Vilnius - the “historic summit” that wasn’t

Vilnius - the “historic summit” that wasn’t 

New Europe 29-Nov-13 

The Vilnius summit between the EU and the six Eastern Partnership countries has started with the participants signing impressively long documents: the technical part of initialing the agreements took hours, the documents signed by Moldova and Georgia with the EU having both more than 900 pages, with each page being signed by all sides. 

The Association Agreement that Ukraine should have signed on Friday morning, 29 November, would have been even loger: 1200 pages. 

The paradox of the Vilnius summit is that, in spite of the EU Commission’s Jose Manuel Barroso’s bombastic habit of calling any such event “historic”, this summit with six poor former Soviet countries would have been practically ignored without the EU’s arm wrestling with Russia over Ukraine. 

After six years of negotiating with the EU, Ukraine should have signed an association agreement that it initialed in March 2012, but it abruptly shelved it at Putin’s personal request, as disclosed by both Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich and the prime minister Mykola Azarov. 

EU Enlargement Commissioner Štefan Füle, present in Vilnius, is quoted as having given Ukraine until Friday morning to decide whether it will still sign the Association Agreement. “Yes, we still hope that the agreement will be signed”, said Füle, although there is little hope of this happening. Ukraine’s premier Mykola Azarov has already admitted that the government ditched the agreement under Russian pressure: “The Russian government made it clear to us that signing such an agreement means it would be impossible to discuss trade and economic relations”. 

In his turn, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has before the summit blamed both Russia and the EU for his failure to sign the agreement. He said that Russian President Putin threatened to bankrupt factories in eastern Ukraine if he signed the EU pact. In an interview with the German paper Die Welt on the eve of the summit, Yushchenko even called Ukraine’s treaty on gas import from Russia the “greatest tragedy in Ukrainian politics”. 

Ukraine pays a higher price to Moscow for gas than Germany or Poland and it already owes Russia 22 billion dollars. Twice, in 2006 and 2009, Russia cut its gas supplies to Ukraine, disturbing gas deliveries all across Eastern Europe. With one quarter of its exports going to Russia, the corrupt, tightly knit Yanukovich government didn’t want to risk a new confrontation at the start of winter. 

But, while calling Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine a form of colonialism and “an invitation to slavery”, Yushchenko also criticised Europe’s insistence on the freeing of the jailed former premier Yulia Tymoshenko. 

It is understood that the EU committed a strategic mistake by focusing too much on the Tymoshenko case and on what is called “selective justice”. EU officials have brought no clear proof that Tymoshenko’s trial had been flawed or unfair; they only spoke vaguely about “selective justice”, irritating even pro-Europeans inside Ukraine, many of whom have their own ideas about Tymoshenko’s degree of innocence. 

The forced low-key Vilnius summit exposes a serious reversal for the EU’s own policy towards its Eastern, former Communist neighbours. The EU perspectives have always been formulated in a long term perspective and in a much too technocratic way to deeply appeal to a political class that continues to thrive in Kremlin’s shadow. EU has tried the same uniform, technical approach to all its neighbours. All had to apply the same criteria and to submit themselves to the same “benchmarks”. 

In the absence of a concrete agreement with Ukraine, the EU is thus trumping up relations with the small, enfeebled Eastern Partnership countries Moldova and Georgia. On top of initializing agreements similar to the one that Ukraine should have signed, Moldova got reassurances that visa requirements would be lifted for its citizens, while Georgia is signing a supplementary agreement allowing it to participate in EU crisis management missions. Azerbaijan will also sign an agreement to facilitate visa deliveries. 

The remaining two Eastern countries, Armenia and Bielorussia, are only figuring at the summit without signing anything. Both accepted to be part of Russia’s Customs Union with Central Asian countries Kazakhstan and Kirghizia, a decision which would make the signing of an agreement with the EU legally impossible. 

Meanwhile, even as the Vilnius summit is underway, protests continue in Kiev against the government’s decision not to sign the promised association agreement with the EU.