Ukraine

Ukraine says Tymoshenko an ‘irritant’ to EU ties

July 25, 2012 10:15 am by James Fontanella-Khan

Jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko showing what she called a bruise on her forearm

Anyone hoping that the ongoing standoff between the EU and Ukraine over the detention of one-time Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko will end soon is likely to be disappointed. With national elections just three months away, there seems to be no interest in Kiev in releasing her during campaign season.

Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, Ukraine’s foreign minister, acknowledged to Brussels Blog that the former prime minister had become more of a problem for his government in jail than free, noting her imprisonment has made an “association agreement” with EU almost impossible to finalise. “We [see] this issue as a certain irritant which obviously is not helping to move ahead with a positive agenda with the European Union,” Gryshchenko said.

But Gryshchenko swiftly repeated the line that other senior Ukrainian officials have made about the Tymoshenko case: there was little he could do to overturn last year’s court ruling that sentenced the former prime minister to seven years in prison for abuse of office. Read more

Tags: ,
Posted in Enlargement, EU, Foreign policy |

Ukraine’s bumpier road to Brussels

October 18, 2011 2:23 pm by Peter Spiegel

Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovich, left, and Commission president José Manuel Barroso in March 2010

The European Commission announced today that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich was no longer welcome in Brussels on Thursday after opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison last week.

Both Yanukovich (who made Brussels his first foreign stop when he became president last year) and Tymoshenko (who attended the pre-summit gathering of centre-right presidents and prime ministers ahead of the March EU summit) have been regular visitors to Europe’s capital as Ukraine tries to finalise an “association agreement” with the EU before the end of the year.

Coincidentally, Ukrainian foreign minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko was in town on the day of the Tymoshenko verdict and held a round-table with a small group of Brussels-based journalists. Given the day’s events, Brussels Blog though it would be a good time to provide more excerpts from last week’s interview. Read more

Tags:
Posted in EU, Foreign policy |

Russia teaches EU a lesson in its Ukraine gas-for-naval base deal

April 26, 2010 1:40 pm by Tony Barber

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. Read more

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Foreign policy |

Don’t waste the golden chance of the EU’s diplomatic service

March 15, 2010 8:55 am by Tony Barber

Setting up the European Union’s new diplomatic service was never going to be easy.  Turf wars between the EU’s 27 member-states and the European Commission were inevitable, and the ever meddlesome European Parliament was certainly not going to pass up an opportunity to stick its oar in.  But if the EU doesn’t get this right, the world’s other big powers will never be convinced that the Europeans are serious about operating a coherent common foreign policy. Read more

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Foreign policy |

Tymoshenko’s defiance risks losing her friends in Europe

February 17, 2010 10:58 am by Tony Barber

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. Read more

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Energy, Enlargement, EU, Foreign policy |

FT video: Ukraine’s big economic chill

February 4, 2010 10:37 am by Financial Times

From central Ukraine and capital Kiev, a leading oligarch, a bar owner, a foreign investor and ordinary hard-hit people discuss what the new president needs to do to mend Ukraine’s broken economy. Read more

Tags:
Posted in EU |

Ukraine’s Election: A Democratic Achievement Worth a EU Reward

January 19, 2010 9:21 am by Tony Barber

The European Union should be pleased with the outcome of the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election.  Not because the politician who received the most votes was former premier Viktor Yanukovich, the most pro-Russian of the main candidates.  Rather, because the election for the most part met the very high standards of democracy, legality and fairness that the EU had demanded of Ukraine to sustain the process of bringing the country closer to the 27-nation bloc.

It was a genuine contest among a variety of distinctive candidates, and the second, knock-out round on February 7 between Yanukovich and Yulia Tymoshenko, the incumbent prime minister, will be a genuine contest, too.  Compare this with the tainted presidential election of November 2004, which precipitated the Orange Revolution that propelled Viktor Yushchenko to power.  In terms of democracy and the political maturity of society, Ukraine has progressed a long way over the past five years. Read more

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Enlargement, Foreign policy |

Lessons in Power May Loom for the EU in 2010

January 4, 2010 9:52 am by Tony Barber

What does 2010 hold in store for the European Union?  With people in Brussels only just drifting back to work after a couple of weeks of snow, sub-zero temperatures and seasonally adjusted flu, it seems too brutal to plunge straight into topics such as the “2020 Strategy“, the “Reflection Group“ and other elusively named EU initiatives of which we are certain to hear more as the year moves on.

What one can say is that the EU ended 2009 feeling rather more pleased with itself than perhaps it had expected 12 months previously.  Despite suffering the most severe economic contraction in its history, the EU avoided a meltdown of its financial sector, stuck fairly well to its rules on fair competition and free trade, and even witnessed a return to growth in certain countries. Read more

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Enlargement, Environment, EU, Foreign policy |

Czech court’s OK to Lisbon treaty won’t solve EU’s real problems

November 3, 2009 10:06 am by Tony Barber

It’s striking that the Czech constitutional court announced its approval of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Tuesday morning just as the prospect of another Russian gas import crisis began to loom on the EU’s horizon.  For even though the news from Prague is welcome, a moment’s reflection is all you need to remind yourself that the Lisbon treaty will, in and of itself, do very little to help the EU address its most serious foreign and economic policy problems.

The sheer sense of relief at adopting a new EU treaty – it’s taken eight years, required two different texts, gone through three failed referendums and caused endless trouble in countries such as the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK – risks fostering the delusion that everything will be better once Lisbon is in force.  But this is to fall into the trap of assuming that process can substitute for substance (see Monday’s blog on how the same fallacy affects the EU’s approach to relations with other big powers). Read more

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Energy, Foreign policy |