Tymoshenko arrest changes everything

Published Aug. 6, 2011 at 2:11 am

The Viktor Yanukovych administration is banking on Ukraine being of sufficient strategic importance to the United States and European Union, and too big to push around, to have sanctions imposed against them.

They are wrong about the US as the Barack Obama administration resembles George Bush Senior in the early 1990s in his Russia-reset and Russia-first policy.

They are right about the EU for whom Ukraine is the most important member of the Eastern Partnership. The Deep Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) is the most ambitious EU treaty since the Association Agreements the EU signed with Eastern Europe in the 1990s. If EU policy to Ukraine fails the entire Eastern Partnership is discredited and disintegrates.

This is where the political trials in Kyiv could play a major role. With ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko imprisoned, the signing of the DCFTA will be postponed. It was already going to be difficult to ratify the DCFTA as the majority of the European Parliament (or four political groups) are critical towards democratic regression in Ukraine while 17 out of 27 EU members have heads of state who are from parties who are members of the European Peoples Party.

The Yanukovych administration will not give her a suspended sentence because it wouldnot neutralize Tymoshenko completely as she will campaign around Ukraine as a martyr. She is very good at doing this and excels at being a mobiliser of crowds, as seen in the 2004 Orange Revolution.Imprisonment prevents her from running in the 2012 and 2015 elections which means that the OSCE could not call these elections “democratic.” If elections in Belarus are not “democratic” because opposition leaders are in jail then how can they be “democratic” if Tymoshenko is in jail or not allowed to stand?
Taras Kuzio is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC