Putin’s Progress: Ukraine picks its team, and it ain’t the West

MOSCOW, Russia — The Kremlin appears to have scored a major diplomatic coup on Thursday after Ukraine abruptly announced it is putting off plans to sign landmark political and trade agreements with the European Union next week in favor of seeking to renew its relations with Moscow.

The surprise move came after months of political and economic pressure from Russia, which has aggressively sought to pull its Soviet-era subject away from Europe’s orbit and into a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In a statement posted on its website, Ukraine’s cabinet said it had decided to suspend preparations to sign EU association and free trade pacts and ordered several ministries to “resume an active dialogue” with Russia and other countries in the Moscow-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

It also proposed a tripartite committee, with Russia and the EU, to reexamine mutual economic relations.

The decision came hours after Ukraine’s parliament failed to pass a raft of bills that would have enabled imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to go to Germany for medical care.

EU officials have made the release of Tymoshenko — President Viktor Yanukovych’s main rival, who they say was jailed for political reasons — a key precondition for signing the agreements next week at a summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

She is serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of office for concluding an allegedly unfavorable energy deal with Moscow in 2009.

While Ukraine’s three main opposition forces vigorously sought Tymoshenko’s release, Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions refused to back any bill they say would amount to a reprieve for the heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Yanukovych and other leading Ukrainian officials have openly backed signing the sweeping agreements with the EU, but critics say the authorities are more concerned about the political threat a freed Tymoshenko would pose ahead of a presidential election in 2015.

European officials expressed disappointment on Thursday at the apparent U-turn.

“[The] Ukraine government suddenly bows deeply to the Kremlin,” tweeted Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, an ardent supporter of Ukraine’s European integration. “Politics of brutal pressure evidently works.”

EU enlargement chief Stefan Fule, another advocate, canceled a scheduled visit to Kyiv. He had hoped to push through a last-minute compromise that would have allowed Ukraine to conclude the agreements.

Former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, one of two EU envoys to Ukraine reporting on the country’s progress, confirmed on Thursday that Kyiv would not sign the agreements in Vilnius.

“This is the decision of the Ukrainian government, not Europe,” the Polish television network TVN24 reported him as saying. His mission to Ukraine — along with that of former European Parliament President Pat Cox, the other envoy — is now over.

Yanukovych claimed during a working visit to Vienna on Thursday that his country isn't giving up entirely on European integration, adding that there is no "alternative."

"We are walking along this path and not changing direction," he said, the Interfax news agency reported.

However, Russia has made numerous efforts in recent months to dissuade Ukraine from pivoting toward Europe, saying deals with both sides would be impossible.

Last summer, it banned imports from a popular Ukrainian candy maker and halted all Ukrainian trade at the border for a week — a warning, the Kremlin said, of permanent measures it would have to take to prevent an influx of European goods onto the Russian market if Ukraine were to sign a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU.

Top Russian officials also issued ominously warnings that Ukraine would suffer “economic catastrophe” by turning its back on Moscow, Ukraine’s largest single trading partner.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov hinted on Wednesday that Ukraine’s economic relations with Russia were still a key priority.

“Right now the number one task for us is to restore the pace and volume of our trade with Russian Federation, and to remove the obstacles that are there,” he said before a meeting with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev, according to Ukrainian media.

The Kremlin sees its customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as a stepping-stone toward establishing a so-called Eurasian Union, which critics say would mimic the Soviet Union. Ukraine, a country of around 46 million with a GDP of about $175 billion, would be a crucial part of such a union.

However, some experts say Moscow may be happy simply preserving the current status quo, in which Ukraine — caught in a geopolitical buffer zone between Moscow and Brussels — remains more susceptible to Russian pressure.

“It doesn’t have to move forward and provoke the situation any further,” said Arkady Moshes of the Finnish Institute for International Affairs. “It has to make sure its relationship with Ukraine will go back to where it was six months ago.”

Yanukovych may have exhausted any chances he had at winning support from his European allies, especially amid growing fatigue over enlargement in the EU, he adds.

“These people will now be quite seriously disappointed, and what might happen is that they will ignore Yanukovych until the end of his presidential campaign,” Moshes said.

“This attempt to sit on the fence creates more problems than it solves.”