Europrospect. Specific signals or hard requirements?

More than 20 years experience of getting the own position on the edge of geostrategic interests of powerful players of the international downstage was crowned with the legal result: on February 25, 2013, the Ukrainian state got the chance to make a “historic step” towards the European future.

During the XVI summit Ukraine-EU in Brussels the parties legally formalized milestones of interaction between Kyiv and the Community in order to realize the possibility of signing the Agreement on association and the deepen and overall free trade zone on the summit of the countries - participants of the “Eastern Partnership”, which might be held in Vilnius on November, 28 -29, 2013. Indeed, taking into consideration just political conjuncture that is currently forming in the EU, this event would be the best moment for the approval of the document, because in 2014 Brussels will focus on elections to the European Parliament, and in  2015 there should be presidential elections in our country. Moreover, states-members themselves today are well disposed to the Ukrainian progress towards the European Union: so, the meeting of the president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych with his polish and Slovak colleagues Bronislav Komorovskiy and Ivan Hasparovych before the summit (February, 20-21, 2013), during which the latest expressed support to the official Kyiv regarding the issues of the agreement preparation, as well as changing of the official positions of France and Great Britain concerning expectations of the Ukrainian officials and citizens on rapprochement to the EU, give reasons to consider the “opportunity window” for the establishment of relations of our country with this organization significantly expanded.

This assumption, in fact, was confirmed directly on the summit meetings, during which the parties discussed not only question of the association in itself, but also a number of sectoral and potentially significant for Europe vectors of the bilateral cooperation.

Yulia TSYRFA