Top EU en Oekraïne in teken democratisering en afblazen Europese hulp (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Ukraine's dioxin-scarred president, Viktor Yushchenko, will on Friday (4 December) host in Kiev what is likely to be his last top-level EU meeting, a gathering taking place amid a low point in bilateral relations.
With just a few weeks to go to presidential elections in January, Mr Yushchenko trails in sixth place in the polls with less than four percent support.
The mood stands in marked contrast to events in November 2004 when tens of thousands of orange flag-waving protestors risked danger on the streets of the Ukrainian capital to bring him into power and to oust the authoritarian regime of President Leonid Kuchma.
The revolution was born out of violence - the murder of journalist Yuri Gongadze and the dioxin poisoning of Mr Yushchenko himself - but ended peacefully.
The president's five years in office have been marked by political infighting, corruption, lack of reform and mounting tension with Russia, leaving the country exposed to the worst effects of the economic crisis. Its economy will shrink by 15 percent this year.
The people who ordered the killings of Mr Gongadze and Mr Yushchenko have not been brought to justice.
Reflecting on the state of the nation, and in particular to the powerful role played by Ukraine's oligarchs in politics, business and media, the European Commission's envoy in Kiev, Jose Manuel Pinto Teixeira, earlier this week told Reuters: "The country today is in many aspects like 20 years ago."
The statement is perhaps too harsh: Journalists are bribed but not killed. Elections are wild but not fake. But Mr Teixeira's remark reflects the frustration felt in many EU capitals over Ukraine's lack of progress toward EU norms, however.
In this context, the European Commission has shelved plans to offer Ukraine €500 million in economic aid at the summit and will instead urge the country to fall in line with austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund and to ensure it keeps paying on time for Russian gas.
The date for the summit was tabled earlier this year when both sides hoped they could use the event to announce the completion of talks on an Association Agreement.
Instead, the only concrete developments to come out of the meeting will be a deal on Ukraine's co-operation with the EU police body, Europol, and a second agreement on allowing the European Investment Bank to set up shop in the country.
In a sign of Ukraine's weak pull on the strings of power in Brussels, Kiev lobbied for the EU's brand new foreign minister, Catherine Ashton, to attend the summit.
But Benita Ferrero-Waldner will attend instead under the rubric of the EU neighbourhood policy part of her hybrid "trade and neighbourhood" portfolio. The lame-duck commissioner is to leave the commission in January to work for an oil firm.
Meanwhile, talks on the Association Agreement - the launch of which was seen as one of the biggest breakthroughs in terms of EU relations in the past five years - are mired in ill will.
The Ukrainian side is pushing the EU to refer to it as a "European state" in the preamble in an echo of Article 49 of the EU treaty which says that any European "state" can apply to be an EU member.
But EU states, such as Germany, are worried that the vocabulary may prove too much of an encouragement for the country's diplomats to file an unwanted application for EU accession, a Ukrainian diplomatic source said.