At the Russia-EU summit in Khanty-Mansy (26-27 June) fresh ‘initiatives’ by newly admitted member states are testing the EU’s already difficult relations with Russia

The waters were troubled enough. It took pressure from Brussels to get Lithuania, on 21 May, to lift its ban on talks with Russia about renewing the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCE), which expired on 1 January. Till then, the EU had no mandate to open them. As with the Polish veto, imposed in retaliation for a Russian ban on Polish meat, but lifted earlier this year, it was a purely bilateral affair.

Lithuania wanted Russia to resume oil supplies through the Druzhba oil pipeline. Finally it lifted its objection on condition that the negotiations with Moscow should include Moscow’s judicial co-operation and the solution of ‘frozen conflicts’.

The raising of a bilateral issue to multilateral EU level is being justified by the use of a new EU key word - ‘solidarity’. New members would like the EU to have the moral equivalent of NATO’s Article 5, under which an attack on any one member shall be considered as an attack against all. They have elevated ‘solidarity’ against Moscow in its absence.

Elevating revanchism

Making the EU’s relations with the largest country on the European continent the hostage of parochial revanchism exposes the lack of an EU foreign policy. And because ‘solidarity’ is applied almost exclusively to relations with Russia, it risks of recreating wall in Europe, between the ‘liberal democracies’ and ‘hopelessly authoritarian Russia’. It also leaves countries trapped between them, e.g. CIS countries, an open field for influence.

New members see themselves as a model of the latter, and also as front-line experts in any dealings with Russia, because they alone have direct experience of Soviet rule.

At the same time, by taking of members of their North American diasporas into government, they have imported ‘Cold War victory syndrome’ which lacks a European historical prospective and complicates the development of a proper EU policy towards Russia.

North versus South

More damagingly for Europe than for Russia, the new members have been in the forefront of an internal EU contest over two matters high on the agenda for relations with Russia – energy supplies and relations with the formerly Soviet CIS states. In both cases, it is unclear whether EU as a whole supports their aggressive stand, or has simply kept silent for fear of demonstrating a gap. In any case, its ambivalence weighs on EU-Russia relations.

Fir example, in late May, much as made on national television of a visit by to Poland and Latvia by the prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, an energy-starved country isolated in the middle of Central Asia since the collapse of a coloured revolution.

Last October the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine convened at an energy summit in Vilnius to sign an agreement on the building of an oil and gas transport corridor. This would be done by enlarging the existing Polish-Ukrainian Sarmatia company, which was created to deal with the project for redeveloping Odessa-Brody pipeline.

The pipeline would than be used to pump oil in the originally planned direction, i.e. to take Caspian oil northwards through Ukraine. For years, for political reasons, it was left empty and then used to take Russian oil down to Odessa. Now it would be extended and then to Plock and Gdansk in Poland, bringing Caspian energy supplies to European markets independently of Russian territory or infrastructures.

Revived

The plan was revived in May at the Kiev energy summit, a successor to summits in Krakow and Vilnius the previous May and October. But the idea of using Ukrainian transit facilities potential to ‘ensure EU energy’ faces many problems.

Ukrainian infrastructures are in bad need of upgrading. But for this it must either reach an agreement with Russia (which would go against the very intention of the energy summit) or else persuade other producers to fill its pipelines with their own gas and oil en route to Europe.

And foreign investors would demand the same stake in the sector as Russia does, opening up a fertile field for ferocious Ukrainian in-fighting. Already Ukraine tries to seduced them, as during the visit of president Viktor Yushchenko to London on 15 May when he secured a promise of assistance from British prime Minister Gordon Brown,

The plan

On 18 May, in an interview with Polish TVN24 news channel, the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, announced that, in the coming weeks, Poland would present a ‘detailed proposal’ concerning the EU's eastern policy, after ‘consultations with allies and partners’. He insisted the project was not aimed against Russia but a natural expansion of Poland’s relations in ‘a region with which it has historical ties’.

In a part of Europe where borders were drawn after the collapse of empires between the First and the Second World Wars, to speak of ‘historical ties’ is a dangerous device. To make things worst, Sikorski added that the Polish proposals could become part of the EU's ‘good neighbour’ policy, ‘which would also benefit Russia and EU-aspirants like Ukraine’.

On 21 May, in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, he described the ‘Eastern partnership’ plan as Poland's most promising initiative since its EU accession. It would involve the EU in ever closer co-operation with its eastern neighbours - Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and, conditionally, Belarus, when the current authoritarian regime collapsed.

Although Sikorski said that Russia could benefit from the plan, one may doubt its welcome for his proposition ‘there is nothing to prevent the plan from being extended to include, say, the Kaliningrad enclave, if Moscow is interested’.

