EU verdeeld over houding ten aanzien van proces Timosjenko (en)
EU countries are split into two camps on how to handle the Ukrainian government's persecution of its political enemies as former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko goes back to court on Tuesday (11 October).
Lithuanian foreign minister Audronius Azubalis spoke out for the camp of states who believe geopolitical strategy outweighs concerns over the Tymoshenko case, which also includes Poland and other former Communist nations, at an EU meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.
"We think this agreement should be signed as soon as possible ... We should move forward on bringing Ukraine into the Western hemisphere because we think our decision about the Association Agreement could change European geopolitics for decades to come," he said, referring to EU plans to finalise a landmark trade and political association pact with Kiev in December.
On the other side of the EU debate, the camp that includes Germany, the Netherlands and the EU institutions in Brussels, believe the case is emblematic of the deterioration of democratic norms in the country and are already taking the EU-Ukraine integration process backward to punish authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych.
The Netherlands is keen to reopen negotiations on Association Agreement chapters that were earlier closed. The EU diplomatic service is planning to cancel an upcoming meeting between senior EU military officers and Ukrainian counterparts. And EU officials are raising fresh concerns about Tymoshenko allies, such as 47-year-old former interior minister Yuri Lutsenko, who is receiving poor medical care in prison for cirrhosis of the liver.
For its part, Russia is sending out the message that nobody should touch Ukraine because its entire political class is rotten.
At the same time, its embassy in Kiev is laying out caviar-and-vodka-rich suppers for Yanukovych envoys in which it tells them the EU pact will cost them billions by flooding the country with tariff-free EU imports while seeing new tariffs imposed on exports to the Belarus-Kazakhstan-Russia Customs Union.
Meanwhile, seasoned observers of Ukrainian politics, such as Jorge Zukoski, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kiev, say that Yaunkovych and his oligarch friends do not really care about EU integration.
"The ideal situation for them would be to get an EU free-trade deal and visa-free travel and to stay parked on the edge of the EU. They want to make money in Europe and to come and go more easily. But the last thing they want is the dysfunctional bureaucracy in Brussels getting more control over the way they run the country," he told EUobserver at a business fair in Yalta last week.
Tymoshenko was woken up at 5am Kiev time in her jail cell on Tuesday and will spend several hours in police vans and in court in a repetition of events that have been going on for the past two and a half months.
One of her loyalists, MP Sergyi Pashynskyi, told this website Yanukovych has not yet decided how to instruct the judge to proceed and that the final verdict is unlikely to come this week.
One scenario is that she will get a seven year jail sentence for signing an allegedly illegal gas deal with Russia in 2009 shortly after Yanukovych visits Brussels later this month.
Under this scenario, her lawyers will appeal the ruling, lose the appeal, and appeal again at a higher level. At the same time, the parliament will in the run-up to the EU-Ukraine summit in December change Ukrainian law to void articles 364 and 365 - the basis of her prosecution - allowing her to go free. But Yanukovych will let her walk only if she agrees to pay him fines of around $600 million to ensure he saves face in front of his hardman business partners.
The anti-Tymoshenko assault will likely then change tack towards a political smear campaign ahead of elections next year. Tymoshenko allies say pro-Yanukovych acting prosecutor general Renat Kuzmin recently visited her former business partner, Pavel Lazarenko, in jail in the US for money laundering, to dig up dirt.
The EU would most likely accept this scenario for Tymoshenko's future and ink the trade and association pact at the December summit, say EU sources. But if Yanukovych takes a harder line, all bets are off.
Asked by EUobserver if top EU officials Jose Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy would be happy to shake hands with Yanukovych at the December meeting while Tymoshenko remains locked up, the EU ambassador to Ukraine, Jose Manuel Pinto-Texeira, said: "We should still be optimistic that the summit will take place."