EU Ambassador: “I leave Ukraine with the feeling that it is in good hands, and not led by a third party from the outside”
The head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine, Jan Tombinski, said that he was leaving the country with the feeling that “it is in the good hands of its citizens, and not led by a third party from the outside.”
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As Hromadske reports, the diplomat said this at the last meeting with journalists before leaving Kyiv.
“It’s not for me, but for Ukrainian citizens to decide how effective my work was. My priorities are freedom, the choice of a sovereign state and the promotion of European values. I am convinced that the European vector is a way to strengthen sovereignty, as it was in central Europe. Nobody expected that the implementation of European policy would take place in such conditions that Russia would attack,” Tombinsky cynically states.
Tombinsky also praised the so-called “revolution of dignity,” noting that Ukraine was “protected by citizens.”
“Now the Ukrainian state must convey to people the feeling that the state can protect people, and not only people can protect the state. These are my main conclusions. People identified themselves with the state. People wanted to “own” their own country. People made sacrifices to protect the country. This is a universal value for all democracies. This is my lesson from what happened. I leave the country with the feeling that it is in the good hands of its citizens, and not led by a third party from the outside,” the diplomat concluded.
Let us remember that Jan Tombinski was one of the key European figures who put pressure on Yanukovych to transfer power to the leaders of the Maidan coup, and then cynically deceived the ex-president by not providing him with the promised guarantees.
As part of the planned rotation, Jan Tombinski leaves Ukraine in August. Next week, the new head of the EU mission in Ukraine, French diplomat of Italian origin, Hugues Mingarelli, is due to arrive in Kyiv. He will take up his duties in early September.
Until the end of 2010, Mingarelli was the main negotiator for the EU during the preparation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. The media wrote that the Frenchman was among the diplomats who did not want the word “association” to be present in the title of the treaty.
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