The 17th Ukraine-EU Summit which took place yesterday in Kyiv showed, on the one hand, the desire of the Ukrainian power to receive a prospect of EU membership and a visa-free regime for Ukrainians as soon as possible. On the other hand, Ukrainians heard from the European leaders that they must be patient and resolute on the path of integration into the European Union.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko at a plenary session of the summit, which was attended by the President of the European Council Donald Tusk and the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, stated that EU membership is a strategic guideline for the transformations in the state. “We are ambitious in our plans and belief, and namely for this reason we declare that in five years we must efficiently implement the Association Agreement and create the conditions needed for applying for the EU membership,” the president said. Poroshenko underlined that Ukraine’s European future first and foremost depends on the Ukrainians.
“I am calling upon the European Union to support the European integration aspirations of the Ukrainian nation and recognize that Ukraine, like any other European state that respects and is ready to defend common values, can become a member of the EU in the future. Of course, if all necessary criteria are fulfilled,” he said. Poroshenko underlined that the current summit was taking place in a new Ukraine, and this was the first summit since the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU had been signed.
On his part, President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who before the beginning of the plenary session of the Ukraine-EU Summit, paid tribute to the heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, delivered a short speech in Ukrainian. He called Instytutska Street a sacred place for Ukraine and an important place for the entire Europe.
“Your heroes gave their lives for Ukraine free from corruption, for Ukraine where good and honesty reign, for sovereign and modern Ukraine, where one can live decently. They made the most important step. Now everything depends on your courage, and also on your patience,” he said.
Volodymyr HORBACH, political expert at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, Kyiv:
“The Ukraine-EU Summit in Kyiv is revealing a mutual incongruity in expectations, and this may be a manifestation of the crisis in our relations with the EU. Either we have to accept the EU’s passivity and resign ourselves to the reality that our eastern neighbor is trying to impose on us, or the EU should treat Ukraine and the situation that is developing here with much more interest. So far, the EU keeps underestimating our issues and fails to see that they are, in fact, its own issues as well.
“The EU ought to recognize a moral obligation to us as we have actually found ourselves in this situation through no fault of our own and should have been able to count on the union’s sympathy and help. From a purely moral perspective, the EU is not discussing these things with us, but rather debating some technical points that were relevant before the war, but are not, and cannot be more important now than the war itself.
“After our revolution and the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian society will have to go through a stage of certain disappointment in the EU as well, a stage of understanding that it is actually, first of all, a bureaucracy, and not some politically accountable system. It will not provide a defense umbrella for Ukraine, as it is a bureaucracy which defends the interests of European bureaucrats.”
“I think that our government is doing the right thing when it begins to put pressure on them at meetings and say those things in public. We have no other way, we must put the question squarely in front of them.”
