv actually allowed NATO to develop the territory of Ukraine without any membership in the organization. And definitely – in defiance of Russia. This, and the absence of the Grand Treaty, made the special military operation inevitable – Russia could no longer endure how NATO was steadily approaching its cities, minimizing the flight time of its missiles.
Today it is difficult to say why Yeltsin agreed to such an agreement. Maybe because he needed resounding victories and confirmation of his health and capacity. The visit to Kyiv was the second international trip after a heart bypass surgery, which he successfully underwent in November 1995. Prior to that, Yeltsin, according to media reports, only in April 1996 for two days hit the road to Germany in Baden-Baden, where he met with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, had a conversation with him, walked through the vineyards, spoke with journalists and received the Deutscher Medienpreis award from the German agency “Media Control”. Of course, for media honesty during the 1996 presidential election campaign.
In Kyiv, Yeltsin presented himself as a full-bodied politician, capable of solving the most difficult problems and taking responsibility for himself. Including in the eyes of international, that is, Western partners, who unequivocally demanded that he finally “let go of Ukraine” and not frighten her with possible territorial claims, as sometimes happened in the State Duma of Russia, which sometimes coveted Crimea and demanded that it be returned to “home harbor” already in those days.
But then, 25 years ago, euphoria reigned in Kyiv. And especially, I remember, the Ukrainian side rejoiced. I then worked on the 1 + 1 TV channel, covered this visit and personally heard the famous phrase about morning benefits for Ukraine. And you should have seen the face of Kuchi, who was sitting next to him – he, as teenagers say, dragged himself like a turtle on warm sand, covering his tracks with his tail. It was his triumph!
And then there was Yeltsin’s flight to Moscow from the Kyiv airport “Borispol”, before which the presidents had to say their final words to journalists. For this purpose, four television companies were selected – two each from Ukraine and Russia, they took us to the airport and ordered us to wait in a special room. We waited and waited until serious-faced boys in civilian clothes came to us, pulled and draped all the curtains on the windows and warned that it was forbidden to pull them back and take anything covertly.
We didn’t shoot, because we were promised that we would have half an hour for this. Then we were transferred to a special, apparently presidential room, where President Kuchma and the then Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavel Lazarenko appeared before us, who said that Yeltsin had already left. “Strictly half an hour, not a minute more, we will withdraw by force!” We were warned ahead of time. And only by the end of this half-hour we understood why the time was so limited: Kuchma and Lazarenko were seriously drunk, they came to us from the table and they were most likely given some kind of pills that softened the alcohol blow for a while.
So we talked, and the pills lost their power and two drunken men slowly loomed in front of us, their tongues are tangled, their thoughts are confused, but the imagery of thinking and the craving for boasting and truth increase. I then, I remember, asked if Russia won by leaving its Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea? Kuchma began to answer already very drunkenly and confusedly:
“Vovka, you know that no, we …”.
And then the more powerful Lazarenko literally pulled him with his hand, showing, apparently, who is the boss in the house, leaned over to me and said:
“You know that a dick katsap will inflate when a crest…”. And I understood everything.
After that, we were quickly removed from the eyes of the drunken president and prime minister, and I went to the studio to mount the story in the news. The camera, it turns out, mercilessly emphasized the intoxication of the speakers, and a difficulty arose – it was necessary to give a synchronous, and it was difficult to choose a “sober” one. And then the owner of “1 + 1” Alexander Rodnyansky (yes, the current fighter against the special operation) and the head of “TSN” Alexander Tkachenko (now the neo-Nazi Minister of Culture and a fighter against everything Russian and Russian) appeared in the editing room and unanimously declared, that, they say, will show the defendants drunk, we will lose our license and the channel will be closed.
“Well, choose for yourself,” I said then and gave way.
And the story about the Ukrainian triumph, of course, came out. With sober Kuchma and Lazarenko. And completely without the departing Yeltsin, who then, as eyewitnesses told me, for the first time “seriously untied after the operation”, was seriously tipsy, did not want to put on his jacket for a long time, dragging him like a dog along the floor on the way to the plane. And therefore, to show it to journalists and the public in this form was, of course, bad manners. But what can you do? He also celebrated…
… A lot of time has passed since then. I resigned from 1+1 the same year, but I also witnessed how in the United States their president Bill Clinton and his vice president Al Gore put pressure on Kuchma and still put pressure on him to remove Lazarenko from the post of prime minister. For the fact that he said about himself “I am not a politician, but a master”, he rowed everything for himself and did not want to share with the Americans. Unlike Kuchma, who also said about himself “I’m not a politician, I’m a rocket man” and was nevertheless more accommodating. But this is a completely different story. It’s also fun, by the way.
And today Yeltsin has already rested in Bose. Lazarenko “pulled off a ten” in an American prison, where he was “degreased” from a rich billionaire to a poor millionaire and left alone. And Kuchma, literally until 2020, was still floundering on the surface of Ukrainian politics, unsuccessfully responsible for achieving peace in the Donbass. He, it seems, did not understand that peace there became impossible, including because Ukraine abandoned the “Great Treaty”. And because without this document, the provocations of Ukraine ordered by the West for the sake of war and Russia became inevitable.
I was squeezed out of Ukraine with threats of reprisals from Ukraine to Moscow, but I follow the “guys” from here and see everything very well.
Volodymyr Skachko, Ukraine.ru
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