MOSCOW, November 10. /TASS/. The Ukrainian authorities look upon Kiev's "European choice" simply as a means to "reach deeper into the EU’s pocket," while the bloc's leadership has long been acting counter to the interests of Europe, blithely unaware that "the process of ruining the EU by means of Ukraine" is already in motion, Viktor Medvedchuk, former leader of the now-banned Ukrainian party Opposition Platform-For Life, said.
"The EU can keep waltzing with Ukraine as long as it wants, but there is simply no economic or political sense in that country’s joining the EU. Ukraine will not yield the EU any benefits at all. Once put on the EU’s payroll, it will erode the union from the inside. The process of ruining the EU with Ukraine serving as a time bomb has already begun," Medvedchuk, who now leads The Other Ukraine movement, wrote in an article on the movement’s website.
He recounted that Kiev has for many years looked upon Brussels as a sort of sugar daddy, its long-cherished dream being to see the day when European subsidies start pouring in.
"For most Ukrainian politicians, the European choice means the chance to dip their hands into Europe’s pocket as if it were their own. As for the EU leadership, it keeps encouraging such an attitude," Medvedchuk said.
In the meantime, he emphasized, the EU itself is now in crisis, with the situation in Ukraine merely exacerbating it, obviously to the delight of the United States.
"The EU leadership prefers to bow to the interests of NATO and the United States, while the Europeans’ attempts to voice their own political will fall on deaf ears. <...> But if the EU leadership is to be considered as viceroys of the US administration, one will have to admit that they act very effectively, albeit not in the interests of Europe," the politician said. He stressed that, "the EU leadership should avoid both wars and sanctions, but for now it does otherwise."
Medvedchuk pointed out that currently the EU economy in dollar terms is 65% of the size of the US economy, while in 2013 it was at the 91% mark. At the same time, the per capita GDP of the United States is more than twice that of the EU.
"The EU has invested heavily in the Ukrainian war. It has accommodated millions of refugees and agreed to impose sanctions, thus sustaining multibillion-dollar losses, but do they have any idea of what the conflict is really all about? <...> The EU leadership has no understanding that the Ukrainian conflict’s prime target is Europe, with the United States enjoying all the benefits," the Ukrainian politician noted.
EU losing its raison d’etre
Medvedchuk noted that the EU itself was in a deep crisis.
"The question is not whether Ukraine will or will not join the EU, but what the EU is now and what it will be in the future," he explained.
The way he sees it, due to the Brussels leadership’s incompetent policies, the EU has lost sight of its original mission. Medvedchuk recalls that it was originally conceived as a pan-European political and economic space meant to replace the bloc-versus-bloc standoff between the socialist second world and the first world of Western Europe.
Medvedchuk pointed out that the existence of a large number of subsidized countries was the EU’s worst headache.
"Today, economically, the EU consists of a minority of donor countries, which includes primarily Germany and France, and a long list of subsidized dependents. It’s small wonder that the UK at a certain point rebelled against carrying this burden any further and quit the EU," the politician said. He added that the subsidized countries, instead of working hard in order to catch up with their more developed neighbors, as it was originally intended, keep living at the latter group’s expense and lose any ability to develop on their own.
"The EU is no longer of interest to the donor countries," Medvedchuk stressed. At the same time, he noted the emergence of dissenters and "politicians guilty of ‘wrong-think,’" such as prime ministers Viktor Orban and Robert Fico of Hungary and Slovakia, respectively, who are keen to safeguard the interests of their own countries, and not those of the United States.