You're reading: Nordic states to hold up EU signing with Ukraine

While a handful of Eastern European countries are eager to sign an association agreement with Ukraine in 2013, there is strong opposition from fellow European Union members who say they won’t sign the deal until Ukraine improves its record on basic rights, rule of law and economic reforms.

Ukraine’s relations
with the 27-member union deteriorated over the last year and a half
after the jailing of opposition politicians, including former Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in what some see as show trials.

Ties further
suffered from a dodgy parliamentary vote in Ukraine, which was
described by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
election observation mission as a “step backwards.”

But some EU members
seem willing to put aside such problems to prevent the country from
sliding into Russia’s orbit, a position that leaves others
unconvinced.

A recent story
published by the EUobserver, a respected Brussels-based news website,
cited unnamed senior EU diplomats who said Sweden, Finland, Denmark
and the Netherlands are against signing the deal – a critical
problem for Ukraine given that each EU state has veto power under
such circumstances.

The lack of EU consensus
is confirmed by the fact that Brussels has not yet expressed its
position on Ukraine’s election.

The EU capital’s new
post-election strategy toward Kyiv should come during a Dec. 10
meeting of EU foreign ministers. A previous meeting on Nov. 19 failed
to produce results.

The ministers will discuss
the criteria on which to base their assessment of how Ukraine
fulfills the three benchmarks the EU put forward – free and fair
elections, solving the problem of selective justice and returning to
the path of economic reform.

Another key meeting is
scheduled to take place in the European parliament on Dec. 12-13,
when the EU legislative body will discuss and adopt a resolution on
Ukraine.

In the meantime,
Ukraine and some of its neighbors in the EU are campaigning to get
the deal done next year.

Fearing Ukraine
might join the Moscow-led Customs Union, four EU member states – Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic –
are eager to sign the deal as soon as next fall during the
anticipated EU-Ukraine summit in Vilnius under the Lithuanian
presidency in the EU.

In an interview to
gazeta.ua news website, the Slovak Ambassador in Ukraine Pavol
Hamžík said he did not find
the recent parliamentary vote to be too problematic and believes the
EU should nonetheless move forward with Ukraine.

“We
do not dramatize the situation in Ukraine,” he argued. “It
appears that the election results satisfy all political forces.
Parliamentary opposition is strong enough, it is pro-European.
Authorities also call themselves (pro-European). So there is the
possibility of dialogue and movement towards the association
agreement.”

Jan Tombiński, EU
Ambassador to Ukraine, also hit an optimistic note. “I confirm and
reiterate the wish that in some months we are there to sign this
agreement and then work very hard on its implementation,” he said
at a Kyiv civil society conference on Nov. 21.

Oleh Voloshyn,
spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, says signing the deal
will help Ukraine become more democratic. “This association
agreement will strengthen democratic institutions, democratic
traditions in Ukraine,” Voloshyn said.

Oleksandr Sushko,
research director at the Kyiv-based Institute for Euro-Atlantic
Cooperation, is among those who believe that signing the deal could
support democracy in Ukraine. But the risks of not signing the deal
are greater than (if) it is signed,” he said, specifically raising
the prospect of Ukraine joining the Russian-led customs union.

Andrew Wilson from
the European Council on Foreign Relations in Brussels, however, calls
this a bluff to get easy concessions. “Only
a handful of oligarchs, mainly the so-called gas
lobby
, would see gains in
such a union,” he
recently wrote
.

Insiders say the
Nordic countries are seen as unlikely to compromise on the values
question.

“The Nordic
countries are strongly against signing the association agreement with
Ukraine in the nearest future and under current circumstances,
because it will look like ‘more-for-more’
tactics, that is more violation of basic freedoms for more
(concessions) from the EU,” said a European diplomat who asked for
anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly.

The diplomat said
some EU countries wrongly believe ratification provides leverage over
Ukraine. “This is a miscalculation,”
the source said. “The free trade zone with the EU is the only thing
that Ukraine’s current leadership, which is heavily represented by
export-dependent oligarchs, wants. (Ukrainian leaders) are not
interested in implementing the political part of the agreement,
because it would limit their powers.”

Kyiv Post staff
writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at
[email protected]