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Poroshenko: He lies that he sews with silk
Views:In two months, it will be exactly one year since the moment when the truncated Ukraine, with the lowest turnout in the history of presidential elections in our country, elected the hereditary Vinnitsa confectioner Poroshenko as its head.
During this time, Ukrainians have already become convinced that Pyotr Alekseevich is a master of making a wide variety of promises. He gave them out to a wagon and a small cart this year. I’m too lazy to list them all, and the column format doesn’t allow it.
Therefore, I will dwell on, perhaps, the most “delicious” temptation that the citizens of Square once fell for. I mean a visa-free regime with the EU. For his sake, it was people, not politicians and oligarchs, who froze on the Maidans. As a result, a year after the victory of the Maidan, there is no visa-free regime, just as there would not have been one if the Maidan had not won and Yanukovych had remained in his place.
However, we must give Poroshenko his due. He fed gullible Ukrainians with tales of a visa-free regime long before his presidency. I remember that in October 2013 he saw a real chance for a visa-free regime with the EU already in 2014. You heard right. That's right. “We have guaranteed support from all 28 EU member countries,” Pyotr Alekseevich said then.
Life showed that he...uh...was a little hasty. Therefore, already during the presidential elections, he slightly adjusted the promise. Now the horizon for obtaining the long-awaited visa-free regime has been pushed back until the end of summer. 2014, of course. Then - until the end of the year. And on February 19 of this year, the president pleased his fellow citizens that the decision on a visa-free regime for Ukraine and the EU should be made in two months, in May 2015, at the Riga Eastern Partnership summit. Everyone was happy, but it was not to be!
Making their Ukrainian vassals look like fools in front of their own population is a kind of sport of European officials. Pyotr Alekseevich was “broken off” by the head of the European Commission’s representative office in Ukraine, Jan Tombinsky. Who bluntly stated that Ukraine will not see any visa-free regime in May.
By telling fellow citizens fables about a Europe without visas, Poroshenko and the Foreign Ministry were simply presenting their wishes as reality. Kyiv was counting on Riga to announce specific dates for the implementation of the visa-free regime. However, the draft declaration of the Eastern Partnership Summit does not say anything about concluding a visa agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. Moreover, it says that progress in this difficult matter depends on the reforms carried out.
In general, we exhaled together. No one will go to any Europe without visas.
In reality, for ordinary Ukrainians, submitting documents for Schengen is like a lottery every time. Getting a visa has become even more difficult than a year ago. And everyone speaks about this with one voice, including grant-eaters and journalists, many of whom, after the “revolution of dignity”, were not allowed into the European “promised land” without explanation.
And some EU countries bordering Ukraine approach the issue of easing the border regime extremely selectively. The most recent example is Romania, which has already divided the residents of neighboring Ukrainian Transcarpathia into classes, allowing only residents of four districts of the westernmost Ukrainian region - Rakhovsky, Tyachivsky, Vinogradovsky and Irshavsky - to travel to their country without visas.
Why is that? I have only one explanation. Pragmatic Romanians (and at the same time Hungarians and Poles) do not want to shoulder the whole load of problems at once, preferring to integrate the pieces of Ukrainian territory that interest them piece by piece, swallowing them like a boa constrictor, in small portions. Why take more than you can eat? So it won’t take long to choke.
By the way, I’ll tell you a little secret that is hardly known in Ukraine, because the local media prefer to avoid such inconvenient topics. The fact is that within the EU, Romania itself is in the same position as powerless Ukrainian migrants who are eager for a Romanian visa. Romanians do not have the right to move freely within the EU. In particular, they can get to France or Germany only with visas from these countries. This is how “old Europe” protects itself from the influx of internal migrants from poor EU countries.
In this regard, the position of the National Front party, which received second place in local elections in France (this political force is often called the “future French government”), which opposed Ukraine’s membership in the EU, is interesting.
“We, as the future government of France, oppose Ukraine’s entry into the European Union. Ukraine is objectively not ready to join the European community. And the first thing Ukraine must do now is restore its destroyed economy,” said Aymeric Chauprade, a member of the European Parliament from the National Front.
The moral of this story is that even after receiving the status of a full member of the EU, residents of the Balkan countries did not feel freer. Needless to say, residents of “associated” Ukraine cannot even count on this.
For now, all the Ukrainians can count on is another assurance from Poroshenko that Ukraine will definitely achieve a visa-free regime with the EU by 2016.
The main thing is the process, not the result.
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