Mark Dec. 19 in your calendar.
In case you haven’t heard yet, this is the date that the European Union and Ukraine were scheduled – but may miserably fail – to wrap up and initial the comprehensive free trade and association agreements.
The big ceremony is still formally planned to be held at the bilateral summit in Kyiv. The agreements were negotiated by both sides for years. You may have heard diplomats referring to the deals regularly at cocktail hour as the big AA and DCFTA [Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement] agreements.
But the agreements have recently been placed in doubt due to two ostensible factors: the EU’s unhappiness with the allegedly politically motivated prosecution of Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko on corruption charges, and Ukraine’s recent decision to demand a clause in the deal outlining a path to EU membership.
In the first instance, despite the obvious flaws in the trial that convicted Tymoshenko last month, the administration of President Viktor Yanukovych had laid out a credible case for its action, or lack thereof, in refusing to intervene in the trial on the former prime minister’s behalf.
But the president and his team appeared to have been increasingly chagrined by the “catch 22” which European protests forced them into. Yanukovych did not intervene, and was roundly accused of political persecution.
However, if he had intervened, he would have been guilty of putting executive pressure on the judiciary, an act unacceptable in any nation aspiring to democratic values.
While it is clear that the most expedient course for Ukraine in terms of its relations with Europe would have been to refrain from prosecuting Tymoshenko in the first place, the charges and arguments put forth by the prosecution were not, as has been frequently claimed in international media reports, trivial or procedural ones.
Tymoshenko was not merely charged with making a bad, politically -motivated decision as prime minister in signing the 2009 natural gas agreement with Russia; she allegedly forged official documents in a deliberate and calculated bid to exceed her legal authority. Allegations of such behavior by a prime minister would have merited a serious investigation in any European country.
For some reason, this has been a facet of the Tymoshenko case that the West has loathed to acknowledge. The message that the European and U.S. foreign policy establishments are implying, but apparently lack the gumption to state directly, is: “We know Tymoshenko is probably guilty [if not of this, then of some other corruption], but let her go anyway because all of you leaders in Ukraine are guilty of crimes.” The stance appears to have really gotten under Yanukovych’s skin.
Thus riled, Yanukovych and his team decided to take a hard line and refuse a compromise that would have seen the charges against Tymoshenko reclassified as a misdemeanor, allowing her to resume participation in politics. The EU responded predictably, cancelling Yanukovych’s Oct. 20 visit to Brussels and threatening to delay or scrap altogether the deals.
Yanukovych and his Party of Regions reacted to the situation with a new twist in strategy: they invented a fresh obstacle to the signing. Yanukovych and Foreign Ministry officials began to insist in public that the agreement should contain language that stipulates the possibility of future Ukrainian EU membership.
In this way, the Party of Regions apparently figures that it can tell Ukraine’s voters that the deals failed because Europe rejected Ukraine and Ukrainians, and not because of the EU’s concerns over rollbacks of the country’s democratic institutions under Yanukovych’s rule.
This position may well have some traction with the domestic electorate, helping the Yanukovych’s party minimize the political fallout in next year’s parliamentary election.
At this point, the EU should stop to clearly consider its options and interests regarding Ukraine before it is too late. The iron is hot; the free trade and association agreements should be completed now, if at all possible. Failure to sign would represent a major foreign policy debacle for Europe and a strategic victory for the Kremlin, which is desperate to see the EU-Ukraine integration process derailed.
In the short term, the EU should not allow the agreements to be scuttled by Yanukovych’s bluff on membership. The EU should realize that, with or without the paragraph that Ukraine is demanding, accession to the EU by Ukraine will remain a highly theoretical and distant proposition.
In other words, Europe has absolutely nothing to lose by granting Ukraine a membership perspective for 10, 15, 20 years down the road. It is obvious that such membership would be conditional on the strengthening of democratic institutions.
In submitting to the membership perspective demand by Ukraine, the EU would force Yanukovych out of his foxhole. Perhaps he and his backers have some other reason (for example, a backdoor quid pro quo deal with the Kremlin on lower natural gas prices) for not wanting to sign the trade and association agreements.
If this is the case, and the agreement is still not initialed next month, the EU would be granting a boost to Ukraine’s pro-European opposition forces, as the Party of Regions would then have to bear the full brunt of the voters’ wrath for squandering its chance to advance Ukraine’s EU integration.
Some members of the ruling party have begun to make remarks along the lines: “Europe is such a mess these days, they are not interested in us, and even if they were, would we really want to join such a club?” This brand of sour grapes, Putinesque logic, which implicitly suggests that Ukraine would be better off following the nation-state models of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, misses the forest for the trees. Presented with the choice of joining a “dysfunctional” Europe or a 21st-century upgraded version of the Soviet Union, it is not difficult to predict which option the majority of Ukrainians would prefer.
In terms of its European integration drive, rather than worrying about the EU’s internal issues, Ukraine needs to focus on controlling what it can control: the maintenance of its status as the most open and free society among the former (non-Baltic) Soviet states, the steady development of its judicial system and civil society pillars, and the implementation of reforms in the energy and public utilities sectors to reduce the country’s bloated consumption of Russian gas.
Any discussions about the so-called “problems” of Europe are just a distraction from the real choices facing Ukraine. If Yanukovych and his government fail to make progress, the debate about whether or not Ukraine has a membership perspective in the EU will prove to have been nothing more than a bag of hot air.
There is no reason to put the cart before the horse. The next logical step in the Ukraine-EU relationship is the initialization of the free trade and association agreements on Dec. 19, and both sides should make it their top priority to see that this historic opportunity is not wasted.
Will Ritter is a Kyiv-based freelance writer who can be reached at [email protected].
