Foreign policy specialists have begun admitting that, had the Ukraine signed the EU Association Agreement as demanded by Brussels and Berlin, it would have inflicted serious damage on the country. The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), “very few Ukrainian products” are “competitive in the EU ”[The Association Agreement’s trade facilitation measures would have benefitted German-European suppliers, but hardly Ukrainian exporters. On the whole, Ukrainian industry is out of date and “hardly competitive.” If the “markets would be opened” this would lead “to enormous modernization costs and the unemployment would have shot up very high. This would have been even more probable, since the association with the EU would have driven a wedge between the Ukrainian and the Russian economies – not only to the disadvantage of Russian companies: A “separation from the prevailing main customers of Ukrainian products” would have plunged “sectors, such as the air traffic or the petro-chemical industries into a deep crisis. Specialists are parting from the premise that the economic crisis with its affiliated rise in unemployment, which could be expected in the case of a signing of the Association Agreement, would “in the course of a year, cause a drop in popular support” not only for Kiev’s government, but also for integration into the EU
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:02:43 +0000
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