It was just a few months after the Orange Revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had risked their lives by going on the streets to overthrow a bogus, Soviet-type leader (Viktor Yanukovych) and the new authorities believed an EU accession promise would keep the movement going.
Instead, Rybachuk was shuffled from meeting to meeting with MEPs, officials in the European Commission and the EU Council, and with diplomats in EU countries’ embassies.
They talked to him about the complexity of EU decision-making and about “benchmarks” and “criteria” for financial assistance.
He left the EU capital angry and confused.
“Who the hell do I have to see around here to get Ukraine into the EU?” he told a Polish diplomat before flying home.
What happened next is well known.
For their part, Orange Revolution leaders turned on each other in political vendettas and corruption scandals.
It got so bad that in 2010 Yanukovych was voted into power. On paper, he passed pro-EU law after law. But in reality, he took Ukraine backward. He jailed opposition leaders, rigged parliamentary elections, seized control of media and made his family very wealthy.
On the EU side, the accession promise never came.
Instead, the EU drafted a several-thousand-page-long “association agreement” and “deep and comprehensive free trade agreement,” full of technical demands.
It even refused to call Ukraine a “European state” because it sounded too much like the EU Treaty on the right of “European states” to apply for membership.
EU countries also kept Ukrainian people at arm’s length.
Ukraine dropped visa requirements for EU citizens, but EU consulates became notorious for red tape and refusals.
In an incident in 2007, one EU country even made a Ukrainian children’s choir sing in the snow outside its building in Kiev before issuing (expensive) EU travel permits.
Meanwhile, in the background, Russia was making moves.
In 2008, it showed former Soviet states it is ready to use hard power – tanks and bombs – to keep them in line by invading Georgia.
In 2009, it used hard power – mid-winter gas cut-offs – to increase control over the Ukrainian economy by forcing it to pay super-high gas prices.
In 2010, it used gas threats to get the Russian navy to stay in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
This year, a few weeks before Ukraine was to sign the EU agreement at a summit in Vilnius, it called in a $1 billion gas debt and threatened a trade ban if Yanukovych put pen to paper.
The story ended on 21 November when Ukraine said No to the EU pact, citing Russian pressure.
What went wrong?
For sure, the Ukrainian elite shares blame for the fiasco.
Ukraine’s one-time foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, says its former PM, Yulia Tymoshenko, committed “treason” by agreeing the high gas price, in part, for personal gain.
EU diplomats say Yanukovych never intended to sign the EU pact because the status quo, with Ukraine in limbo between the EU and Russia, makes it easier for him to retain power and enrich his clan.
Ukrainian people are equally responsible for their own fate.
Tens of thousands of them protested against Yanukovych in Kiev on Sunday (24 November), prompting clashes with riot police, in the biggest opposition rally since the Orange Revolution.
It remains to be seen if the tents will stay in place.
But while many people in western Ukraine have lapsed into political fatigue, equally many in the country’s Russophone east never shared the EU romance in the first place.
“In order to understand Ukrainian politics, you have to remember that Ukrainians gave the English language two words: masochism and anarchy,” Andrey Kurkov, a Ukrainian novelist, told members of the European Parliament at a recent hearing.
The treaty fiasco also shows that EU soft power cannot compete with Russian hard power.
For cosmopolitan Ukrainians, the EU, an enclave of liberal democracy and open markets, is a more attractive model than Russia.
But when tanks roll in or when the gas goes off, EU officials look far away and tiny.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is fond of summoning local leaders for what Ukrainian diplomats call “man-to-man” chats.
But when he does, EU officials cannot make a counter-offer. They cannot say: “Relax: we can wire $1 billion more than the Russians to your offshore account. Relax: we will impose sanctions on Russia unless it puts the gas back on. Relax: if worst comes to worst, our military will stop Russian troops from ‘saving’ Russian passport holders from ‘unrest’ in Crimea.”
Equally, EU institutions do not know what is really going on.
