Ukraine (Washington Insider Magazine) -Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at the inaugural Crimea Platform, and commemoration of the country’s 30th year of restored independence, to push the European Union (EU) to keep open its doors for accession.
His diplomatic messages in Kyiv, spoken over the course of Aug. 23-24, were for the 27-member political and economic bloc to bolster its ranks in an era of so-called great power competition.
In an interview with Politico, Kuleba underlined what he meant by this message after the diplomatic event that saw representatives from 46 states, including all 30 members of NATO, 14 heads of state and high-ranking European officials in attendance. Its purpose is to serve as a center for developing international efforts aimed at ending Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its return to Ukraine.
“The EU has to expand to maintain dynamics and to mobilize as many resources as possible in the global struggle that it is taking part in,” he said. “So it doesn’t matter [if it’s] Eastern Partnership 2…Association 1. The EU should make a very simple message: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, you are part of us. We do not set a deadline, but you will be in the EU. And this is a completely different kind of way to address things.”
As recent as Aug. 25, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid told independent Ukrainian news outlet Yevropeiska Pravda (European Truth) in an English-language interview that Kyiv “will need about 20 years of work until you are ready” to join the bloc.
She added that Ukraine would need to have its territories free of occupation before defense bloc NATO accepts it as a member, referring to the Russia-instigated war in two easternmost parts of the country and Moscow’s forcible seizure of Crimea.
Kuleba also outlined Ukraine’s call for NATO membership in the interview. He cited his country of carrying out three airlifts to evacuate people from Afghanistan as an example. “My job description tells me … and that is [in] the Constitution of Ukraine: you have to make Ukraine a member of NATO,” he said, Politico reported.
Kyiv constitutionally enshrined both NATO and EU membership as its foreign policy course in 2019. Public opinion polls currently show that a majority of Ukrainians support accession to both blocs.
This renewed vigor by Ukraine for EU and NATO expansion come following the Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement between Germany and the United States in July. The agreement lifted U.S. sanctions on the Russian gas pipeline, which would run underneath the Baltic Sea, removing Ukraine, the usual supply route into Europe, out of the equation.
In protest, Ukraine in July invoked two provisions from its 2,135-page Association Agreement with the EU, demanding to have consultations with the EU and main pipeline project partner Germany.
Publicly, EU officials did very little. German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that she would help protect Ukraine’s role as a transit country – and the EU commission saying that while it did not see the pipeline as being in the bloc’s collective interest, it would be willing to work with all parties involved.
Dusseldorf’s Higher Regional Court ruled against Russian state-owned Gazprom, the ultimate pipeline operator and owner, in an Aug. 25 ruling. It did not provide an exemption to the Russian natural-gas monopoly regarding EU rules that separate gas production from transportation, Bloomberg Law wrote.
According to the EU’s Third Energy Package, production and transportation of fossil fuels must be unbundled and Germany’s Federal Network Agency had also told the Russian company it must comply with those rules.
Privately, it was reported that officials were pleased with Kyiv standing up to Berlin and Brussels and insisting that its partnership with the EU goes both ways. “They are absolutely right,” one senior EU official, who wasn’t named told Politico. “In the institutions, there is a sense of my colleagues … [that the] the Association Agreements imposes obligations on the Ukrainians, rather than mutually.”
Svitlana Zalishchuk, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament and foreign affairs adviser to the deputy prime minister, mirrored this rhetoric to Politico.
“It’s not just Ukraine’s obligations to do reforms,” she said, adding, “it’s also the EU’s obligation to apply the same principles that are working in the EU toward Ukraine.”
