By Vestnik Kavkaza
The situation is changing day by day, ahead of the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius. At first there were rumors on Belarus’s integration with the EU, but later the Belarusian foreign minister, Vladimir Makei, stated that the level of Minsk’s participation in the summit “shouldn’t be high.” The EU praised Ukraine, but Kiev declared that its European integration was postponed. “The last straw that broke the camel’s back was a letter from the International Monetary Fund which tied giving a loan to Ukraine within our debt to several absolutely unacceptable conditions for Ukraine: increasing prices on housing utilities services, fixation of salaries and pensions, elimination of subsidiaries in agriculture, and so on. We couldn’t fulfill these conditions,” Ukrainian Prime Minister, Nikolai Azarov, told Russia's Channel One.
Not everybody liked the position in Kiev. Yesterday participants of a demonstration put up 20 propaganda tents and 15 army tents on the European Square. They protest in favor of European integration of Ukraine. Now Ukraine is afraid of another “Maidan.”
The situation in Moldova remains difficult. “Ahead of signing agreements in Vilnius, the authorities are holding secret talks with the EU, ignoring public and parliamentary opinion and violating norms of the Constitution. Moldavia is able to build a democratic state independently without European standards imposed on it by the West,” the leader of Communists, the former president of Moldavia Vladimir Voronin stated at the Saturday meeting. He stressed that “Moldavia can become a European country only on the path to the Customs Union which gives a pot of opportunities for development of the country.” Voronin congratulated “the Ukrainian people and government, who demonstrated a political will and didn’t yield to Brussels which wanted to impose slavery on the country.”
The position is supported by Moscow. The chairman of the Eurasian Discussion Club, Roman Shkolin, stated that “a series of agreements with the EU were planned to be signed at the summit. And Moldavia is one of republics which plan to sign the agreement. The Ukrainian government declared its position that it didn’t plan to sign any agreements at the summit. And the question is about Moldavia’s mood. An attitude toward European integration is ambiguous in Moldavia. According to a public opinion poll which was conducted by the Association of Sociologists of Moldavia in October, 42% of respondents would vote for joining the EU and 38% would vote for the Customs Union. According to a Romanian survey which was presented in Chisinau on November 15th, 42% of respondents would choose the European Union, and 48% - the Eurasian Union. 10% are undecided.”
Roman Khudyakov, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee, thinks that “striving for the EU, the Moldavian authorities purposely hush up the negative factors . Their political platform is based on promises of a paradise in the European Union; in fact it is not true. So, why should they spoil a beautiful picture with ugly details and disappoint Moldavian citizens?”
Oleg Naginsky, expert in the sphere of Eurasian integration, thinks that “it seems that the agreement with Moldavia is a copy of the Ukrainian agreement, or even worse. One of main reasons which were voiced by the Ukrainian government was a lack of security for the country, i.e. actual interference with Ukrainian internal affairs. And first of all they insisted on a reconsideration of the agreement. I think there is no sense in Moldavia signing the agreement and repeating Ukraine’s mistakes. I would talk to citizens, if I were the Moldavian government, talk to businessmen directly; we had to do it in Ukraine.”
