EUROPEAN leaders face a session of soul-searching and strategy planning over Ukraine at their year-end summit on Friday when they will discuss why Kiev rejected an EU free trade deal and took a bailout from Russia instead.
As well as weighing Ukraine’s decision to turn away and what Europe might have done to prevent it, leaders will debate the message they want to send to swathes of Ukrainians now protesting against President Viktor Yanukovich’s move.
They will also have to agree what line to take with Russia, which applied intense political and economic pressure on the former Soviet republic to spurn the EU deal. Russian President Vladimir Putin and the EU are due to hold talks in Brussels in late January.
Asked how the leaders’ discussion was likely to go, one senior official involved in the talks said: “The goal will be to prevent a whole lot of Russia-bashing.”
Yanukovich’s rejection of the EU deal at a meeting with European leaders in Vilnius last month has already prompted some self-examination, including questions over whether the EU should have offered more money or potential membership to Ukraine as an inducement.
Moscow has said it will give Yanukovich’s government a $15bn lifeline and slash the price of its gas by around a third, two gifts Ukraine could not ignore.
But the EU has argued its offer of a free-trade and political association agreement was not short on financial incentives either. A document prepared by EU officials shows benefits of up to $19bn could have flowed to Ukraine over seven years if it had signed up.
Even if those numbers had been presented to Yanukovich ahead of the Vilnius meeting, it seems unlikely that he would have plumped for the EU deal given the amount of pressure he was under from the Kremlin.
Following two secret meetings with Putin in November, Yanukovich told EU officials it was going to cost Ukraine $160bn over three years to sign up with them, in terms of the cost of meeting EU obligations and lost trade with Russia.
EU officials dismissed the number as complete fantasy and there was no evidence to back it up. But it showed the kind of money that Yanukovich, whose son is a multi-millionaire and who surrounds himself with oligarchs, is keen to attract.
“Yanukovich and his clan are afraid of losing everything if they lose power,” said Ulrich Speck, an expert on Ukraine with Carnegie Europe, a think tank in Brussels.
“Therefore they struggle for survival,” he said, pointing out that if Yanukovich is to win presidential elections in 2015, he will need Russia’s backing and creative influence.
In his first public appearance on Thursday since agreeing the deal with Moscow, Yanukovich argued that securing cheaper gas and credits from Russia had been the only way to avoid default, but offered no concessions to persuade thousands of protesters to leave the streets.
Soon after, his government issued a $3bn two-year eurobond whose terms corresponded exactly to those of a bond that Russia had said it would buy as part of a $15bn lifeline to help its former Soviet ally out of economic crisis.
But, in a televised news conference lasting more than 1-1/2 hours, he showed no readiness to meet opposition leaders’ demands for the resignation of his government or early elections. He said their actions were “revolutionary”.
His only slightly conciliatory gesture was to say that he would not run for re-election in 2015 if he felt he might lose.
The main opposition leaders – boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko, former economy minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and far-right nationalist leader Oleh Tyahnybok – say they will try to keep people on the streets over the New Year holiday.
With his popularity at a low after four weeks of unrest, Yanukovich indicated he had no intention of agreeing to an early presidential election before the due date in early 2015.
