Informal meetings of Ukraine’s head of state with the President of the European Commission seem to have become a tradition. Last May Leonid Kuchma already had an unofficial meeting with Romano Prodi. Last Sunday he again met the European Commission head in an informal atmosphere in Bologna (Italy), a city beloved by tourists and known not only for the fact that it boasts Europe’s oldest university but also that Romano Prodi is a professor at this university. Former Italian Prime Minister Prodi repeatedly said that Bologna is his favorite place. Leonid Kuchma went there at the president of the European Commission’s personal invitation.
Not much is known about the Bologna meeting. Perhaps the informality of the two politicians’ conversation substantially affected the amount of information released. On the eve of President Kuchma’s trip it became known that after the meeting the presidents of Ukraine and the European Commission were supposed to go for a walk accompanied by Ukrainian First Lady Liudmyla Kuchma and Mr. Prodi’s wife Flavia Franzoni. All four of them had dinner “in a friendly atmosphere,” disclosed presidential press secretary Olena Hromnytska. In her version, the main issue under discussion during Kuchma and Prodi’s meeting was the current stage of the EU enlargement. According to Interfax Ukraine, Romano Prodi answered two questions worrying the Ukrainian leadership: granting Ukraine the status of a market economy country and Brussels’s support to our country on its way to the WTO. “We will work on Ukraine receiving the status of a market economy country and becoming WTO member state. We are doing this to create the infrastructure, which would unite us,” the European Commission president said. “Now when we are working on enlargement issues, it is important for us to deepen our relations, friendship, and cooperation with Ukraine. We are completing the enlargement process, and precisely at this moment we are speaking about the policy of strengthening our ties with the neighboring countries, including Ukraine,” he stated, answering journalists’ questions. Speaking about Ukraine’s place in Europe, Mr. Prodi stressed that “Ukraine is, no doubt, a European country,” adding, “But now EU policy cannot go beyond the current enlargement. I would say this is a historic moment when we need to strengthen and broaden our ties.”
In the last six weeks this was the third meeting between Leonid Kuchma and Romano Prodi. It seems that the President of Ukraine was more than satisfied with his visit to Bologna. The Ukrainian Ministry for Foreign Affairs also remarked yesterday that such informal meetings are “useful.” Head of the ministry’s press service Markiyan Lubkivsky pointed out the importance of developing informal friendly relations between our country’s leadership and the European Union as “a guarantee for Ukraine’s successful integration into the EU.”
