The EU is drawing a line in the sand with Russia: The bloc isn’t going to let Ukraine get dissected like Georgia was.
The EU tugged Ukraine westward on Tuesday by launching a symbolic new accord, wading into Moscow’s backyard for a second straight day on fears that Russia is flexing its muscles among former Soviet states.
The 27-member bloc stopped short of offering Ukraine membership during an EU-Ukraine summit hosted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. But the two sides began work on an “association accord” — a step that offers closer political and economic ties and in the past has been designed to prepare nations for eventual membership.
The summit was a potential boost for pro-Western Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, who hailed the move. He has recently faced the unraveling of a political alliance that was behind his country’s Orange Revolution in 2004.
“The EU does a huge favor to Ukraine by inviting it into this accord. This shows that [the EU] cares,” Arkady Moshes, director of the Russian program at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said by phone.
“The EU wants to try at least to show Russia that the old sphere of influence is obsolete ... and that bringing the old Soviet borders back would not be accepted,” he said.
The meeting came a day after Sarkozy, whose country now holds the rotating EU presidency, led a diplomatic push in Georgia and Russia to cement a ceasefire deal and soothe tensions between the two neighbors following last month’s war.
He won a commitment from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to let EU monitors into parts of Georgia now occupied by Russian troops, and a timetable for a Russian pullback of some forces from key positions inside the Caucasus Mountains nation. They also set a date for international talks on security in the region.
Georgia amounts to a test case for a potentially more complex and consequential situation with Ukraine, which has historic ties to Russia and like Georgia has been signaling its hope to join the EU and NATO.
Ukraine’s population of about 45 million is nearly 10 times that of Georgia.
Many Ukrainians fear that Moscow covets Ukraine’s strategic Crimea peninsula on the Black Sea, home to an ethnic Russian majority and the site of a Russian naval base in the port of Sevastopol.
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