When the EUobserver met one senior EU diplomat in Kyiv in 2011, he said: “What I need is an organigramme that tells me which Ukrainian oligarch is backing which political party at any given time.”
What he asked for is hard intelligence, which the EU foreign service does not get.
The Rybachuk anecdote indicates the EU also failed to compete with Russia on soft power, however.
The anti-Yanukovych protests on Sunday show that soft power is not nothing.
But over the past 10 years, EU institutions did not adapt to the rules of the game in post-Soviet Europe.
Time and again, when a Ukrainian official walked into an EU meeting, he faced negotiators used to deadlines and compromises in the Brussels environment, who politely lectured him in English about “win-win” situations and “long-term” benefits.
When Ukrainian oligarchs looked at the EU treaty, they saw a template which lets EU firms gain market share in the first years after adoption.
But when they walked into the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine’s big men sat down at tables decked with crystal glasses and bottles of Beluga vodka.
They met Russian diplomats with a background in Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, who talked to them in Ukrainian or Russian about immediate gains and threats.
Clash of two worlds
“We don’t know how to play geopolitics,” an EU diplomat told EUobserver a few days before the EU deal collapsed.
“It’s a clash of two worlds. Ukrainian politicians are completely different to us. They know the West only through visits to five star hotels,” he noted.
He added that if the EU underestimated Putin, it also underestimated Yanukovych, who has played Brussels against Moscow to get “money, money, money” to help win elections in 2015.
The day Yanukovych said No, the EU foreign service came close to using Russian tactics.
It said in a statement on 21 November that if Ukraine abandons the EU path, it is unlikely to get International Monetary Fund aid, threatening a state default.
The game is not easy, however.
The next day, Putin accused the EU of “blackmail,” adding that EU countries are planning to “stage” mass protests in Kyiv.
The same day, the EU foreign service reverted to form.
Its spokeswoman told press in Brussels that Ukraine should meet EU “benchmarks.” She added that Russia will not pay a price for its actions, describing it as an EU “strategic partner … important trade partner.”
But if there is fault on the EU side, EU countries take the lion’s share.
The EU commission and the EU foreign service suffer under the weight of their own bureaucracy and technocratic culture.
Their strategy for post-Soviet states – the Eastern Partnership of benchmarks, criteria – is not fit for purpose.
They also contain plenty of people who see Ukraine as a low priority, far lower than, say, China or the Middle East.
But if EU institutions did not give Ukraine an accession promise or visa free travel, if they did not threaten to throw Yanukovych under the bus or punish Putin for his interference, it is because leading EU states, such as Germany, France and the UK, did not give them the say-so.
Berlin, London and Paris have plenty of diplomats who know how to play dirty.
Former Communist EU countries, such as Estonia or Poland, also know how to do business in the east.
But between them, EU leaders did not muster the political will to fight for Ukraine.
EU commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso and neighbourhood commissioner Stefan Fuele could not win over Yanukovych in 11th-hour phone calls and trips to Kyiv.
EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton was too busy on Iran.
But where was French President Francois Hollande or German Chancellor Angela Merkel when Yanukovych was meeting Putin in the run-up to the 21 November debacle?
Some Ukrainian diplomats have their own explanation, redolent of Soviet-era paranoia.
When Merkel in Lubmin, near the German-Polish border, in November 2011, turned on Nord Stream, a Russian-German gas pipeline which bypasses Ukraine, giving the Kremlin more influence over former Soviet and former Communist states, one Ukrainian diplomat recalled the Yalta Conference.
The Yalta meeting in 1945 saw the UK, the US and the Soviet Union carve up post-WWII Europe into east and west.
“It’s as if the Germans have done a deal with Russia: ‘This is ours. This is yours. You can do with it what you want’,” the Ukrainian diplomat told this website.
Andrew Rettman writes about foreign relations for EUobserver. He joined the site in 2005 and specialises in Israel, Russia, the EU foreign service and security issues. He was born in Warsaw, Poland. The article, first printed in EUObserver, is reprinted with the author’s permission.
