You're reading: Bildt: Ukraine has slim chance to get Crimea back in next 10 years

Ukraine has only a slim chance to reclaim Crimea from Russia within the next 10 years, according to Carl Bildt, ex-foreign minister of Sweden and one of the staunchest Western supporters of Ukraine.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes longer than 10 years,” Bildt told the Kyiv Post in an interview.

Bildt is in Kyiv for the 13th Yalta European Strategy annual meeting that is taking place on Sept. 15-17.

The European politician has more bad news: He says that Ukraine isn’t among the top five issues on the European Union’s agenda right now.

However, he argues it is a good thing.

“Be happy that it isn’t,” Bildt said. “It means that Ukraine doesn’t have an acute crisis.”

According to him, the EU is inward-looking at the moment. As internal issues like Brexit and Euroskeptics stand firmly on the EU’s top priorities list, there is what Bildt calls “a weakening of attention” towards Ukrainian crisis and Turkey’s failed coup.

“I would wish that EU was stronger than we’ve seen it in the last year or so,” Bildt said. “But that is explained by the internal turmoil that they’re having .”

The focus will change eventually but it will take time. Figuring out internal problems will take more than a year, he said.

Ukraine, at the same time, acutely needs EU’s attention and control to make sure that its leadership stays on the path of reforms – which it has been repeatedly trying to slipping out of, blocking the key reforms like introduction of electronic declarations for public officials.

“That was messy. Not very impressive,” Bildt says of the parliament’s attempt to sabotage the declarations reform by sneaking in an undermining amendment.

Sometimes, Bildt agrees, Ukraine’s leadership doesn’t show enough commitment to the reform path. Still, he hopes that Ukraine will stay on course.

“Ukraine’s advantage is a very strong civil society,” Bildt said. “Ukraine’s problems are populist tendencies in politics and vested interests.”

He believes that the vested interests were challenged by the reforms of Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s government and names Yatsenyuk’s demolition of energy subsidies one of Ukraine’s two biggest successes along with the financial stabilization achieved by ex-Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko.

Bildt is also optimistic about Ukraine getting the long-anticipated visa-free regime with EU soon. The politician, whose wife Anna-Maria Corazza Bildt is a member of European Parliament and is on the Delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee, says that the visa-free regime may be approved by the end of the year if certain technical complications are overcome.

By saying so, Bildt is backing the words of President Petro Poroshenko, who yet again promised quick progress on the visa issue in his opening remarks at the YES Meeting on Sept. 16.

The politician is close to Poroshenko. Since May 2015, Bildt is on the International Advisory Council on Reforms, a group of foreign advisors to President Petro Poroshenko. However, Bildt told Kyiv Post that the group had only had one meeting so far, and Bildt couldn’t come to it.

Still, he offers counsel to Poroshenko when the two meet during Bildt’s visits to Kyiv.

“I give him advice even when he’s not asking for it,” Bildt says. “I give him my assessment of the situation.”

Around the same time that Bildt joined Poroshenko’s advisory board, it was reported that he also became an advisor to LetterOne, a company of Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman. Bildt says that there is no conflict in advising a Russian company and Ukraine’s president on the same time.

“On the opposite, it demonstrates that you can be a friend of Ukraine and not be an enemy of Russia,” Bildt said.