Versoepeling visaregeling maskeert spanning tussen EU en Oekraïne (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych will score a diplomatic victory on visa-free travel at a summit in Brussels on Monday (22 November). But his opponents say he is taking the country backwards in terms of democracy and good governance.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in a communique on Friday said: "I am pleased that we are able to announce an Action Plan towards the establishment of a visa-free regime for Ukraine."
The plan, a list of specific conditions that Kiev must fulfill before the EU opens a door in its immigration wall, will look to "establishing a visa free regime for short stay travel as a long term perspective," the Barroso statement added.
Ukraine itself dropped visa requirements for EU citizens when it hosted the Eurovision song contest in 2005 and hopes to fulfill EU conditions in time for the Euro 2012 football championship finals in Kiev. It has a long way to go, however.
The Roman Catholic charity Caritas, in Drohobych, near the Polish-Ukrainian border, said in a 2009 report that out of the 3 million or so Ukrainians currently working abroad, only 2 percent do so legally. The US State Department last year described Ukraine as "a source, transit and ... destination country for men, women and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour."
There are good reasons to leave; one in four Ukrainians live in poverty on less than €76 a month; it has some of the highest rates in Europe of corruption, adolescent alcoholism, drug addiction and HIV infection; life expectancy for men, at 62 years, is lower than in India and Iraq.
The Monday summit will see Mr Yanukovych get the red carpet treatment at the Val Duchesse priory on the outskirts of Brussels.
He will bring with him Ukrainian foreign minister Konstantyn Gryshchenko, a career diplomat who worked his way up in the Soviet foreign ministry in the 1980s and who has taken part in some of the most sensitive negotiations on Ukraine's future in recent years - the peaceful handover of power in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the end of the 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas crisis.
The EU side is set to take a soft approach. EU Council head Herman Van Rompuy and Mr Barroso have indicated they will repeat long-standing calls for reforms on human rights, the rule of law and democracy and to "stress in particular the importance of a free media." But the Friday communique said nothing about alleged abuses in recent local elections and the prospects of Ukraine handing control of its state gas company Naftogaz to Russia's Gazprom.
The two MEPs who helped to monitor the vote and a clutch of NGOs said the local elections saw abuses reminiscent of the 2004 presidential poll.
Mr Gryshchenko has dismissed the complaints as the machinations of Mr Yanukovych's arch enemy, former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and her friends in the centre-right establishment around Europe. The tactic of attacking the messenger angered German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok. "The US government and non-partisan organisation Opora also criticised the elections. This is not a partisan process," he said in a written statement also on Friday.
Meanwhile inside Ukraine, what international criticism there is of the new administration is being muted out.
"The state-owned First National Channel, the channel owned by the head of the security services, Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, and others presented a glowing fairy tale about the government's efforts to ensure free and fair elections," Halya Coynash from the Kharkiv Human Rights Group told EUobserver. A recent report by another one of Mr Khoroshkovsky's TV stations, Inter, on the Council of Europe also "cut out" the Council's recommendation to reform his security corps.
Taras Kuzio, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in the US, said in a pre-summit op-ed submitted to this website: "Ukraine's media and election environment has progressively worsened in Yanukovych's first year in office ... I therefore have little compulsion in choosing Orange democratic 'chaos' over Eurasian authoritarian stability."
Andreas Umland, a teacher at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine in a similar op-ed said: "Brussels will now have to find a new tone in its negotiations with Kyiv. It needs to make sure that it neither pushes away the Ukrainian leadership as a negotiation partner for the near future, nor loses the Ukrainian state as a member of the European community of democratic countries."