If the Greek debt crisis is teaching the European Union some harsh lessons about the design of its monetary union, no less serious is the message coming from Ukraine about the effectiveness of EU foreign policy. Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s newly elected president, agreed a deal with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia last week that gave Moscow a 25-year extension of the right to station its Black Sea fleet in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. In return, Ukraine secured a 30 per cent cut in the price of Russian gas deliveries.
This deal illustrates how Russia deploys hard political and economic power in a way that the EU can never match. Economically speaking, Ukraine is on its knees right now. The prospect of cheaper gas was too enticing to refuse. The Kremlin spotted its chance and went for it.
The accord surely puts paid to any prospect that Nato might one day embrace Ukraine as a member. How on earth could Nato contain a country that hosts a foreign naval base – a base, moreover, that was used by Russia as recently as August 2008 to support its military incursion into Georgia?
Of course, Yanukovich has absolutely no interest in Nato membership. Opinion polls suggest that a majority of Ukrainians aren’t enthusiastic about it, either. With Russia as your neighbour, this is plain common sense. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, got it right last week when she said Yanukovich was not tilting Ukrainian foreign policy totally towards Moscow, but rather was trying to strike a balance between the West and Russia. “Given Ukraine’s history and geographic position, that balancing act is a hard one, but it makes sense to us,” she said.
EU membership for Ukraine is a different matter. Largely because of the opposition of Germany and other western European countries, the 27-nation bloc has never made Ukraine an explicit offer of EU entry. Instead it has trumpeted initiatives such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and, since last May, the Eastern Partnership. These are supposed to draw Ukraine and other former Soviet republics closer to the EU without actually letting them in.
This can lead to some surreal consequences. Stefan Füle, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, gave a speech about EU-Ukrainian relations last Thursday at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kiev. Even though he was speaking one day after the Black Sea fleet deal was announced, Füle’s speech did not mention Russia once. Instead there was a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how “the EU and Ukraine face many challenges today”.
For Europe’s voice to count for something in Kiev, the EU needs to make bold decisions, just like the Russians did with the gas-for-base deal. The EU could, for example, accelerate the timetable for completing an association agreement and free trade accord with Ukraine. The EU could set a date for giving Ukrainians the right to visa-free travel in the EU. Above all, it could stop shilly-shallying and announce that, even if it is a long way in the future, EU membership is a realistic prospect for Ukraine.
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