Russia asks to accept Ukraine in “hostile” EU

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seemed unusually subdued last week when asked about the possibility of Ukraine gaining EU candidate status:

“We have no objections.”

But Russian officials and analysts have since claimed Putin he didn’t mean it.

“We consider the EU enlargement process negative, hostilein fact, in relation to Russian national interests “, said the Russian ambassador to the block, Vladimir A. Chizhovto a state newspaper this week.

It was another example of mixed messages by the Kremlin, which began before the war with inscrutable positions on the ability of diplomacy to prevent a conflict and continued after the invasion with ambiguous positions on a possible peace agreement.

But one thing seems clear:

Ukraine’s achievement of candidate status marks a milestone in Putin’s charged and unnerving relations with the EU. – and the desire of a growing number of Ukrainians to join him.

For both Russians and Ukrainians, the question of whether Ukraine will one day join the European Union is secondary to the question of chow do you survive the country to the current Russian invasion.

This may be one of the reasons why the country’s EU enforcement hasn’t been top news in Russia.

“There is a view that Ukraine will not or would not exist within its current geographical limits,” said Andrei Kfortov, director general of the Russian Council for International Affairs, an investigative organization close to the Russian government, describing the mood in Moscow.

“This sense further reduces the importance the decision on candidate status. Because everything can change.

But it’s also clear that Ukraine’s desire to align with its western neighbors is the ultimate bankruptcy reminder Putin to keep the hearts and minds of Ukrainians in his orbit.

In the Kremlin narrative, it is the anti-Russian axis of Washington and London which is pressuring Brussels to accept Ukraine as a member, against the best interest of the European Union.

“What will Europe get?

Ukraine or its remains? he asked for an essay published Thursday by RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency.

“No, Russia will not allow it, because it fully understands that the EU is becoming one screen for the Anglo-Saxon matches against Moscow ”.

The explosiveness of Ukraine’s relations with the European Union became evident in 2013, when the then president of the country, a friend of Russia, Viktor F. Yanukovych, was in the final stages of negotiations for a trade deal with the bloc.

Putin wanted Ukraine to be part of a Russian-led customs union that he already included Belarus and Kazakhstan.

When Ukraine withdrew from the Europe Agreement under pressure Putin, protests broke out in Kiev that led to the country’s pro-Western revolution and the ousting of Yanukovych.

This prompted Russia to annex Crimea and foment the Russian-backed separatist war in the east.

So when Putin told an economic conference in St. Petersburg last week that he didn’t care if Ukraine joined the European Union, his words rang out. empty for many analysts.

He said it would be expensive for EU members to accept Ukraine as one of them and that European companies would like to stop the development of the Ukrainian economy in order to avoid new competition.

“If Ukraine does not protect its internal market, in my opinion it will completely turn into a semi-colony,” Putin said.

“But again, that it’s none of our business“.

Indeed, Russian officials have argued that the expansion of the European Union is part of a twin threat along with the expansion of the NATO alliance.

Chizhov, the Russian ambassador, told the Izvestiya newspaper that the union “has done so recently degraded at the level of an auxiliary military bloc, NATO auxiliary ”.

Ukraine EU

Candidate status is a “symbolic gesture of support,” said Kadri Liik, an analyst at the European Council for Foreign Relations in Berlin, as the country it will take years to join the block.

And despite the Russian confrontation between the EU and NATO, EU membership would not automatically provide Ukraine with guarantees of security against future threats from Moscow.

c.2022 The New York Times Company