Ukraine Pivots to Russia With Last-Minute Freeze of EU Plan
Save
President Viktor Yanukovych’s government will focus on reviving trade with Russia and other former Soviet republics, it said yesterday. The decision is probably final, said Linas Linkevicius, the foreign minister of Lithuania, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency. Postponing the signature of the agreement “is not realistic,” he said by phone.
The EU and Russia, buyers of about a quarter of Ukrainian exports each, are jostling over relations with the country of 45 million people that’s an essential transit route for east-west energy shipments. The second-most populous ex-Soviet country is also crucial to the ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin to set up a trading area to emulate the Brussels-centered bloc.
“There’s always a possibility to go back to negotiations but it will be more difficult to do so in the future,” Joerg Forbrig, senior program officer for Central and Eastern Europe at the Berlin bureau of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said by phone yesterday. “The momentum was there and this has been lost now. The political momentum has been lost and it will be hard to recreate this.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-21/ukraine-pivots-to-russia-with-last-minute-freeze-of-eu-deal-plan.html
No comments:
Post a Comment