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A. I wish that were possible, but I have my doubts. I don't think the commonwealth is more promising than the proposed union treaty.
Look here. ((He pulls a three-page typed document from a pink folder with a red tag saying URGENT.)) It's a report on the supreme soviet of Ukraine discussing the Minsk agreement; they ratified it without discussion, then added several amendments attaching conditions to the guarantees in the original document about open borders, freedom of movement and free exchange of information. So you see what's starting to happen already?
Q. Can you guarantee that during this period of transition you will keep control over the nuclear button?
. A. Absolutely, absolutely. Everything will remain as it has always been. Any alarming speculation, here or abroad, about who will have his finger on the button is groundless.
Q. But what about the notion, raised in Brest, of joint command?
A. We'll deal with that in due course. I can guarantee that everything will turn out all right. I talked with Yeltsin today, and he said to me, "Mikhail Sergeyevich, as far as I am concerned, there will be no actions on my part that will lead to confusion in the armed forces."
But the more immediate question is this: Kravchuk has named himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces deployed in the ((Ukrainian)) republic. However, he left out strategic ((nuclear)) forces. I put in a call to him on my secret line and said, "Do you know what you're doing? You're undermining the whole process."
Kravchuk told me, "I assure you, nothing will change with regard to strategic forces." I told him, "You should announce publicly that until a new defense treaty is signed, there will be no hasty decisions regarding the armed forces, and that the military will stay under a single command and under my control. Don't go introducing uncertainty into these matters! The whole world is watching. Don't confuse people!"
Kravchuk and I agreed that everything will be decided mutually and in stages. I've just sent Defense Minister Yevgeni Shaposhnikov to Kiev to work out procedures for the transition. In fact, nothing has changed so far as the armed forces are concerned. You Americans have nothing to worry about.
Q. We've heard many terms: union, confederation, commonwealth. You talk about a "soft" union. What do you mean?
A. You may have noticed that these days I'm more often asking my colleagues questions than I am providing my own answers. It is a touchy situation. I don't want to appear to be imposing anything on them. There's this false impression around that Gorbachev is trying to revive the old center and the old structures. But in fact those things don't exist anymore.
I had some questions for Yeltsin when he came to see me on Monday. "It's not clear to me what kind of commonwealth you're setting up," I said. "Both politically and legally, it's just a concept, a sketch, inviting all sorts of doubts and questions."
Nonetheless, I tried to make it clear to my comrades from the outset that there were some positive aspects to the Minsk agreement. If you compare the economic part of the union treaty with the agreement, you'll see they're identical.