EU delegates Cox and Kwasniewski discuss reform with Ukrainian leaders

Former European Parliament President Patrick Cox and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski spent their latest mission to Ukraine – which concludes May 28 – discussing legislative reforms, urging new laws on prosecutors and the judiciary and examining the implementation of the Criminal Procedural Code amended in 2012. They met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, among other officials, reported the Kommersant-Ukrayina newspaper. Despite these discussions, Kommersant’s anonymous EU sources said the mission’s main purpose remained arranging for the release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from prison.

Zenon Zawada: We think it’s significant that Cox and Kwasniewski began devoting more attention to matters other than Tymoshenko’s release. As the article mentioned, they will have to go before the EU leadership in late September and offer a convincing argument that the Ukrainian government has made enough progress in fulfilling the requirements to sign the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement. Knowing that Tymoshenko will likely still be imprisoned at that time, they now realize they will have to stress other successes achieved by the Yanukovych administration when presenting their case. The article refers to an anonymous EU source stating “there aren’t that many of such arguments,” which confirms our assessment of the situation: the Yanukovych administration’s rather careless approach to the Association Agreement has stretched the EU leadership’s patience to its very limits.