Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is now up in arms to defend the country’s agriculture ignored by Russia.
Photo: AP
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Poland's Demands Break Off Russian-EU Talks
// Poland derails talks on a new agreement between Russia and the EU
EU foreign ministers failed to reach an agreement Monday on a new cooperation and partnership treaty with Russia as Poland broken off the talks. Warsaw promised to keep vetoing any negotiations with Russia until Moscow ratifies the Energy Charter and lifts the embargo on Poland’s meat and agricultural products.
Relations with Russia came in the forefront at yesterday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers. In ten-day’s time, Helsinki will hold a Russian-EU summit where Moscow and Brussels are expected to launch talks on a new partnership and cooperation agreement. The agreement in force, which was signed in June 1994 and came into effect in December 1997, expires next year. However, even the launch of the talks seems problematic now.
Poland’s stance has become a real stumbling block for the bilateral relations. As a matter of fact, all 25 EU members must give a unanimous approval of a mandate for the European commission to start drafting a new agreement with Russia. 24 European nations have agreed to launch the negotiations. Poland has been the only one to oppose, insisting that Brussels must set two conditions for Moscow before entering any talks.
Warsaw has two key demands for Moscow, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said a few days before the meeting in Brussels. Russia’s Western neighbor wants it to ratify the Energy Charter and lift a ban on meat and vegetable imports from Poland which was introduced last November after the bilateral relations had toughened.
Kaczynski claims that Moscow is using Europe’s dependence on Russian gas to gain its political ends. To eliminate this threat, Warsaw believes, Russia must ratify the Energy Charter that it already signed. The Charter would open the Russian pipeline network for a third party. Moscow, however, repeatedly dismissed the articles of the Energy Charter’s protocol giving the access to Russian pipelines as unacceptable. Poland is set to defy this opinion. “Naturally, we will be blocking any talks if agreements are still not applied to Poland only because Russia does not want to do it,” Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said.
Russia’s embargo on Polish meat and agricultural exports was the second issue that the prime minister voiced. Warsaw is convinced that this economic move was deeply politicized.
Russian-Polish relations strained shortly after Poland’s then-President Aleksander Kwasniewsi threw his weight behind the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. He played a key part in the revolution’s success attracting attention of the EU to developments in Ukraine at the end of 2004, as the main advocate of the Orange in the West. Polish officials believe that the embargo came as Moscow’s response to Warsaw’s actions.
Another reason for this strict demarche of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s government could have a relation to his party’s defeat in local elections this Sunday. Naturally, the prime minister needs to score extra points by showing persistence in defending national interests.
Moscow was surprised with to the unexpected demarche. A high-placed source in the Kremlin told Kommersant:
“They have not asked us about anything during talks. Why should we think and try to find the things that may have hurt them? They could have said: ‘We are worried about this and that; there are problems, let’s discuss them.’ This would a normal way to develop interstate relations. But they apparently don’t have the guts or experience to ask this.”
Russia and Poland has had direct talks quite recently. Late November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Warsaw. However, the parties failed to find common ground. As an example, Poland’s Foreign Minister Anna Potyga said at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart that Warsaw views the construction project for the Nord Stream pipeline, which will run beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany, a threat for the country. Kaczynski’s latest statement has no mention of the project but Polish representatives obviously raised this issue in talks in Brussels. Warsaw is most likely to keep on pressing on its partners in the EU, chiefly on Germany, to block the Nord Stream venture.
Leaders of the European Union are not inclined to support this stance. Emma Udwin, spokesperson for the EU External Relations Commissioner, told Kommersant:
“We have reached an agreement. We still have ten days to go before the Russia-EU summit. Discussions are still on. I hope that we will be able to convince Poland over the next ten days.”
Udwin assured Kommersant that the European Union is not going to yield to Warsaw’s demands:
“I don’t think that Poland will be able to change the position of the European Union. Poland has certain problems with Russia, with meat exports, for example. But I think they will be solved in bilateral talks. The EU, in its turn, will help the parties to reach an agreement. As far as the Energy Charter is concerned, the European commission suggests continuing a dialog with Russia in a hope to convince it to ratify the charter as soon as possible. The European commission, however, believes the ratification of the charter should not be a condition for the start of talks or for signing the agreement.”
Even though European officials are sure that Poland will drop its demands in the next ten days, the European commission braces itself for the worst – a situation when Russia and the European Union may be unable to launch talks in Helsinki. “The parties decided at the last summit in Sochi that the current agreement between Russia and the EU would be valid until a new one is drafted. Therefore, there cannot be any threat of law vacuum,” Emma Udwin told Kommersant.
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee, says that drafting a new agreement in one-year’s time is absolutely impossible in the current situation. But he adds, however: “Next November is not the end of the current agreement. This is just a crossroads – either we renew the old one or we draw up a new one.” Kosachev is sure that the European Union is interested in the soonest possible signing of a new agreement no less than Russia because the blueprint in force is outdated. For example, this document contains recommendations for Russia to start negotiations on joining the WTO as soon as possible. Furthermore, it was signed back then when the EU did not consider Russia a market economy. “This agreement has no relation to the present time. A new one would be much better,” the Duma’s international affairs chief said. “But this is an internal problem of the European Union. The selfish stance of Poland has become a real pain for Europe. After all, we want to develop relations with the EU on the basis of equal rights, so it would be better to have no agreement whatsoever than risk getting into a blackmail situation.”
Meanwhile, the developments which may not let Russia and the EU draft a new agreement in time looks quite absurd, considering the recent turn in Russia’s energy foreign policy. The European Union is the key partner for Moscow. The Kremlin lays great hopes on cooperation with it in an attempt to counterbalance the United States as relations with it keep on worsening. Poland is one of the closest allies of the United States in Europe, therefore its stringent stance could be no accident. The US is apparently unhappy about Russia’s romance with the EU behind its back and is certainly ready to support Poland it its striving to isolate Moscow.
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 14, 2006
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