You're reading: Calls for EU membership path growing louder in Kyiv

Ukrainian leaders are intensifying calls for the European Union to offer a membership perspective, hinting that a failure to do so would threaten the signing of a key deal on deeper political and economic ties.

The stubborn pursuit of an offer of a clear path to membership of the 27-nation bloc, despite a clear refusal from Brussels, could be an attempt to deflect blame if talks on the political association agreement and free-trade deal fail, a European diplomat said.

The EU has said the agreement is unlikely to be ratified if ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is jailed in her abuse-of-office. A verdict is expected on Oct. 11.

President Viktor Yanukovych has placed European integration at the center of his foreign policy, and a chilling of relations by Brussels would represent a major blow.

Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov have in recent weeks called for the offer of a path to membership, saying it is a crucial part of the proposed association deal. EU Commissioner Stefan Fuele, however, has already made clear that, although the proposed agreement is aimed at bring Ukraine closer to the EU, it would contain no such offer.

“I hope this will not become a problem that will become an obstacle in reaching the association agreement,” he said in a September interview with the Kommersant-Ukraine daily.

But Ukrainian officials have not backed down.

On Oct. 7 Interfax quoted an unnamed source in Ukraine’s foreign ministry as saying that if membership perspective is not included into the agreement, it “could jeopardize finalizing the agreement this December.”

Leonid Kozhara, a senior Party of Regions lawmaker and deputy head of parliament’s Committee on Foreign Relations, warned on the same day that the absence of a perspective “hands an advantage to those who are pushing Ukraine away from Europe,” Ukrinform news agency reported.

He added that this could jeopardize the ratification of the agreement in parliament.

The European diplomat said the intensification of demands by Ukrainian leaders could be a way to find an “exit strategy” to save face if Europe back away from the deal in the case of a conviction for opposition leader Tymoshenko.

The diplomat added that the calls for a membership path were “a ritual performed by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry.”

Ukrainian leaders and diplomats have long demanded a membership perspective, which some experts say has helped fostered economic and democratic developments in Serbia and Croatia. The latter, like Ukraine, became independent 20 years ago, is now expected to join the union in about two years.

But the EU has refused amid internal conflicts over future expansion of the bloc.

A Ukrainian official said that pushing for the inclusion of a membership perspective in the association agreement was a way to keep Europe aware of its aspirations.

“A few years ago we decided to experiment by stopping any references to a membership perspective and see how Europeans, who found it to be irritating, would react,” the diplomat said. “After some time we started receiving signals that some in Brussels started suspecting that Ukraine had dropped its European aspiration.”

Taras Chornovil, a pro-presidential lawmaker and deputy head of parliament’s Committee on Foreign Relations, said Yanukovych was following the same line as his predecessor Yushchenko

“Once Yanukovych started talking about seeking membership perspective and eventually full-blown membership in the EU he cannot all of a sudden drop the idea all together. This rhetoric regarding membership perspective in the EU is mainly aimed for domestic consumption,” he said.

In the meantime, Europeans are saying that what Ukraine wants is not brokered through negotiations, but rather earned via commitment to shared values and progress in overhauls to modernize the country.

“This perspective is something natural, automatic, which appears if a given country is honest about its pro-European ambitions and is working hard to realize them. We do not see this to be the case in Ukraine,” the European diplomat said.