Turning the pages back... September 14, 2003 (09/10/06)

Turning the pages back...

September 14, 2003

The ongoing topic of Ukraine's potential economic alliances and the respective positives and negatives of each has been a major factor in the Westward aspirations of Ukraine. Specifically, the question whether of Ukraine should choose to join the Single Economic Space with Russia and the other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or the European Union is of the utmost concern. An article was carried three years ago in The Weekly on this topic and readers can see how far Ukraine has come on this issue.

Ukraine's former (and current) finance minister and first vice prime minister, Mykola Azarov, with his counterparts from Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in September 2003 had approved a draft agreement on the formation of a single economic zone encompassing their countries. The agreement, intended to increase trade by simplifying bureaucratic regulations and removing tariffs, was to be signed at a summit of the four countries' presidents later that month in Crimea.

Many in Ukraine were surprised by this initiative due to its contradictions with Ukraine's declared aim of strengthening ties with the EU.

However, at a meeting of Western diplomats called by Mr. Azarov, Steffen Kovmand, acting head of the European Commission's Kyiv office, said: "[Mr. Azarov] certainly managed to reassure everyone in the room that this was in no way contradictory to Ukraine's EU ambitions. And he pointed out that it was something he felt could make good economic sense to Ukraine. And he actually pointed out that in various articles and provisions of this agreement - that, I repeat, we haven't seen yet - the speed and depth of integration was very much something that would be decided step-by-step, and by each signatory to the agreement."

Ukraine's former Foreign Affairs Minister Anatolii Zlenko, who retired on September 2, 2003, commented, "We already have a strategic course for our country, and that is toward European integration. And currently we are mobilizing - by this I mean the president of Ukraine is mobilizing - all our efforts for the realization of this political course for our country."

At the time, former Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Borys Tarasyuk, who headed the Ukrainian Parliament's Committee on European Integration, commented, "If integration with the European Union is the natural path for Ukraine, then integration with the East, which is represented by the single economic zone, is the Kremlin's main objective and nothing else."

In describing the "multi-vector" foreign policy, Mr. Tarasyuk said the Ukrainian government was deliberately keeping its intentions unclear in order to play the EU and Russia against each other. Mr. Tarasyuk also said that although the government was likely to secure the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the agreement on the single economic zone, Moscow and Kyiv - the two most powerful players in the potential economic zone - were far from reaching a final agreement, he said.

Source: "Analysis: The single economic zone or the European Union?" by Askold Krushelnycky, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 14, 2003, Vol. LXXI, No. 37.

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