Russia concerns keep the Europien Union keen on Kyiv engagement.
As former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court three more times last week and faced a possible fourth criminal charge, Western officials reinforced their growing concerns that President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration was attempting to sideline his rival through politically motivated investigations.
Concerns that Ukraine is backsliding on democracy one year into Yanukovych’s rule are sky high.
This week, Ukrainian officials launched a forth criminal case which implicates Tymoshenko in corrupt gas dealings dating back to the mid-1990s.
Nearly a dozen of her associates are already behind bars, as blatant evidence of corruption by current high-ranking officials goes uninvestigated.
In a warning last month that Ukraine was sliding towards authoritarianism, U.S.-based Freedom House also pointed to a flawed regional election held last year and rising pressure on the few media that still report critically about Yanukovych’s administration.
The U.S. and European Union have stepped up criticism in recent statements.
Following a July 5 meeting with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, EU enlargement chief Stefan Fuele expressed “deep concern at the recent developments in the cases of Mrs Tymoshenko and other members of the former government of Ukraine.”
Fuele was referring to a growing number of investigations into Tymoshenko and her political camp launched by Yanukovych-loyal prosecutors. U.S. and EU officials have repeatedly raised concerns.
The trials are quickly becoming a litmus test for Yanukovych’s democratic credentials.
“If this process [of criminal investigation into Ukraine’s opposition leaders] is perceived to be political, it will have an impact on bilateral relations,” said an EU diplomat in Brussels.
The diplomat declined to elaborate on what measures could be taken.
But sources said the West, specifically the EU, is not likely to punish Kyiv at this point by limiting engagement.
Policymakers fear that a policy of isolation would only tilt Ukraine back into the orbit of Moscow.
Earlier this week, the European Union’s ambassador to Ukraine, Jose Manuel Pinto Teixeira, indicated that although concerns are growing, Yanukovych’s administration had not yet crossed the point of no return.
He suggested that Brussels sought to continue with a policy of engagement, saying that the Tymoshenko case would not threaten ongoing talks on association and free trade agreements between Kyiv and the 27-nation bloc.
“We do not link these two processes,” said Teixeira, who showed up for the first day hearings in the Tymoshenko case to express his concern.
Yanukovych and his government have consistently reiterated that European integration is their top priority, even as relations with neighboring Russia have soured over the price of energy imports.
Both Ukraine and the EU insist they are keen to conclude negotiations on association and free trade agreements this year.
Analysts and European diplomats said integration would continue, as Europe tries to draw Ukraine from Russia’s grasp and pull the nation back toward democracy.
But critics say that the trial of Yanukovych’s main rival Tymoshenko, which could see her jailed for up to 10 years if convicted, should make the EU think twice about signing up to closer ties.
Writing in the Kyiv Post last month, a group of respected Western and Ukrainian analysts, including Nico Lange, director of Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Ukraine, and Edward Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called on the EU to take a time out in relations with Kyiv.
“There is a contradiction between the EU’s hurry to sign a free-trade deal and Ukraine’s move away from European values,” they warned.
The EU is itself at a critical moment, with some members, such as Greece, wracked by debt crises that threaten to overwhelm their economies.
It is far from a homogenous group, analysts said, and it would take a serious violation of democratic norms to cajole it into any action against Ukraine.
Diplomats in Kyiv and some analysts argue that drawing Ukraine in closer will allow the EU to push harder on the democracy issue.
“The association agreement with the EU will bring Ukraine closer to Europe. It will give Brussels more leverage over Kyiv in order to strengthen commonly shared democratic values in the country,” said one Western diplomat.
However, the prosecutions are creating “a very poor image of domestic politics within Ukraine,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine now at the Washington-based Brookings Institute.
According to Pifer, Ukraine fatigue is setting in and, as a result, it could be more difficult to achieve the Yanukovych administration’s major goal of better relations with the West.
Meanwhile, Russia is turning up pressure on Ukraine’s leadership, hoping to pull Kyiv back into its sphere.
It is also using its influence in Brussels and the mistakes of Ukrainian leaders to cut into EU support for closer ties with Kyiv, said Valeriy Chaly, deputy director of the Razumkov Center think tank.
“I think that major script writers of this geopolitical scenario are outside of Ukraine,” he said, hinting at Russia. Chaly said the EU has set the fairness of next year’s Ukrainian parliamentary elections as a litmus test.
If there isn’t improvement on the democratic front, “it will be hard to talk about an association agreement [between the EU and Ukraine],” he added.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
