By STEVEN R. HURST
(AP)
NEW YORK — Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko says he is optimistic
that his country will join NATO, declaring the tide of public opinion
in the former Soviet republic is swinging in favor of membership in the
Western military alliance.
Yushchenko, who faces a tough
re-election battle in January, also disputed reports that only about 5
percent of Ukrainians support his re-election in January, saying his
poll numbers show about 10 percent backing with the number rising.
The
embattled Ukrainian leader spoke Monday with The Associated Press
shortly after arriving in New York for the United Nations General
Assembly. He said NATO membership, which the United States supports,
was not a matter for outsiders, like Russia, to decide.
The
Kremlin, smarting over NATO expansion into its former Baltic republics
and Central and Eastern European satellites after the Soviet Union
broke apart in 1991, has put extreme pressure on Ukraine not to join
the alliance.
But Yushchenko declared he was determined to bring
Ukraine into the Western alliance, which was established after World
War II to counter Soviet expansionism in Europe.
"I would like to
underline that if you analyze the history of Ukraine in the 20th
century," Yushchenko said, "you will see that from 1917 to 1991 Ukraine
declared its independence six times and five times we lost it."
He blamed the Soviet Union for the reversals.
Yushchenko,
who looked well after he was poisoned under suspicious circumstances as
he successfully fought for a first term as president in 2004, declared
that 33 percent of Ukrainians support NATO membership while the number
opposed has slipped to 27 percent. He said that contrasted with figures
four years ago of only 14 percent favoring alliance membership with 30
percent to 37 percent opposed. Independent polling in the country still
shows a majority against joining NATO.
"We have good dynamics,
and month by month the number of NATO supporters is growing," he said.
"I'm a great optimist. I'm sure Ukraine will follow the path of Latvia,
Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary,
Bulgaria."
He pointed also to the Russian invasion of Georgia,
another former Soviet republic, in August 2008 as a strong selling
point for NATO membership, which includes a guarantee that an attack on
any member state will be viewed as an attack on the alliance as a whole.
The
Russians swept into Georgia, also a candidate for NATO membership,
after it sought to bring the breakaway region of South Ossetia back
under central government control.
After the invasion, Russia
declared that South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway region in
Georgia, were independent states under Moscow's protection.
Appearing unfazed by his lack of support with the January election just four months away, Yushchenko said: "I plan to win."
"I
have done some things I can be proud of," he said. "In the last four
years our GDP grew 7 to 7 1/2 percent (annually). ... We made
considerable social changes. We took care of orphans. ... Unemployment
is the lowest of the 18 years of our independence. Living standards are
the best in 18 years. We've instituted free speech, free press, free
elections."
But this year Ukraine's economy is among the worst
suffering in Europe from the global economic recession and the country
has relied on an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to
avoid a complete meltdown. The IMF has predicted that Ukraine's economy
will shrink by 14 percent this year.
In June, parliamentary
auditors reported that unemployment had risen to 879,000 people since
last year as the metals and chemical industries laid off thousands of
workers.
Independent polling shows Yushchenko likely to lose the
presidential election. Polls have the incumbent trailing both
Moscow-aligned Viktor Yanukovych, whom Yushchenko overwhelmed in the
so-called "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko. She was a close ally of Yushchenko in the last election,
but they have become bitter enemies and do not speak to each other.
