Ukraine News: Russia Calls E.U. Move to Advance Ukraine’s Joining ‘Hostile’: Conundrum for Putin, how can Ukraine be called a "made up " country?
The EU just drove a stake into the heart of Russian Federation propaganda as to Ukraine. How can a 45 million person country be called a fake country when it is in EU Candidacy status now ? The entire wailing from the Kremlin about Ukraine as a fake country, runs afoul of EU Candidacy status. And increases the likelihood of a rupture between the EU and a Putin lead Russian federation.
There are some attendant risks in this EU move. But the greater risk will be in continuation of unrestricted aggression against Ukraine, as Putin is risking having his regime FORMALLY (not de facto, FORMALLY) identified as an economic wrecker of the EU block and further aggression against Ukraine by Kremlin Armies will make the case that Russia is a bandit nation under Putin leadership.
As noted by others, EU candidacy can take decades to resolve. Case in point, Turkey in that status since 1987. But with Kremlin armies trying to devastate the EU via full blown war in the Donbass region, the case for speeded up admission is being made hourly.
What pro Putin "restrainers" who trash talk Ukraine now need to get, is how is Ukraine a destructive influence, when it is being considered as far as defacto European status ? This is a bridge too far to entertain, and their propaganda took a huge hit
https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/23/world/russia-ukraine-war-news.amp.html
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Ukraine News: Russia Calls E.U. Move to Advance Ukraine’s Joining ‘Hostile’
June 23, 2022
Updated?9:46 p.m. ET
The decision, which sets Ukraine on a probably lengthy path toward becoming a member of the bloc, signals more resistance to Putin. Russian forces advanced on a key eastern city, threatening its supply lines.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia delivered lengthy remarks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week, including a claim to not object to Ukraine possibly achieving candidate status for the European Union.Credit...
Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sounded uncharacteristically subdued last week when asked about the prospect of Ukraine achieving candidate status for the European Union: “We have no objections.”
But since then, Russian officials and analysts have said that Mr. Putin didn’t really mean it.
“We consider the E.U. enlargement process to be negative — hostile, in fact — in relation to Russian national interests,” Russia’s ambassador to the bloc, Vladimir A. Chizhov,?told?a state-run newspaper this week.
It was another example of mixed messaging by the Kremlin, which started before the war with inscrutable positions on whether diplomacy could avert a conflict and continued after the invasion with ambiguous stances on a potential peace deal.
But one thing seems clear: The attainment of candidate status by Ukraine marks a milestone in Mr. Putin’s charged and vexing relationship with the E.U. — and the desire of growing numbers of Ukrainians to join it.
For Russians and Ukrainians alike, the question of whether Ukraine will someday in fact join the European Union is secondary to the question of how the country survives the current Russian invasion. That may be one reason the country’s E.U. application has not been a top story on the news in Russia.
“There’s a point of view that Ukraine either won’t exist, or won’t exist in its current geographic boundaries,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government, describing the mood in Moscow. “This sense even further reduces the significance of the decision on candidate status. Because everything can change.”
But it is also clear that Ukraine’s desire to align itself with neighbors to its West represents the latest reminder of Mr. Putin’s failure to keep Ukrainians’ hearts and minds in his orbit.
In the Kremlin’s narrative, it is the anti-Russian axis of Washington and London that is pushing Brussels to accept Ukraine as a member, against the European Union’s best interests.
“What will Europe get? Ukraine or its remnants?” an essay published by RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency,?asked?on Thursday. “No, Russia will not allow this, because it understands perfectly well that the E.U. is becoming a screen for the Anglo-Saxon games against Moscow.”
The explosiveness of Ukraine’s relationship with the European Union became apparent in 2013, when the country’s Russia-friendly president at the time, Viktor F. Yanukovych, was in the last stages of negotiating a trade agreement with the bloc. Mr. Putin wanted Ukraine to be part of a Russia-led customs union instead that already included Belarus and Kazakhstan.
When Ukraine backed out of the European deal under pressure from Mr. Putin, protests erupted in Kyiv, leading to the country’s pro-Western revolution and Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster, and prompting Russia to annex Crimea and foment the Russian-backed separatist war in the east.
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So when Mr. Putin said at an economic conference in St. Petersburg last week that he did not mind Ukraine joining the European Union, his words rang hollow to many analysts. He claimed that it would be costly for the European Union’s members to accept Ukraine as one of their own, and that European companies would want to stunt the development of the Ukrainian economy to avoid new competition.
