President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barrosso added, however, that “the time and pace for the next steps in the formalization of the association agreement will be determined by political developments in Ukraine.”

Indeed, in recent weeks, the European Union member states and the European Parliament made it perfectly clear that the agreement will not be signed and ratified as long as there is no progress on the demanded democratic reforms, with the trial, conviction and sentencing of Yulia Tymoshenko as the main obstacle.

At the same time, EU Commissioner Stefan Fuele stated that the “initialing” of the agreement can take place within a month. To avoid confusion and political abuse of these concepts (initialing, signing and ratification), it is useful to explain the legal and political difference between them.

The first important step is the initialing of the agreement, meaning that both parties initial each page of the text. By doing so, both parties officially indicate that the negotiations are finished and that the adopted text is in the final form.

Although the political negotiations are finished, the agreement is still not yet ready to be initialed as the final draft needs one last legal scrubbing. The English and Ukrainian versions must also be synchronized. Because the text of the agreement runs more than 1,000 pages, these tasks will take several weeks. No exact date is envisaged for the initialing, but both the EU and Ukraine declared their interest to do so as soon as possible.

The EU is emphatic in emphasizing that the initialing is a purely technical step which will, contrary to the signing and ratification, not depend on the progress of political reforms in Ukraine. It must be stressed, however, that this step does indeed has a political connotation.

First, rapid initialing is in the interest of the EU which invested considerable time and energy in negotiating the agreement and wants to lock in the text of the agreement. This process will make it impossible for Ukrainian industrial lobbyist or political forces to pressure the government to put issues agreed upon during the negotiations back on the table.

Secondly, the EU would like to initial the agreement as soon as possible to prevent President viktor Yanukovych’s camp, the Party of Regions, from claiming a political victory, which would certainly aid its campaign for the Oct. 28 parliamentary election. Although the agreement cannot come into force without signing and ratification, the initialing would probably be announced as a triumph of Yanukovych’s foreign policy. This also explains why the EU will try to initial the agreement as far as possible away out of the media spotlight.

Unlike the initialing, the next two steps – the signing and the ratification – will depend very much on the progress of democratic reforms in Ukraine. Signing the agreement would be a big media event during the next European Union-Ukraine summit. Unanimity in the Council of the European Union is required for the signature (i.e. approval of all the member states). As such, the concerns of all the EU member states will have to be taken into account as any one of them can block this process.

Moreover, during the next step, the ratification period, all of the EU member states would then need to ratify the agreement. This is due to the fact that the agreement is a “mixed agreement,” meaning that the contents of the agreement goes beyond the exclusive EU competences. In addition, the European and Ukrainian parliaments must also give their consent on the association agreement.

The European Parliament traditionally attaches great importance to the promotion of the EU’s democratic values in its external relations and will also make its approval conditional upon progress on the demanded democratic reforms. Because the European Peoples Party, the biggest political group in the European Parliament, has strong ties with the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, a lot will depend on the further development of the Tymoshenko case.

The association agreement still has a long way to go before it can enter into force. A classical trick to alleviate this long ratification process is to sign and conclude a separate interim agreement incorporating only those parts of the association agreement in which the member states’ involvement is not required (i.e. the aspects falling under the EU‘s common commercial policy).

Such an interim agreement will not need the ratification of the EU member states and can therefore enter into force significantly earlier than the association agreement. However, also in this case, the consent of the European Parliament is required.

In the end, it will all come down to the political developments in Ukraine. Although so many actors on the EU side can block the association agreement, progress on several key EU demands – namely, Tymoshenko’s release, fair parliamentary elections, independent judiciary – can speed up this process. This goes beyond the EU’s influence and will only be realized by a strong political will from the Ukrainian government. And herein lies the problem.

Guillaume Van der Loo is a Ph.D. researcher at the European Institute of Ghent University and is affiliated with the International Centre of Policy Studies in Kyiv.