EU Eastern Partnership summit will highlight failure of plan to check Russia
By Shaun Walker
A summit in Riga this week is likely to highlight the failure of the EU’s flagship programme designed to entice six former Soviet states out of Moscow’s orbit and into the embrace of Brussels.
The Eastern Partnership scheme was set up in 2009 in response to Russian actions in Georgia and was meant to check Russia’s ambitions in what Moscow regards as its “near abroad”, while offering the vaguest of suggestions of future EU membership.
The Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine, however, combined with even less desire in the EU to see the bloc expand further, has left the Eastern Partnership concept in turmoil, with two of the six countries joining the Kremlin’s Eurasian Economic Union, explicitly designed as a rival to the EU.
Meanwhile, Ukraine and Georgia, the most fervently pro-EU of the six, are likely to be given little in the way of carrots at the summit in Riga, to be held on Thursday and Friday.
At a 2013 summit of the grouping in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ukraine’s then president Viktor Yanukovych said he would not sign a free trade agreement envisaged by the programme, under pressure from Russia. The decision set in motion a chain of events that led to protests in Ukraine, Yanukovych’s downfall, the Russian annexation of Crimea and war in east Ukraine.
These events have loomed heavily over the Riga summit.
“We have all experienced a collective shock that we have a neighbour who is willing to use any means in order to undermine sovereign choices in Europe. We thought that this time was long over,” said a top EU official in the runup to the summit.
Amid internal EU divisions on whether the best response to this is redoubled commitment to integrating eastern neighbours or a scale-back of ambition, the result is a fudge.
“The EU will never allow a third country to dictate the policy it has towards other countries,” said the senior EU official. “However, we will act more carefully with regard to Russia in the future. Perhaps there was not enough carefulness, not enough outreach, not enough dialogue before.”
In the runup to Riga, EU officials are publicly claiming they are still as committed as ever to the Eastern Partnership. But the rhetoric shows the bloc is now extremely worried about provoking Russia and the voices of EU member states less hawkish on Russia are in the ascendancy.
“We don’t want to provoke Russia and give them one more reason to be aggressive,” said another European diplomat attending the summit. “We need to be extremely careful.”
Trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the EU were held this week in Brussels to iron out the details and time scale of the implementation of the EU-Ukraine free trade agreement.
Among some of the partner countries, enthusiasm for the project is also on the wane. Azerbaijan, aware that the EU is interested in its energy supplies anyway, has lost interest in the programme. President Ilham Aliyev will not attend the Riga summit, apparently in protest at European complaints about the country’s human rights record. Belarus and Armenia are still engaging with the programme but have become members of Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union, ruling out real economic or political integration with the EU.
That leaves Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova still keen on EU integration and eventual membership, but here it is the EU itself that is trying to slow things down. Diplomats say they are preparing to “manage expectations” of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, because several EU countries do not want to commit even to the vague prospect of future membership as part of the Riga summit. Wrangling over the wording of the summit’s statement is ongoing. Even visa-free travel, a key carrot for Eastern partnership countries, seems unlikely to be extended to Ukraine and Georgia in Riga.
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