Politics: no clean hands

By Richard North - June 24, 2024

While Farage is still in hot water over his comments on Ukraine, one might recall the intervention of a certain David Cameron, back in July 2013, when he was still prime minister.

Reported by the Guardian and widely in other media on 1-2 July 2013, Cameron said the EU should extend its membership deeper into the former Soviet Union, calling for its borders to run from the Atlantic to the Urals.

If that phrase was not sensitive enough – being reminiscent of Hitler’s Grossraum, Cameron was speaking in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan on the day that former Yugoslav republic Croatia became the EU’s 28th member state.

From the geographical heart of the former Soviet empire, the then prime minister went on to hail “the power of the EU to transform divided societies”, declaring that the membership terms imposed on Croatia and on its former enemy and neighbouring former Yugoslav republic Serbia were having a “remarkable” effect in underpinning democracy in the western Balkans.

Not content with that, Cameron made it clear that he hoped the enlargement of the EU would go further and extend beyond the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – the only former members of the USSR in the EU.

All this emerged in a question-and-answer session with students at the Nazarbayev University in the Kazakh capital, Astana, when Cameron said: “Britain has always supported the widening of the EU. Our vision of the EU is that it should be a large trading and co-operating organisation that effectively stretches, as it were, from the Atlantic to the Urals”.

He went on to say that “We have a wide vision of Europe and we have always encouraged countries that want to join”. And, while not naming any specific countries, the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt noted that Cameron’s remarks indicated that he believed that Ukraine should be admitted to the EU.

Even at that time, though, Watt understood the sensitivity of the remarks, writing that Vladimir Putin – who has said that the demise of the USSR was one of the great strategic tragedies of the 20th century – “may regard Cameron’s remarks as hostile”, noting that Putin believed that 2the EU should extend no further into the former USSR than the Baltic states”.

Watt even went so far as to spell it out in so many words, adding in his report that, “Russia is sensitive about Ukrainian membership of the EU. Ukraine houses the Russian Black Sea naval fleet at Sevastopol, which was in Russia until the Crimean peninsula was gifted to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s”.

There is no question about the importance of this statement and the implications of Cameron’s statement at the time. Without being wise after the event, I wrote in my EUReferendum blog on 22 November 2013, that: “It wasn’t so very long ago that a certain Mr Cameron made a hugely provocative pro-EU speech”, repeating his words that: “Our vision of the EU is that it should be a large trading and co-operating organisation that effectively stretches, as it were, from the Atlantic to the Urals”.

Those months later, the remarks were effectively being repeated by a German politician just as Ukraine had been due to sign a landmark association agreement with the EU, in Vilnius, when Kiev decided to put the whole show on hold.

Very little off this was reported in the legacy media in Britian at the time, but – referring to a Euractiv report (now paywalled) – I noted that the writing had been on the wall when the Ukrainian parliament had failed to pass laws that would have allowed jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko to go to Germany for medical treatment. At the time, her release had been seen as a sine qua non condition for the signature of the association agreement.

Two hours after the rejection of the laws, the Ukrainian government announced it had decided to stop its preparations to sign an association agreement with the EU. The statement underlined that the decision was taken with a view to elaborating measures towards “Russia and other countries from the Community of Independent States”.

Ukraine then said it would propose to the EU and Russia the formation of “a tripartite commission to handle complex issues”, while Kiev would “resume an active dialogue with the Russian Federation and other countries of the Customs Union and the member states of the CIS on the revival of trade and economic relations in order to preserve and strengthen joint efforts of economic potential”.

The statement did not say whether Ukraine intended to join the Customs Union led by its former Soviet master Russia, but the EU had already said that such membership was “incompatible the statute for countries associated with the Western bloc”.

In fact, the writing had already been on the wall, instanced by Reuterst on 21 September 2013 which reported that Ukraine’s prime minister had sought to calm Russian fears over Kiev’s plans to sign a free trade pact with the European Union.

But, rather than calming the situation, he was confronted by a Kremlin official who had repeated threats of retaliatory action. This was Sergei Glazyev, an aide to Putin, who warned that Russia might be obliged to impose duties on any goods arriving from Ukrainian territory, at a huge financial cost to Ukraine.

Following the Ukrainian statement in the November, EU officials were said to be “thunderstruck”. Appearing at a press event minutes after the Ukrainian government’s decision became known, Linas Linkevičius, foreign minister of Lithuania – which was then holding the EU presidency – said there was not enough clarity following the announcement, and the best option was “to wait” for more information.

The reasons behind the move were explored later in another Reuters report on 19 December 2013, when it emerged that, in the September, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich had urged his party to accept an agreement to deepen trade and other cooperation with the European Union.

Yet it had been less than three months later that Yanukovich had spurned the EU, embraced Putin and struck a deal on 17 December for a bailout of his country. Russia agreed to invest $15 billion in Ukraine’s government debt and reduce by about a third the price that Naftogaz, Ukraine’s national energy company, pays for Russian gas.

Said Reuters, it is not clear what Yanukovich agreed to give Russia in return, but two sources close to him said he may have had to surrender some control over Ukraine’s gas pipeline network.

As to what caused the U-turn, Reuters concluded that public and private arm-twisting by Putin, including threats to Ukraine’s economy and Yanukovich’s political future, played a significant part. But, the Agency added, “the unwillingness of the EU and International Monetary Fund to be flexible in their demands of Ukraine also had an effect, making them less attractive partners”.

Much water was to flow under the bridge, and more was to come. But, in February 2014, I was back in EUReferendum writing again about Mr Cameron’s earlier intervention, noting that the Russian sphere of influence extended to include the Ukraine, on its south-western border.

There is no way, historically, socially or politically, I wrote, that the leader of the Russian Federation could allow the Ukraine to detach itself from its sphere of interest and align itself to the western bloc.

Despite that, I continued, with total disdain for the finer feelings of the Russians, the EU has been nothing else but provocative. I had tracked down its website, going back to 2007, the earliest I could find, which had the EU is seeking an increasingly close relationship with Ukraine, “going beyond mere bilateral co-operation, to gradual economic integration and a deepening of political co-operation”.

This, even then, was to be more that a trade deal – much more – prompting me to write that: “the EU’s dogged persistence in pursuing this agreement with the Ukraine has been the equivalent on parking its tanks, if not on Moscow’s front lawn, on the verge opposite. This was something no Russian government could possibly tolerate for very long”.

The rest, as they say. is history (pictured), with Russia making its views very plain after the downfall of Viktor Yanukovych. Dmitry Medvedev, the then Russian prime minister denounced what he termed an “armed mutiny” in Ukraine, declaring: “There is a real threat to our interests and to the lives of our citizens”.

Yet, in May 2016, during the EU Referendum campaign, Cameron suggested that Brexit would increase the risk of war and genocide returning to the European continent.

By that time, there was already a low-grade war in Donbass, and Russia had annexed Crimea, whence the infamous Boris Johnson blamed the EU for causing the turmoil in Ukraine, attacking the EU as a “force for instability and alienation”.

Johnson’s fate (if it can be called that) was to be branded a “Putin apologist”, an epithet being currently applied to Farage who, back in 2022, was arguing that the attack on Ukraine had been “caused” by Nato and the EU trying to “poke the Russian bear with a stick”.

It is perhaps fair to criticise Farage for his poor choice of words. The only “cause” of the attack was Putin, in terms of a direct causal relationship. But nonetheless, the EU’s handling of its relations with Russia over Ukraine has been clumsy and provocative. Neither it nor its partner in chaos, the United States, walk away with clean hands.