October 9 to 11 Kyiv hosted a Strategy of Ukraine’s National Security in Context of World Community’s Experience international conference, organized by the National Institute of Strategic Studies and Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
National Security and Defense Council Secretary Yevhen Marchuk said at the conference that the development of a national concept of Ukraine’s security is “the urgent demand of the time.”
This concept is supposed to determine “the Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation, alternatives, and consequences of Ukraine’s geopolitical choices, the structure of threats and challenges to the national interests in the next few decades, provide a clear formulation for strategic directions and policy priorities in all the decisive fields of national security,” Mr. Marchuk was quoted by Interfax-Ukraine.
According to the NSDC Secretary, this strategy will become an indispensable conceptual and methodological basis for the development of many important official actions, especially Ukraine’s military doctrine. “An important task this strategy is also supposed to fulfill is to enhance the level of Ukraine’s international integration and the level of international security as a whole.”
The development of the strategy, which is the work of the National Institute of Strategic Studies and the NSDC, is expected to be completed in the first half of 2001, NISS Director Serhiy Yanishevsky told Interfax-Ukraine.
It would be logical to assume that a new military doctrine and foreign policy concept will later be developed, aimed at the implementation of the security strategy’s provisions. Today, for example, it cannot be said that all the clauses of the foreign policy provisions adopted by Verkhovna Rada as long ago as in 1993 are in full accordance with the current situation, for that situation has changed.
Incidentally, Russia has already finished work on a similar document. The presentation of a new Russian foreign policy concept, where the word Ukraine was for the first time absent, took place last June.
