Within Europe there are both supporters and opponents of Ukraine’s European integration – currently the former are scratching their heads, and the latter are rubbing their hands together with glee. There may be no Ukraine-EU summit on Dec. 19 after all, and there may be no ceremonial signing of the association agreement. Instead, perhaps, the President Viktor Yanukovych will fly to Moscow that day, to ‘size up’ the international agreement of the Eurasian Union which, as yet, Ukraine has no part in. Yanukovych, at least, has been rather vague about his potential whereabouts: ‘I will be where I need to be’. On Dec. 14 Ukrainian journalists still hadn’t received accreditation for the summit, but it was announced that a pool of journalists had been organised to fly… to Moscow on the evening on Dec. 19.
Possible fiasco
Poland was clearly embarrassed: its presidency of the European Commission could end in the fiasco of a Ukrainian trend towards eastern politics. In recent times Presidents Yanukovych and Bronislaw Komorowski have met twice; Komorowski flew to Ukraine with his Swedish colleague Carl Bildt [9] and the Minister for Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski [10].
Yanukovych really didn’t want to fly to Wroclaw on Nov. 15 ‘because of the fog’. Nevertheless it had to happen, and he repeatedly justified himself, saying ‘it does not impact upon the independence of Ukrainian justice’ in the case of Yulia Tymoshenko.
But Komorowski didn’t believe this and after a few days flew to Kyiv ‘to have a look at the building preparations for a memorial to the Polish victims of repression’. And again got nowhere. After these failures my Polish colleague, the Polish Radio journalist Tomasz Kulakowski wrote that ‘in Poland everyone was furious. Except former president Aleksander Kwasniewski. And I understand why it didn’t bother Kwasniewski.
Read the rest of the story here at Open Democracy.
