WASHINGTON, Jan 30 Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin and others In the early 1990s, the country's leaders called Ukraine «the main destabilizing factor,» but they assured that there would be no «Yugoslavian scenario» in relations between the two post-Soviet republics, follows from documents declassified in the United States.
The transcripts of Yeltsin's first two meetings with US President George W. Bush in 1992, dispatches from Secretary of State James Baker, telegrams from the American embassy in Moscow, and a recording of a conversation with Yegor Gaidar, the chief reformer in the then Russian leader's economic team, became public.
"This is off the record. Our main destabilizing factor is Ukraine,” Yeltsin told Bush at a meeting at Camp David.
He explained that we are talking about the presence in Ukraine of 11 million ethnic Russians and the pressure exerted by Ukrainian nationalists on the then president of the country, Leonid Kravchuk. Yeltsin assured the American leader that Moscow had no «imperial ambitions and would be attentive to the concerns of other countries.»
Speaking on the same topic, Gaidar assumed that overcoming bilateral differences would take a long time, but assured Bush that «a Yugoslav-type scenario will not happen in Russian-Ukrainian relations.»
At the Camp David summit, the first meeting between Yeltsin and Bush, the Russian president proposed to the United States to build a joint missile defense system, to remove multiple independently targetable warheads (MIRV-IN) from intercontinental ballistic missiles, and to supply uranium to the States. The first initiative remained unanswered, in the second case, the Americans proposed to remove MIRV-IN from ground-based ICBMs, but not to touch sea-based missiles, the third proposal later resulted in an intergovernmental agreement on the irreversible processing of Russian weapons-grade uranium into fuel for US nuclear power plants.
At the end of the meeting, Yeltsin asked whether the two states headed by them remained adversaries, and received assurances that this was not the case. Bush and Baker, however, refused to use the term «allies» for Russia.
The declassified materials are to be part of a collection of documents on Russian-American relations in the 1990s — «from the collapse of the USSR to the rise of Vladimir Putin,» say researchers from Georgetown University.