After more than a year in which Ukraine and France have been preoccupied with one crisis after another, bilateral relations are set to accelerate with a flurry of high-level visits.
President Petro Poroshenko is due to visit France later this month followed by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in May. Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius just returned from Paris and Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin is due next week. At the parliamentary level, exchanges between both nations are ramping up significantly as France seeks to offer help and advice to Ukraine’s new political leaders on decentralization and other issues.
France’s overriding priority remains finding a lasting peace to end to Russia’s war against Ukraine through the full implementation of the Feb. 15 Minsk II peace accords, brokered with the help of French President Francois Hollande.
France and Germany have worked closely to hold European Union unity on economic sanctions that punish Russia’s annexation of Crimea and instigation of war in the eastern Donbas. France made a big unilateral economic concession by refusing to deliver two Mistral warships to Russia, a contract valued at $1.6 billion.
At the same time, the two European powerhouses have lined up with U.S. President Barack Obama in opposition to supplying Ukraine with lethal defensive arms, fearing that Ukraine’s fighting forces will never be a match for the Russian military.
French Ambassador to Ukraine Alain Remy, stationed in Kyiv for three years, said that his nation believes the Minsk peace agreement “is the only option” and one that is working well enough for representatives of all four countries – France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia – to keep talking with each other.
“It’s certainly not a perfect solution,” Remy said in an April 2 interview with the Kyiv Post. “It’s not a settlement of the crisis. It’s a step forward to enable reaching a settlement of the crisis.”
As for the possibility of a Russian spring military offensive, Remy said “it’s very difficult to make a prognosis.”
While there has been a “significant reduction” in violence since the Feb. 15 peace accord, Remy also noted a worrisome “increase in terrorist acts in cities” such as Kharkiv and Odesa.
He said France will work until the end for “a stable and lasting cease-fire” so that Ukraine and Russia can “get as quickly as possible into the political phase” of ending the crisis.
French Ambassador to Ukraine Alain Remy. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
When the shooting stops, France places decentralization of Ukraine’s political system “at the top level of our priorities,” Remy said. “I am not talking about federalization. I am talking about decentralization.” In this area, Remy believes France has a lot to offer Ukraine in light of France’s landmark decentralization movement in 1982.
As for reforms to improve Ukraine’s corrupt and uninviting business climate since Viktor Yanukovych fled the presidency in 2014, Remy said that “unfortunately not enough has been done during the last year.” Encouragingly, he said the pace of positive change has picked up since the start of the year, but much remains to be done.
“We feel some progress on the ground,” Remy said. “We still encounter many problems.” French companies are taking a “wait-and-see attitude,” he said, nothing that none has left Ukraine in the past year.
Remy said that he welcomes the prospect of Ukraine and France focusing on renewing bilateral relations through the visits of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk.
“The attention of the French public and French leaders has been drawn mostly to Maidan and the crisis in Crimea and then the war to the east,” Remy said.
Crisis has, unfortunately, dominated perceptions of Ukraine, leaving many of the people in his country with “a distorted view of Ukraine,” Remy said. “Ukraine is not just war.”
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]
