Ambassador Taylor's Podcast for April
Dobroho Dna!
I’m very glad to be back to see you at the beginning of this month. This has been a great month for us, but this is also the first anniversary of these podcasts. I hope you’ve enjoyed them. I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to speak with Ukrainians about what’s been going on in the U.S. Embassy, and if you have, too, then we will continue to do these.
This has been a good month for us here. The big event, of course, was the President of the United States’ visit to Kyiv. President Bush had been looking forward to this visit for a long time, and the conditions were finally right: good government, good leadership, good stable situation here for the President to visit, and he greatly appreciated the opportunity to be here.
He had very good conversations with President Yushchenko, Prime Minister Tymoshenko, with the Speaker of the Rada, Mr.Yatsenyuk, with the leader of the opposition, Mr. Yanukovych, and a good number of Ukrainians both in government and out of government.
He was able to see some of this beautiful city. He saw St. Sophia’s, a thousand year-old beautiful building that attributes to the history, the great and long history of Ukraine. He also paid his respects to the victims of the Holodomor at the memorial on St. Michael’s square.
He had an opportunity to visit a school, school #57 in Kyiv, where he talked with some students, had a very good conversation – a longer conversation than we’d expected with these students – who asked him very interesting questions, he said, about his life, about his life experiences, what he regretted in life, what he loved about his job, what he looked forward to doing after his time as president. This was a great opportunity. President Bush told me after this discussion with these students that he enjoyed that session as much as any other session that he had because he was not asked about policy, U.S. policy around the world, he was asked about how he felt about life and about his presidency and his future, so he had a very good conversation.
Then in that same school he saw a play, a skit done by Ukrainian students about HIV/AIDS, AIDS awareness. This is a very important issue for President Bush, and he was very glad to see the Ukrainian attitude.
This was a very great visit. It set us on a good path for our relations between the United States and Ukraine for the next several years.
President Bush next went to Bucharest, where he used his visit to Kyiv to prepare, to defend, and advocate and argue in favor of the Ukrainian position. The Ukrainian leadership, as you know we’ve discussed, had requested a Membership Action Plan to begin at Bucharest at the NATO Summit, and President Bush talked about this while he was in Kyiv, and he went to Bucharest with this high on his mind, and very enthusiastic and very determined to make this case on behalf of Ukraine’s request. President Bush and other allies in NATO achieved a strategic victory for Ukraine. Ukraine did not get a Membership Action Plan to begin the process at Bucharest, but it got something even better: it got a promise, a commitment by all of the NATO heads of state that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO.
They did say that there was work to be done, questions to be answered, but they made a major statement, that is that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the NATO alliance. So this is a strategic victory, a strategic accomplishment for Ukraine.
There’s a lot of work to be done. The Ukrainian government needs to answer the questions of the Ukrainian people about NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a foreign organization to many Ukrainians, and many Ukrainians have questions: Who’s in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? What is it for? What are the purposes? These questions deserve to be answered. These are important questions, and only when the Ukrainian people get the answers to these questions should they be asked whether they want to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.
This will require the government to do some serious work about an information campaign. This would be the President and the Prime Minister, but also other influential members of Ukrainian society. This will be a work, an effort that takes place over several years.
In that same regard, I went to Chernivtsi last week and opened a center, which is an information center about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, about European-Atlantic Integration, and was able to talk, again, with my favorite part of that community there which was the students at that university. A great university, 150 years old, a beautiful building, but again the students are the highlight – interested, well-informed, looking forward to this discussion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, looking forward to European-Atlantic discussion with people from Ukraine and people from the NATO alliance as well.
This was a great opportunity for me to see this fine city in Ukraine, but it was also an opportunity for me to tell the people of Ukraine and the people of Chernivtsi that there is no greater friend of Ukraine than the United States, and we look forward to being NATO allies together.
Thank you very much.