1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

I saw quite a bit of him in an official way, in his offices in Bankova, which is the name of
the street near the president’s office. I got to know him well and Ludmilla, his wife, and
his daughter, Olena – I played tennis with his daughter. I saw him in his dachas in
Crimea. We saw a lot of each other. I had a good sense of what kind of life he was
leading, and what his thinking was. His intellect was such that he was excellent at
managing day-to-day crises. He could handle the details of the immediate politics of
balancing one faction with another, and the economic issues of the moment. He also
demonstrated that he had no vision for the future. I think his sense of duty – and he did
have a sense of duty – was one that was thrust upon him. His role was not one that he
would have preferred. I think clearly he preferred the Soviet system, but he understood
very clearly that the Soviet era was over, that there was no return – “no way back,” as he
would say with a deep sigh. “There is no way back. We have to accept our fate and go
forward.”
For him, it was a nostalgic, deeply nostalgic moment, whenever he discussed or
approached basically anything that was high-tech. During our one official visit to the
United States to meet President Clinton, we together went down to Cape Canaveral to
witness a shuttle launch. The shuttle crew included a Ukrainian astronaut, so we went
through the rocket facilities at Cape Canaveral, as we had earlier in Greenbelt, Maryland,
at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). It was very evident that he
knew every technical aspect. He even seemed to drink it in. He and Volodymyr Horbulin,
then national security advisor, and long-time friend, his chief assistant – he was also from
the rocket factory at Pavlograd, – whenever we’d go by one of our big rockets they’d look
it over very carefully, pat the rocket here and there and then stand back and say, “We do it
differently. In fact, ours have more thrust and are much simpler” (this was true) “And of
course, much cheaper and we can get more payload.” Then there’d be a deep sigh. I heard
him say, “Oh…I’ll never be able to return to that. I’m stuck with the job of being
president of this new independent country where my heart is really in building rockets.”
The incident revealed a very human side to Kuchma - “my occupation gone…” in the
manner of Othello. That was about as deeply reflective as he could get.
Q: I’m kind of getting the atmosphere of this time, I mean, looking at it from a nonknowledgeable
point of view, as just a Foreign Service officer, I always felt that the
Ukraine – as long as the Ukraine was independent and truly independent, this basically
stopped Russia from getting too powerful or messing around or being ugly. But I was
wondering how, say, the Ukrainians – did they see that getting close to us kept the
Russian bear out of their backyard or did they use Russia to extract stuff from us? What
was their outlook on this, and was our outlook as I described it?
MILLER: Yes, as you described it, the fear of Ukraine becoming a part of the Russian
bear again was certainly part of our thinking. I think, in my own view, now, that that was
an error. Certainly it was the danger from the past, it was not a realistic danger of the
present. The issues of governance are very different, very different; and the idea of a
primitive Slavic nation being a threat to the rest of the world, of marching across the
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