Summit of Failure: How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine
Yanukovych was primarily interested in the right-hand column. When he needed money, he had always been in the habit of simply taking it -- from everyone: from his own people; from the Russian Federation; and, of course, also from the EU. Previously, during a stint as prime minister, he had mostly used his power to secure lucrative posts for members of his own clan. Indeed, Yanukovych had enjoyed a dubious reputation dating back to the clan wars in his home region, the Donbass coal basin. Even if he claimed the contrary, he never cared much about Western values. But would Yanukovych really do anything for money?
On Dec. 20, 2010, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office had filed charges against Yulia Tymoshenko accusing her of misuse of state funds. It appeared as though Yanukovych was seeking to get a former political opponent out of the way.
Füle, who is Czech, studied in the 1980s at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an institution for the Soviet elite and he speaks fluent Russian, obviating the need for an interpreter. He reminded Yanukovych of his promise to reform the Ukrainian justice system. The EU even had a term, "selective justice," for the arbitrariness that prevailed in the Ukrainian legal system. Füle also reminded Yanukovych that, as expansion commissioner, it was also his job to convince EU member states of why Ukraine should belong to Europe.
Events then proceeded as Füle feared they would. In May, the Prosecutor General's Office indicted Tymoshenko a second time. At this point, she had already been in pre-trial detention for three months. It started to look as though she would get convicted. Füle asked if he could visit her in jail.
The EU had transformed Tymoshenko into a symbol of whether Ukraine was indeed compatible with Europe. If she were released, Kiev would be given the seal of approval for its judiciary. If she remained imprisoned, Ukraine would continue to be stigmatized as a country with an arbitrary legal system.
Two months ago, the European Union and Ukraine officially approved the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement. Brussels had begun paving the way for the "Eastern Partnership" four years ago. The partnership envisions tight political and economic ties between the EU and the six former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The agreements had actually been envisioned as consolation prizes for countries that were unlikely to be granted EU membership at any time in the foreseeable future.
Like so many things in the EU, the Eastern Partnership is also a compromise. The Eastern Europeans,
particularly the Poles, would prefer to give Ukraine full EU membership. At the very least, they want some kind of buffer placed between their countries and Moscow. But Southern and Western Europeans are not interested in an additional enlargement round. The result is a complicated situation for EU bureaucrats. Sometimes they get so caught up in policy that they fail to see the forest for the trees.
"You will have to find a solution that is also acceptable to Putin," Pinchuk warned the commissioner. "Things could get difficult with the Russians." But Füle believed he knew the Russians better.
"It's always difficult with the Russians," he said.
The Kremlin then proposed to Brussels that negotiations be conducted between the EU and the Eurasion Union -- directly between the two blocs of power. But European Commission President José Manuel Barroso refused to meet with the leaders of the Eurasion Union, a bloc he considered to be an EU competitor.
"One country cannot at the same time be a member of a customs union and be in a deep common free-trade area with the European Union," the commission president said on February 25. He said that Kiev had to decide which path it wanted to take. The message was clear: Kiev had to choose either Brussels or Moscow.
"We will respect whatever choice the Ukrainian government and people make...," he said. "But there are facts that speak for themselves." The statements are far from friendly. Whereas they may have sounded like a promise to those listening in the hall, Putin's comments were both a slap in the face and a threat to the Ukrainian government.
Moscow imposed other measures in an escalation between Moscow and Kiev dubbed by the international media as the "chocolate war". Although the term may sound sweet, the realities were anything but nice.
Ukraine was facing insolvency while, at the same time, Russia was busy heaping pressure on Kiev. Although Russian sanctions had long since indicated otherwise, Berlin and Brussels were not taking Ukrainian concerns, and the country's fear of Russia, seriously. The Ukrainians, they seemed to think, were simply interested in driving up the price for their ultimate signature.
The closer the summit approached, the greater the EU pressure became on the Germans to cease focusing so much attention on the case of Yulia Tymoshenko. The Poles in particular insisted that the issue could not be allowed to torpedo the association agreement. Behind closed doors, President Bronisaw Komorowski said:
"Never again do we want to have a common border with Russia." And Germany began to revisit its position as a result, but it was much too late.
Putin had nothing but disdain for Yanukovych, loathing the Ukrainian leader's constant wavering. In the past, he had often left Yanukovych waiting for hours like a supplicant and the Kremlin was convinced of Yanukovych's unreliability. Though the man from eastern Ukraine was much less pro-European than his predecessor, he had continued to stubbornly resist requests from Moscow.
During Putin's meetings with Yanukovych in Sochi and Moscow, Putin promised subsidies and economic benefits worth around $12 billion annually, including discounted prices for oil and natural gas. Conversely, he also threatened to launch a trade war that would drive an already fragile Ukrainian economy to ruin
Barroso was visibly nervous. Ukraine's economy, he said, would profit considerably in the long term from closer ties with the EU. "Poland and Ukraine had roughly the same gross domestic product when the Berlin Wall fell. Now, Poland's is roughly three times as large,"
When the German delegation, under Merkel's leadership, met with Yanukovych the next morning for one final meeting, everything had already been decided. They exchanged their well-known positions one last time, but the meeting was nothing more than a farce. In one of the most important questions facing European foreign policy, Germany had failed.
But Putin, too, had miscalculated. That same night, thousands of demonstrators collected on the Maidan (Independence Square) in Kiev. Three months later, Yanukovych would be forced to flee the country and Putin would annex the Crimean Peninsula. Thus far, the conflict has claimed the lives of 4,000 people and eastern Ukraine remains gripped by war.
Russia and Europe talked past each other and misunderstood one another. It was a clash of two different foreign policy cultures: A Western approach that focused on treaties and the precise wording of the paragraphs therein; and the Eastern approach in which status and symbols are more important.
http://www.spiegel.de/international...ings-between-europe-and-russia-a-1004706.html
Good luck trying to hold back Germans without the US and British this time to help with a second front and carpet bombing
