By Vestnik Kavkaza
The second day of the Riga summit of the Eastern Partnership is taking place today. The project requires political associations and economic integration between the EU and Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The last three countries signed association agreements with the EU last year, but still it was clear ahead of the summit that the EU wouldn’t offer Ukraine and Georgia a visa-free regime, as was expected by Kiev and Tbilisi. The European Commission considered that Ukraine and Georgia have achieved significant progress on the way to a visa-free regime, but they have to do a lot for liberalization of the visa-regime in various spheres. Moreover, it is obvious that the problem of Crimea will somehow be mentioned in the final document, but there will be no word ‘annexing’ in its text.
Some experts believe that the program of the Eastern Partnership will be significantly changed after the summit.
Vladislav Belov, the deputy head of the Europe Institute of the RAS, says that “the project was initiated by Poland and Sweden. Germany, which was expected to be the main force behind the project, stood aside. Let’s not forget that 2009 was a year of not only an economic, but also a political crisis. The conflict of August 2008 between Georgia and Russia, the speech by Vladimir Putin at the Munich Conference, which wasn’t understood by the European and world community, set a stamp upon such an approach of the EU represented by the two states, where Russia initially was excluded from the EU mechanisms.”
According to Belov, “the EU insists that Russia has been invited to the project. But Russia was invited under unequal conditions. The approach excluded one of main players in the Eurasian space, Russia, from the integration project which didn’t require the six countries to have EU membership. Initially, there was an idea that the EU has its own quantitative and qualitative limits. Thus, some transactional option of political and economic associative cooperation was suggested. All six countries were started to be withdrawn from the post-Soviet integration space, where Russia offered its own vision of integration. The EU didn’t like it from the very beginning. That’s why Russia treated the project negatively.
The fact that these six countries were pulled away from the integration space which was a subject of significant Russian interests was confirmed a week before the Vilnius summit in November 2013, when the President of Ukraine decided to postpone the signing of the association agreement. Such an approach of bilateral relations without consideration of Russia’s interests provoked developments in Ukraine, according to the worst scenario.”
Belov thinks that “all six countries of the Eastern Partnership have different potentials. The problem is typical for the Eurasian Economic Union as well. Absolutely different economies which have tried to be united into a common mechanism of cooperation in the economic sphere, including many political aspects, led to the fact that the EU had to shift to individual relations, which has actually destroyed the project, shifting it to a different field.”