Czech support

On 26 May, the plan was supported by the Czech deputy prime minister for European affairs, Alexandr Vondra, just before a meeting of EU foreign ministers. Describing it as a ‘Polish-Swedish’ plan for ‘widening co-operation with the EU’s partners to the east’, Vondra said it was a way to balance the idea of a Union for the Mediterranean, initiated by France a week earlier. (France’s presidency of the EU presidency as from 1 July, will be followed by that of the Czech Republic.)

Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn immediately warned of the danger of weakening the EU’s cohesion.

In fact, this is the third major EU initiative by Warsaw. The first was the Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz government’s pioneering of a mishandled 'energy pact', and the second Jaroslaw Kaczynski administration's desperate attempt to change the EU voting system in 2007. Its first test will be whether it is listed among the conclusions of the Russia-EU summit.

Problem

The problem is that it was launched ahead of the 26 May meeting of the Council of European Union, and when step were already taken towards formalising a new ‘Northern initiative’. In early May, a conference of MEPs and others concerned in the ‘Polish-Swedish initiative’ discussed further European integration, and called for the creation of a new ‘27+6’ parliamentary assembly called EURONEST, modelled on EUROMED (for the Mediterranean) and EUROLAT (for relations with Latin America).

The assembly would begin functioning after the next European elections. However, the Commissioner for External Relations, Mme Ferrero-Waldner, has been less than enthusiastic, seeing no ‘added value’ to the new initiative, compared with the classical good neighbours approach. Other EU officials have been puzzled by Sikorski’s argument, when he announced his initiative at a 26 May Council of Ministers meeting, differentiating between ‘European neighbours’ in the East and just ‘neighbours of Europe’ in the South.

Sikorski may even have difficulty convincing Ukraine that his initiative is not a new kind of neighbourhood policy, and that Kiev is not better served by pursuing its own efforts to enlarge its partnership with EU with a view to admission.

New quintet

When Sikorski speaks of ‘consultations with allies and partners’, he can only have in mind a group of five (Poland, the three Baltic states and Sweden), which has been very active in the former USSR, especially with the approach of the EU-Russia summit. The five are also the vanguard of a group of countries which want EU to be ‘less soft’ on Russia and more firmly to support efforts for ‘reform and Euro-Atlantic integration’ on the part of countries overshadowed by a ‘powerful neighbour’.

For instance, the decision to lift Lithuanian veto was taken on 11 May, after talks in Vilnius between Lithuanian foreign minister Petras Vaitiekunas, Poland’s Sikorski, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt and Slovene foreign minister Dimitrij Rupel. Hervé Jouanjean, deputy secretary-general of the European Commission, also attended.

On 12 May, the foreign ministers of Latvia, Slovenia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden met in Tbilisi ‘to asses relations between Russia and Georgia’. The five were presented on Georgian state television as ‘foreign ministers of influential EU countries’ – clear evidence of the use President Saakashvili is making of the Central European initiative.

In May, too, visits were exchanged between high ranking officials of Central Asian republics and the countries of the Polish ‘plan’, with every attempt to blur the lines between national and EU initiatives. For instance, on 20 May, when Kyrgyzstan prime minister Igor Chudinov met his Polish and Latvian counterparts in Riga and Warsaw, they discussed not only bilateral cooperation but also ‘support by Latvia and Poland for Kyrgyzstan's water and energy initiatives under the EU-Central Asia partnership’.

The energy curse

Of course energy is seldom out of the picture, as the 22-23 May Kiev energy summit demonstrated, with the attendance of the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Poland and Romania, as well as representatives of Kazakhstan’s president Nazarbaiev, of the EU’s energy commissioner and of the US.

Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko told the participants that one was witnessing a ‘new culture of fuel transit’ which would allow ‘political and other energy threats to our joint security to be minimised.’ He said the summit was a first contribution towards the idea of a ‘transit space for energy supplies from the Baltic, Black and Caspian seas.’

Before the summit, the Ukrainian authorities sent the other participants an outline of the joint undertaking for a new use of the Odessa-Brody pipeline, which has the encouragement of Washington. .

Poland has promised to defend the project as conforming with the EU Energy Charter. Nevertheless, the European Commission has plenty of reserves about that, and Poland will have to explain how the proposed creation of a new energy organisation, involving some members of EU, is compatible with Warsaw’s regular calls for a single EU energy policy.

All this leaves Russia able to do what it always been happy to do - sitting on the balcony, waiting (as foreign minister Sergei Lavrov puts it) for the EU to start negotiations for which Moscow has been ready for a long time.

by Nina Bachkatov

Source >  Russia and Eurasia

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