Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, center, poses with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, left, and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy at the E.U. Council in Brussels. (Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
7:47 AM
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine on Friday signed a landmark trade deal to bind itself to the European Union, a monumental step that came in defiance of months of Russian efforts to block the country from turning westward.
The agreement will have “serious consequences” for Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, a top Russian diplomat said immediately after the signing ceremony in Brussels. The decision was also sure to complicate efforts to end more than two months of separatist violence in eastern Ukraine.
It was the same document rejected in November by Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych. That decision sparked months of protests by pro-Western Ukrainians, a brutal crackdown by Yanukovych and his eventual ouster in February, leading to the greatest tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War.
More than 100 protesters died in Kiev under the blue and yellow banner of the European Union, as they took to the streets to demand that Yanukovych reconsider his last-minute decision — made under heavy Russian pressure — to reject the agreement. Hundreds more Ukrainians and dozens of Russians have died in violence in eastern Ukraine since April, when pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings and territory in an effort to align themselves with Russia, not the European Union.
Friday is “maybe the most important day for my country after independence day,” said Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, as he signed the deal in Brussels, using the same pen that he said Yanukovych would have used in November. “All of us would have wished to sign the agreement under different, more comfortable circumstances. On the other hand, the external aggression faced by Ukraine is another strong reason for this crucial step,” he said.
“Over the last months, Ukraine paid the highest possible price to make her European dreams come true,” Poroshenko said. “It must be worth something.” He called for E.U. leaders to offer assurances that Ukraine could one day become a full member and said Ukraine was committed to joining the union.
Two other former Soviet republics, Georgia and Moldova, also signed the telephone-book-thick trade deals with the European Union on Friday, in the face of Russia threats of tough consequences if they did so.
Russia has said that it views the expansion of E.U. ties to its border to be a Western encroachment on a region that has long fallen within the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. E.U. leaders — along with those of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova — have said that the deal presents no such challenge to good relations with Russia.
“The anti-constitutional coup in Kiev and attempts to artificially impose a choice between Europe and Russia on the Ukrainian people have pushed society toward a split and painful confrontation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Moscow on Friday.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said the deal would “no doubt . . . have serious consequences,” Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
The agreements will open the vast 28-nation E.U. market, with its 504 million residents, to tariff-free exports from the countries in exchange for gradual work toward bringing regulations up to European standards. Leaders in all three countries hope to follow the model of Poland and the Baltic nations, former Eastern bloc states that are now E.U. members and whose economies have grown significantly in the 23 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, by contrast, have struggled.
The agreement makes no promises of eventual full E.U. membership, a step all three countries have said they would like to take. E.U. leaders have been cautious about commitment to that measure, which would mean opening their labor market to the countries’ citizens. With 46 million residents, Ukraine is more populous than all but five of the E.U. countries.
Immediately after the signing ceremony, E.U. leaders were due to discuss whether to impose new sanctions on Russia over its conduct in Ukraine. Russia annexed Ukraine’s autonomous Crimea region in March after pro-Russian separatists there staged an independence referendum, and Kiev has accused Moscow of aiding the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The E.U. agreements are “milestones in the history of our relations and of Europe as a whole,” said European Council President Herman van Rompuy at the Friday signing ceremony. “In Kiev and elsewhere, people gave their lives for this closer link to the European Union. We will not forget them.”
The signature ceremony in Brussels took place as a temporary cease-fire in eastern Ukraine was set to expire Friday. Hostilities continued after separatist leaders agreed to the cease-fire on Monday, including the Tuesday downing of a Ukrainian military helicopter, and both sides accused each other of violating the truce.
The cease-fire’s end meant that the prospects for Friday talks between the two sides were even more uncertain. But in an apparent token of goodwill, rebels in Donetsk early Friday released four observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who were captured in eastern Ukraine more than a month ago. Four others were still being held in the neighboring Luhansk region.
Russia has applied heavy pressure on its neighbors not to sign the deals, called “association agreements.” It banned imports of Moldovan wine last year, cut off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine last week and said it would raise tariffs on imports from all three countries in response to the deal.
Those steps are likely to impose significant economic hardships on the countries, which remain closely tied to Russia as an export market. Armenia, another former Soviet republic that was also due to sign the agreement, reversed course in September when it came under heavy lobbying from Russia not to do so.
“We will, of course, take protective measures” against the countries that sign the agreement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday, Interfax reported.
In addition to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia also face pro-Russian separatist movements on their soil, and officials in all three countries have expressed fears that Russia will stoke tensions even further after the E.U. deal. Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008 in the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Russian soldiers are stationed as peacekeepers in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria. And the separatists in eastern Ukraine have also declared their intention to create an independent state.
No comments:
Post a Comment