Ukraine’s chances of signing an association agreement with the EU have practically fallen to zero after the parliament in Kiev has refused on Wednesday 13 November to pass a law allowing the jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko to be sent to Germany for treatment.
That means Ukraine will not be able to sign the Association agreement with the EU end of this month, at the summit in Vilnius between the EU and the six former Soviet countries grouped together in the Eastern Partnership. The freeing of Yulia Tymoshenko was a sine-qua-non condition for the signing of the Association agreement.
Wednesday’s parliamentary session in Kiev was attended by top EU envoys Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Polish president, and the British liberal Pat Cox, a former speaker of the EU parliament. The two EU envoys immediately went into talks with parliamentary faction leaders, and came back to Brussels, where they are due to deliver a report on the situation in Ukraine.
That report will in turn be discussed by EU foreign ministers at a meeting on November 18. The ministers will assess Kiev's readiness to sign an Association Agreement at the EU's Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius on November 28-29.
The conclusion seems already to be negative. Another reason for which Ukraine started rapidly losing its credibility was the indictment on Monday of Serhiy Vlasenko, Yulia Tymoshenko’s lawyer, for domestic violence in a case which could see him also jailed for three years.
One of the former leaders of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko was condemned in 2011 to 7 years in jail for having signed as prime minister a dubious gas contract, but in the West she is widely considered a political prisoner. Since she was sent to jail, the health of the former opposition leader has deteriorated.
Germany announced it was ready to offer Yulia Tymoshenko medical treatment. Since 2011, the EU kept exerting pressure on Ukraine, with the chief of the EU diplomacy Catherine Ashton denying this to be a kind of “à la carte” sort of justice.
Yulia Tymoshenko is a personal rival of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovich's. Seen for a long time as a Moscow puppet, Yanukovich has managed to move his country closer to the EU and NATO. Yanukovich could easily pardon Tymoshenko, on health or other grounds, but, besides his personal dislike of her, he fears her competition in the future presidential elections of 2015.
Huge and strategically placed, Ukraine is also a transit country for most of the gas exported from Russia to Europe. Moscow’s pressure on Kiev is enormous, and, following punitive measures, Ukraine’s exports to Russia have already declined by 25%.
More than 60% of Ukraine’s steel, coal, fuel, chemicals and grain exports go to other former Soviet republics, with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan the most important. Moscow can also apply pressure on other fronts, such as cutting the gas supplies, as it has already done twice in the past. Ukraine is paying one of the highest prices for Russian gas in Europe.
Until now, Ukraine was systematically defended by the EU, who asked Moscow to end using trade agreements to block East European nations from seeking closer relations, or signing special trade and association agreements with the bloc.
In order to put pressure on Moldova and Ukraine, Moscow has recently banned the import of various Ukrainian goods, threatening with a full-blown ban, in order to show Kiev the potential cost of a trade and political deal with the EU.
European Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy Štefan Füle also said that “Russia's pressure on Ukraine in the issue of signing the Association Agreement with the European Union is unacceptable”.
On the other hand, Ukraine's union of industrialists and businessmen has called on Yanukovich to delay by one year the signing of the deal with the EU, saying it was damaging trade relations with Russia and Kazakhstan.