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Ukraine: Disarmament to be Completed by July 2004 Ukraine is set to eliminate the last of its Soviet-era strategic armaments — Kh-22 cruise missiles and Tu-22 bombers — by July 2004, USA Today reported today (see GSN, Nov 6, 2002). Ukraine has been dismantling its Soviet-era nuclear missiles and bombers with U.S. funding provided through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. The United States has spent about $700 million — less than the cost of one B-2 bomber — to aid Ukrainian disarmament, according to USA Today. “It is only logical for the U.S. to render this assistance instead of giving the chance for these weapons to find their way into the hands of rogue states,” said Lt. Gen. Leonid Fursa, deputy chief of the Ukrainian Air Force. “We have too many weapons, and we don’t have the money to eliminate them. The assistance is in everybody’s best interests,” Fursa said. While continuing to provide CTR funding, the United States has suspended almost $55 million in foreign aid to Ukraine because of alleged illegal arms sales to Iraq, according to USA Today. “It’s difficult to have a crystal-clear, long-term strategy for dealing with a country like Ukraine,” said a Western diplomat in Kiev. “Their nonproliferation record in general is pretty good. .... But you’ve got a head of state proactively approving a transfer of arms to Iraq. You just can’t put that information in a box on a shelf and walk away. It has to have a major effect in the way we deal with him. So how do you also continue supporting other elements of society that you want to move forward and thrive?” the diplomat added. Ukrainian officials and experts have said, however, that the United States has unfairly concentrated on Ukraine when other countries, such as Russia, engage in the same activities. “The U.S. pays special attention to Ukraine because we have a high level of military and technical expertise, but we have a lower level in political culture,” said Mikhaylo Pogrebinskyy, a Ukrainian political analyst and Kuchma associate. “They need Russia to help them solve their international problems; they don’t need Ukraine,” Pogrebinskyy added. For example, Russia has not suffered a reduction in U.S. aid even though it is continuing to build, despite U.S. objections, a nuclear reactor in Iran, Ukrainian officials said (see GSN, Jan. 10). Under U.S. pressure, however, Ukraine abandoned a valuable subcontract to build turbines for the project, they said (see GSN, Sept. 4, 2002). Ukraine has “lost thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of our decision to abandon this project,” said Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, Ukrainian ambassador to the United States. “The impression is that the U.S. nonproliferation policy is very inconsistent, that it focuses on immediate goals without any consistent, long-term commitment,” Gryshchenko said (Peter Eisler, USA Today, Jan. 31). ICBM Fuel Conversion Meanwhile, a chemical plant in the Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, is preparing to produce 17,000 metric tons of industrial explosives by 2008 through a project to recycle SS-24 ICBM solid fuel, Yevhen Ustymenko, the plant’s technical director, said yesterday (see GSN, July 16, 2002). More than 400 tests have been conducted since July to prove the process is safe, according to Interfax-Ukraine. Construction on the facilities needed to convert the missile fuel into explosives is scheduled to begin by April and the project is expected to reach full capacity by 2005, according to Ustymenko. The project aims to eliminate about 5,000 metric tons of missile fuel (Interfax-Ukraine/BBC Monitoring, Jan. 31).
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