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What the Russians saw in the EU initiative was a repeat of the “NATO Syndrome,” in that what was promised would soon be betrayed, i.e. no NATO expansion in exchange for a Soviet agreement to the reunification of Germany.
To Russian eyes, NATO’s 1999 expansion throughout Eastern Europe and the subsequent celebratory bombing campaign against Serbia, inaugurated just one month later, and the still later Albanian annexation of Serbia’s heartland province of Kosovo, were altogether the Clinton Administration’s triple-combo opening salvos in an American campaign to recreate the Versailles Treaty’s cordon sanitaire. And the 2009 Association Agreement is but a Trojan horse whose only practical purpose is to advance US and EU interests at the expense of the former Soviet republics’ naïve hopes and Russian security.
Dangling the Association Agreement’s implied – but not certain – right of eventual EU membership before the economically struggling former Soviet republics was but a means to beguile them into the EU orbit and thus US control with a future as NATO base hosts and IMF lab rats.
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By the week of the EU’s Eastern Partnership’s signing debut at the end of November 2013, Vladimir Putin had told Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich that he could continue flirting with the EU, if he wished. But if Ukraine wanted a trade agreement with Russia, with whom the lion’s share of Ukraine’s trade actually occurs, $15 billion in the coming year, cut-rate gas prices, industrial co-operation projects, and possible further credits, the country would agree to the EAU. Compared to the $200 million the EU offered out of a total of $799 million for all eight targeted Association Agreement signers and a certain decade in EU cold storage while the country underwent an IMF-directed mauling, Yanukovich made the prudent choice.
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Mighty Soviet aluminum smelters were located in Siberia, but supplies of bauxite were to be had only in Ukraine. A component an electronics manufacturer in Kharkiv needed could only be obtained from a manufacturer in Vilnius. Multiplying the complications for obtaining key inputs throughout the industrial and manufacturing sectors of 15 nascent and bankrupt governments gives a fuller understanding of why the former republics have failed to successfully restructure their national economies.
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