RTA analyst Nikolai Tkach tells why 2019 can be a milestone for the EU and US policy in Moldova and Ukraine.
Big Brothers’ Problems
It may take long to analyze how the EU and US policy in Ukraine and Moldova developed, but in general it all comes down to two things: economic expansion and gradual deployment of NATO on Ukrainian and Moldovan territory. Roles between the two ‘big brothers’ were defined quite clearly: the EU was responsible for the economic and social issues, the US – for building the security architecture. Brussels relied on the Eastern partnership program, Washington – on the latent expansion of NATO to the East through soft cooperation with Ukraine and Moldova.
Until a certain time, the interests of the EU and the US in the region complemented each other, and then there was the Ukrainian crisis, and everything changed. Further expansion of NATO in Ukraine, oddly enough, is difficult, as the Alliance prefers not to be anyhow associated with the war in the Donbass. “Eastern Partnership” in fact turned out to be a vulnerable project, and even the main success story – Moldova – is considered to be a captured state, which since the middle of 2018 does not receive macro-financial assistance from the EU.
Among other things, relations between Brussels and Washington have seriously cooled: Europe wants stability on its borders, and the US is caught up in geopolitical confrontation with Moscow. Hawks and pacifiers speak different languages, and the number of contradictions is only growing. Under these conditions, the prospects for the entire foreign policy of the EU and the United States in post-Soviet Eastern Europe sank into a dense fog of uncertainty.
The RTA has already noted Moldova’s signal precedent – neither Washington nor Brussels expresses a specific position either on the results of the parliamentary elections or on the negotiations on the formation of the government. Oligarchs-democrats, pro-Russian socialists and pro-Europeans from the ACUM bloc can not agree on anything for a month and a half, and in Western capitals no one is in a hurry to suggest ‘how to’.
Anton Shvets points out that the position of Moldova’s partners is strongly influenced by the outcome of the presidential elections in neighboring Ukraine: the point is that the authorities in Chisinau will try to build on the new leadership in Kyiv, so as not to destroy the Moldovan-Ukrainian friendship against Russia.
Most likely, the situation is much more serious – the completion of the electoral cycle in Moldova and Ukraine will determine whether these countries will be able to continue moving towards the Euro-Atlantic structures, or will become the borderzone between Russia and NATO.
Buffer zone
While the oligarchic regimes of Poroshenko and Plahotniuc are in power in Ukraine and Moldova, the tandem of Kyiv and Chisinau is predictable. The current governments of these countries are strongly ‘hooked’ on anti-Russian populism and the fight against the ‘hand of the Kremlin’, which allows to maintain support from at least the United States, if not Europe, in the context of dominant military-strategic ambitions of Washington in the regional space.
The likely victory of Zelensky in the elections in Ukraine and the imminent need for a ‘compromise’ government in Moldova will lead to a change in strategy in these countries. First, in this configuration of power in these countries, the geopolitical agenda is guaranteed to be relegated to second or even third place. In Moldova, the issue of the resumption or replacement of European funding is becoming more burning (otherwise there will be nothing to live on), and in Ukraine geopolitics has led to the loss of Crimea and the ongoing civil war with tens of thousands of victims. It is clear that in such conditions in 2019 it will not be easy to inflame hysteria around the choice of the path of development.
Secondly, the decline of geopolitical hysteria in Chisinau and Kyiv leads not only to the degradation of harsh anti-Russian rhetoric, but also to skepticism about the European future. At this point, both the EU and the US fell into the trap of the post-Soviet mentality. Based on formal logic, the long-term financing of Moldova and Ukraine, the work with civil society and the cultivation of democratic values should have implanted in the new generations of both countries a non-alternative course towards the West. For Ukraine, the war in the Donbass had to burn all the bridges at all with the Russian past and only accelerate Europeanization. However, this did not happen – the population of Moldova and Ukraine feels hostage to the geopolitical strife of world players and to a comparable extent blames them for their own troubles. This irrational, but inexorable circumstance hinders further plans to create a complete pro-NATO Europe in these countries, and turns investment in such a project into an obvious waste of resources.
The European Union is likely to continue ‘working over’ the Ukrainian leadership at least in order to stabilize the country, ensure gas transit and prevent mass flight of Ukrainians to Europe. As for NATO, the Alliance is likely to
settle on the Dniester. Moldova remains neutral, but is already critically integrated into the military complex of Romania and the United States. The development of NATO infrastructure in Ukraine will continue, but due to inconsistent Ukrainian policy more focused on corruption interests than on strategic goals, will be limited only to the creation of a buffer zone between the Alliance and Russia – a border area that is doomed to survive as an eternal object of someone’s interests. If the assumption is correct, the West will gradually reduce its interest in Ukraine.
Moldova, on the contrary, will become a point of application of forces in the near future: both in political and military-strategic terms, which will inevitably require non-trivial decisions on Transdniestria and a possible deal with Moscow – perhaps the ‘big’ one that has been waited for several years.
