This will be presented on 4 March in a document produced by Federica Mogherini’s External Action services (EEAS) which will address the soundness of today’s policy toward EU’s neighbours. The focal point of the Neighbourhood Policy is the so-called Eastern Partnership.
The Eastern Partnership was meant to be one of the EU’s greatest achievements, by providing six former Soviet republic bordering the European Union a special status, technical assistance, trade facilities, easing the visa regime, while avoiding any discussion of the perspectives of the overall membership of the Union, promising practically everything that can stabilize a country without promising it full membership.
EU officials in Brussels will not say it openly, but five years after it was launched, the Eastern partnership basically no longer exists, even if it has not yet been buried.
The Eastern partnership covers 6 of the former Soviet countries close to the European Union: Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The partnership was launched in May 2009, in Prague, as an initiative stemming primarily from Poland, and supported at the time by Sweden.
After the initial enthusiasm, the partnership fell apart rapidly in the past two years, under pressure from Russia, and mostly in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. During the months that led to the great demonstrations in Kiev, followed by the fall of the Yanukovych regime and the start of the Ukrainian civil war, the EU has blindly pushed the agenda of the Eastern Partnership and of the Association Agreements, without taking into account the warning signals coming from Moscow.
The six Partnership countries are now practically divided into two groups: those that continue to come closer to Europe, and which have signed an association agreement with the EU: Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and the other three –Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus– who had never shown much eagerness to drift towards Europe.
The three countries that have signed an Association agreement with the EU (Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine) are now in the risk of being left in a limbo. They based all their domestic communicational policy on the hope for a continuous Western support in front of a more and more assertive Russia.
The document to be presented on Wednesday proposes openly "to ensure greater coherence between the European Neighborhood Policy and the EU’s relations with Russia and with partners in Central Asia”.
This seems to confirm earlier fears about Federica Mogherini, a former Communist militant, and briefly Italy’s foreign minister, who was seen from the start as potentially too "soft" on Russia.
In January, at a meeting of EU foreign affairs in Brussels, a draft paper sent to the ministers by Mogherini’s services before had already raised alarm, as it asked ministers to consider "possible elements for selective and gradual re-engagement" with Moscow. The paper also proposed a distinction "between the Crimea-related sanctions and sanctions related to the destabilisation of eastern Ukraine."
Mogherini’s suggestion had gone down badly with some of the EU’s more hawkish states, such as Lithuania, which suggested it would send the wrong message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the EU’s resolve was cracking.
In the end, the ministers decided there were no grounds to lift economic sanctions against Russia despite conciliatory proposals from the EU’s foreign policy chief as violence intensified in eastern Ukraine. Any relaxation of sanctions on Russia would only happen if there were improvements on the ground in Ukraine.
A new offensive for softening EU’s stance on Russia seems now to be in the making, as the Wednesday paper will ask whether Brussels should "allow for more flexible ways of working with the neighbours of our neighbours”… that is with Russia.
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