Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara says that Ukraine has three delegations dispatched to three geopolitical centers of the world this week. They all have a common aim: to bring back new deals and money, but the likelihood of successful missions is low.
President Viktor
Yanukovych left for China on Dec. 3, leaving the country when thousands
continued to protest in the streets against the government policy and violence.
First Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov will go to Brussels to negotiate a road
map to singing an association agreement with the European Union. And a deputy
foreign minister went to Russia to prepare the ground for Yanukovych’s visit to
Moscow at the end of the week.
“It was not an easy
decision by the president to leave Kyiv now,” Kozhara said at a Dec. 4
briefing. Yet he said the state visit to China was planned a year ahead, and up
to 12 governmental and business agreements were expected to be signed. He did
not elaborate.
“We see in China the
potentially biggest market for Ukrainian agriculture products, China is also a
very big market for IT, heavy machinery, aircraft industry, space industry,
military technical cooperation,” he said.
Bloomberg reported in
October that Ukraine was close to getting a $3 billion loan under government
guarantees from the Export-Import Bank of China to resume irrigation of
farmland in southern Ukraine. The talks were “in the final stage,” Ukrainian
Agriculture Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk told the agency. The project is
scheduled to begin in 2014 and will help supply water to 1.2 million to 1.4
million hectares of farm land, he said.
But Kozhara could not
confirm if this deal would be closed.
Yanukovych’s next trip
to Moscow does not look like it would be easy, either. Prime Minister Mykola
Azarov said last month that Ukraine will start negotiations with Russia.
“As of early December,
we will sit at negotiations table and plan a road map of restoring our
relationship, primarily in trade and economic relations,” Azarov said at a Nov.
26 briefing. He said Ukraine lost $6.5 billion worth of trade with Russia this
year because of trade sanctions.
He said the government
will also make a new attempt to renegotiate expensive gas import agreements,
which it has been unsuccessfully trying to do since 2010. But the signs coming
from Russia ahead of the meetings are not looking hopeful.
Gazprom CEO Alexei
Miller on Dec. 4 reminded that Ukraine still owed over $2 billion for gas. “At
this point, the debt owed by Naftogaz Ukrainy for gas delivered in August,
October and November is $2.02 billion. We are looking for ways to resolve this
problem. We are negotiating, but no agreement has been reached so far,”
Miller said, according to Interfax-Ukraine.
Deputy Prime Minister
Yuriy Boyko met with Miller in Moscow, and the two sides “discussed current
issues of cooperation in the gas sector,” according to Gazprom’s statement. No
progress was reported.
Oleg Ustenko, executive director of The Bleyzer Foundation, at the Kyiv
Post conference on Dec. 3 described the government’s trips to Russia and China
as “shopping” for cash, and said the government continues to live under an
illusion that it can close a budget gap without turning for help to the
International Monetary Fund. Ukraine’s budget gap is currently estimated at 8
percent of gross domestic product.
“It’s true that the
IMF is crucially important for the government, but it’s also true that they’re
still considering that they can manage,” Ustenko said. Ustenko says that
government will increasingly start to realize that there will be no financing
available on the IMF scale, and will be increasingly more inclined to cooperate
with the IMF.
But IMF representative
in Kyiv Jerome Vacher said that there is no negotiating mission planned at the
moment.
Arbuzov’s upcoming visit to
Brussels, which is supposed to negotiate a new road map for signing the
association agreement with the EU and lay out compensations for Ukraine, is
also unlikely to succeed.
In a recent phone call
with President Yanukovych about the situation in Ukraine, European Commission
President Jose Manuel Barroso, while agreeing to receive a delegation from
Ukraine, emphasized
the need to investigate and punish the brutal beatings by the police of peaceful
protesters on Nov. 30, followed by beatings of journalists and more protesters
during clashes on Dec. 1.
But as the foreign visits started on Dec. 4, no resignations in the
police were announced, while most criminal cases pressed by the government were
against the strikers. A court on Dec. 3 convicted nine people to two months in
prison.
