Yulia Tymoshenko’s refusal to acknowledge Viktor Yanukovich as the legitimate winner of Ukraine’s presidential election is starting to embarrass her friends in the European Union. The White House, Nato and the EU have all congratulated Yanukovich on his victory. The longer Tymoshenko maintains her defiant stance, the more it will cost her in terms of prestige and contacts in Europe.
Only last December I saw the red carpet rolled out for Tymoshenko at a congress in Bonn of the centre-right European People’s Party, the biggest party in the European Parliament. Everyone was there – German chancellor Angela Merkel, EU president Herman Van Rompuy, French premier François Fillon, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, etc. Tymoshenko was one of the star attractions from the “new” eastern Europe.
Now she risks throwing all that away. If the EU wanted one outcome above anything else from the Ukrainian election, it was a free and fair contest and unambiguous acceptance of the result by the loser. This was the key to medium-term political stability in Ukraine, EU policymakers believed. By challenging the result after international observers had declared the election to have met the necessary standards, Tymoshenko did precisely what EU leaders didn’t want her or anyone else to do. As Kostyantyn Bondarenko, a political analyst and director of the Gorshenin Institute in Kiev, told me today: “She is starting to lose authority and weight in and around her own circles. If this confrontation continues, she risks losing even within her own party.”
The EU now faces the task of building a constructive relationship with Yanukovich. It is not all gloom and doom. He is likely to pay an early visit to Brussels and reassure EU leaders that he plans to keep Ukrainian integration with the EU on track. He is often portrayed as pro-Moscow and cool on relations with the West, but matters are not that simple. For example, he gets on much better with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev than with Vladimir Putin, the more authoritarian prime minister and ex-president.
If EU policymakers remain privately nervous about Yanukovich, it is because they worry about his intentions towards the Russian-Ukrainian gas trade business. Representatives of the opaque Rosukrenergo entity form part of Yanukovich’s entourage. The reappearance of mysterious middlemen creaming off vast profits from the gas trade at everyone else’s expense cannot be ruled out. The EU, having suffered huge disruption in January 2009 from a cut-off of Russian gas supplies in mid-winter, is desperate to see transparency and predictability in the gas trade.
If all goes well, Ukraine and the EU may be able to sign a long-awaited association agreement later this year. But Ukraine’s ambitions to get closer to the EU will come a cropper, if Yanukovich reverses the recent modest progress on opening up the gas business to the light of day.
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