“If Ukraine fails to protect its domestic market it will completely turn into a semi-colony, in my opinion,” Mr. Putin?said. “But again, that is none of our business.”
In fact, Russian officials have argued that the expansion of the European Union is part of a twin threat alongside the expansion of the NATO alliance. Mr. Chizhov, the Russian ambassador,?told?the Izvestiya newspaper that the union “lately has degraded to the level of an auxiliary military bloc, auxiliary to NATO.”
Ukraine’s E.U. candidate status is a “symbolic gesture of support,” said Kadri Liik, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, given that it would take years for the country to join the bloc. And despite Russia’s comparison of the E.U. with NATO, European Union membership would not automatically provide Ukraine with security guarantees in the face of future threats from Moscow.
Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War
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Ukrainian flags flying alongside E.U. flags on Thursday in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.Credit...
Nariman El-Mofty/Associated Press
BRUSSELS — The European Union officially made Ukraine a candidate for membership on Thursday, signaling in the face of a devastating Russian military onslaught that it sees Ukraine’s future as lying in an embrace of the democratic West.
While Ukraine’s accession into the bloc could take a decade or more, the decision sends a powerful message of solidarity to Kyiv and a rebuke to Moscow, which has worked for more than a decade to keep Ukraine from building Western ties.
The step was seen as almost impossible mere weeks ago, not least because Ukraine was seen as too far behind in terms of eliminating corruption and instituting economic reforms.
But the decision to nonetheless give it candidate status was another leap for European nations that have been rapidly shedding preconceptions and reservations to back Ukraine in the face of Russia’s invasion.
“Agreement,” Charles Michel, the president of the European Council,?said on Twitter.?“A historic moment. Today marks a crucial step on your path towards the EU.”
Candidacy in the European Union, which the 27 E.U. leaders also granted to Moldova, is a milestone but little else. It signals that a nation is in position, if certain conditions are met, to begin a very detailed, painstaking and yearslong process of changes and negotiations with the bloc, with a view to eventually joining.
When that might happen depends on the readiness of the country in question, which must align itself institutionally, democratically, economically and legally to E.U. laws and norms. On average, the process has taken other countries about 10 years; Turkey has been a candidate for 21 years, but is unlikely to join.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called the E.U. move “one of the most important decisions for Ukraine” in its 30 years as an independent state.
“This is the greatest step toward strengthening Europe that could be taken right now, in our time, and precisely in the context of the Russian war, which is testing our ability to preserve freedom and unity,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on Telegram.
The European Union began in 1952 as a free-trade bloc among a core six nations. It has grown through the years to not only include huge swaths of the European continent, but also to encompass policies far beyond trade and economics, although those remain its strongest and best-aligned types of joint work.
The war in Ukraine has forced the European Union into foreign policy, defense and military alignment, areas that it is both politically uncomfortable with and legally underqualified to address. Although no substitute for NATO, the bloc could in future years — by the time Ukraine actually joins — develop into more of a military union.
The leaders of Germany, France and Italy, the largest E.U. nations, gave a preview of the decision to grant candidate status to Ukraine in a visit last week to its capital, Kyiv. Still, a handful of member countries needed to be convinced that despite Ukraine’s unreadiness to join the union, it was vital to give it the prospect.
Important as the moment is for Ukraine, it is deeply significant for the European Union, too. Most members had been eager to keep the bloc from growing, partly because its 27 members already find it at times exceedingly hard to agree on key issues like democratic freedoms, economic overhauls and the role of the courts.
The bloc nearly doubled in size in the decade from 2004 to 2014, adding 13 members, many of them poorer former Soviet nations that swiftly gained access to wealthier labor markets and ample funding by the bloc.
That integration is still not complete, with several nations struggling with corruption, rule-of-law issues and economic backsliding. This calls into question the bloc’s capacity to absorb a country of Ukraine’s size and population.
Some European nations would have also liked to see Albania and North Macedonia, Balkan nations that have been candidates for more than a decade, admitted before Ukraine. Western Balkan leaders met with their E.U. counterparts earlier Thursday, but the meeting yielded no progress.
The move to grant Ukraine’s candidacy is bound to irritate Russia, which has described Ukraine’s aspirations to align itself with Western institutions like NATO and the European Union as a provocation and interference in its sphere of influence.
SOLIDARITY AMID WARRead the full article about?the European Union’s decision to grant Ukraine candidate status for membership in the bloc.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD