KIEV, May 25. /TASS/. The Eastern Partnership summit in Riga has closed the door on Ukraine’s dreams of speedy European integration, Ukraine’s Vesti online resource said.
"After German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that ‘the Eastern Partnership was not a tool for EU expansion’, this closed the door on any attempts to foist the question of the European perspective into the Riga Declaration, even despite the desperate plea from Arseniy Yatsenyuk "not to be afraid of expansion."
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Vesti points to the lack of progress on practically all clauses put forward by Europe as the conditions for the positive solution of the issue of introducing a visa-free regime: there is little progress in combating corruption, the recommendations of the Venice commission on the lustration law have not been fulfilled. The publication citing a source in the European structures points to a possibility of negative assessment by the Venice commission of the de-communization law. According to Vesti, Brussels doesn’t believe in the speedy restoration of control "at the demarcation lines with Crimea and self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk." The issues of discrimination of ethnic and sexual minorities remain unresolved.
"Thus, several clauses of the European Commission’s requirements are unlikely to be fulfilled" by December 2015, the on-line resource writes. "However, the position of Brussels will depend not so much on the skills of Ukrainian diplomats, but on the EU’s attitude to Ukraine in general at the time," Vesti writes.