A former president of Poland and EU special envoy to Ukraine has claimed Vladimir Putin will “do absolutely anything” to realise his “dream” for Russia and Ukraine to form part of a newly created “Eurasian union”.
Aleksander Kwasniewski was speaking after it was announced the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France had reached agreement on a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, but admitted major work remains to be done to bring lasting peace.
Mr Kwasniewski said he was “pessimistic” regarding the situation and claimed Mr Putin would seek to destabilise Ukraine to cultivate a “special relationship” with the eastern European state. “Russia, and especially President Putin, wants to have, not only part of Ukraine, but the entire country in the zone of his influence,” said Mr Kwasniewski. “His dream, his strategy is to have Ukraine as part of a newly formed Eurasian union and, for that, he is prepared to do absolutely anything.
“The destabilisation of Ukraine is a key element of that strategy. The Russian expectation is that Ukrainians, totally frustrated, will abandon the experiment with Europe and the West, and turn to Moscow to create a special relationship with Russia. My forecast is pessimistic – we have in front of us a very long and very dramatic crisis.”
He also said the result of Mr Putin’s actions was Europe “is more united than before” and that Ukraine “was never so strong in its own sense of own identity as it is now . . . Of course they pay an extremely high price for that,” he added. “Today, we should discuss how we can support peace in this part of the world.”
Mr Kwasniewski was speaking at a conference organised by the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction in DCU a year after demonstrators in Ukraine demanded closer integration with Europe.
Prof Sergey Markedonov of the Russian State University for the Humanities told the conference the Ukrainian crisis presented the “most serious and dangerous challenge” to European security since the collapse of Yugoslavia and the series of ethnic conflicts it gave rise to in the Balkans.
“Ukraine is the nexus where the interests of such key players as Russia, the European Union and the United States have clashed, making this purely domestic crisis turn into a regional and even global issue.”
