Is Putin Really Pushing Ukraine into Europe's Camp?

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, deserves the highest medal of Ukraine. He has done more for its European integration in the past few months than any Ukrainian politician has over the past 20 years. He has stopped the country’s directionless drift, consolidated its elite, given it an impetus westward and mobilised European politicians. Never before has Ukraine been so close to signing an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union, a step towards EU membership.

At the recent Yalta European Strategy conference, held in the Livadia palace, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin carved up the map of Europe nearly 70 years ago, geopolitics unfolded in real time and Ukraine was right in the middle of it. “Ukraine is on the final lap, and it must double its efforts and finish off the job…we’ve done it, so can you,” said Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister.

The presence of European and American heavyweights, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, contrasted with the absence of Russian diplomats. The Kremlin was represented by Sergei Glaziev, a nationalist-minded economic adviser to Mr Putin, whose deliberately provocative speech consisted of thinly veiled insults to Ukraine and a warning to Europe: does it really want to take on a nearly bankrupt country? It was a perfect illustration of the Kremlin’s “soft power”, designed to push Ukraine into the Russia-led Eurasian customs union, in fact achieving the opposite.

The Kremlin’s tactics smacked of desperation. Until recently it had assumed that so long as Yulia Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister, was in jail, the EU would not sign an agreement with her jailer, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president. But a few months ago, Mr Putin is said to have received an intelligence report saying that Mrs Tymoshenko may no longer be a safe obstacle to rely on.

A purported Kremlin plan proposed “putting pressure from all sides, creating a sense of inevitability for joining the [customs] union as a way of survival for the ruling elite”. Whether the plan was real or not, it led to actions: Ukrainian chocolates made by Petro Poroshenko, a former minister, were banned on “health and safety grounds”. Import of Ukrainian pipes made by Viktor Pinchuk, another oligarch, were disrupted. The oligarchs didn’t waver.

The hitherto disparate and squabbling Ukrainian elite has united behind the president. The opposition agreed to back Mr Yanukovych in parliament to pass the legislation demanded by the EU as a precondition for signing the agreement, including judicial reform. None of these laws has much bearing on Ukrainian reality.

Mr Yanukovych has not undergone a sudden conversion to European values of democracy and fair play. Like most of Ukraine’s political class, he is driven by short-term interests and seems to care more for his own power and wealth than for the country’s future. But that does not make his reasons for wanting an association agreement with Europe any less real.

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