Behind the West's Miscalculations in Ukraine — Excellent column from WSJ

An excellent column from WSJ on how the idiots EU top brass pushed the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych into the arms of Russia. Block italic is my own addition.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304585004579417531612266214?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304585004579417531612266214.html


Behind the West's Miscalculations in Ukraine
U.S. Had Let Europe Take Lead in Guiding Westward Drift of Former Soviet Republic

By
Adam Entous in Washington and
Laurence Norman in Brussels
Updated March 3, 2014 10:39 p.m. ET



The U.S. ambassador was waiting in the office of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in November, anxious for a decision that would cinch closer ties with the West, when he ran across a staffer bearing unwelcome news.

"I can't believe it. I just came from seeing the president. He's told me we're going to put the European project on pause," Mr. Yanukovych's chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkyn, told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, according to a person who was present.

The ambassador asked how the president intended to explain the turnabout to 46 million Ukrainians expecting a new pact with the European Union.

"I have no idea," Mr. Lyovochkyn said. "…I don't think they have a Plan B unless it's a dacha on the outskirts of Moscow."

The exchange made clear the U.S. would have to come up with its own Plan B. For the previous two years, the Obama administration had sought to let Europe take the lead in guiding the westward political and economic drift of the former Soviet republic, with the U.S. in a supporting role.

Now, the U.S. has been drawn front and center at a far more difficult time—after blood has been shed, battle lines drawn and Russian ire provoked.

Locked today in the very East-West standoff the administration had hoped to avoid, "The U.S. is now in the lead," a senior U.S. official said.

Many European diplomats felt that while the U.S. portrayed itself as acting tough in recent weeks, the Americans had left them alone on the Ukraine issue for far too long, preferring to prioritize Washington's own ties with Moscow.

The White House decision to rely on Europe to cement ties with Ukraine was shaped by a foreign-policy doctrine meant to give international partners more responsibility for the world's challenges, U.S. officials said. By divvying up responsibilities, these officials said, the U.S. could focus on issues at home after more than a decade of costly wars abroad.

There also was initial skepticism within the Obama administration that Mr. Yanukovych was serious about moving toward Europe. Few administration policy makers believed Ukraine should be an American responsibility because the issue was more important to Russia and Europe than to the U.S.

Strategically, the Obama administration decided to take a back seat to Europe because of concerns that assuming the lead in Ukraine might backfire if Russia saw the European Union pact as a part of a superpower "Great Game" competition.

Even with Russian troops streaming into Crimea, administration officials said Monday it wasn't clear if the outcome would have been any different had the U.S. taken a bigger role from the start. "The truth is Yanukovych left, and the new government is much more Western leaning. This is not a win for Russia," a senior administration official said.

Talks between the EU and Ukraine date to the breakup of the Soviet Union, but in recent years they have focused on a sweeping trade and political pact known as the Association Agreement. In 2012, Ukraine and the EU initialed an agreement that, once final, would draw them closer.

The U.S. thought the Ukrainian leader might be bluffing about signing the Europe pact until mid-2013, when Mr. Yanukovych began taking more concrete steps.

To bring Mr. Yanukovych closer to the West without provoking Russia, the U.S. and the EU settled on an informal division of labor, U.S. and European officials said.

The EU's job was to get the pact signed by a November 2013 deadline. The U.S. would work with the International Monetary Fund to get Kiev to agree to tough economic reforms.

The last thing the Obama administration wanted was another flashpoint with Russia. Relations between the two countries were already fraught over Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the Assad regime in Syria and the decision to grant asylum to alleged National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

Russia began pressuring Ukraine to resist the pact by reducing Russian imports from Ukraine during the first three months of 2013. Russia followed with a targeted trade war to hurt Ukrainian oligarchs who favored European engagement.

Unease was growing within the U.S. administration. The EU wasn't paying enough attention to Kiev's economic troubles and pressure from Russia, government analysts privately warned policy makers, U.S. officials said.

Anxiety in Brussels surfaced in September, when Armenia, which had negotiated a similar trade and political deal with the EU, backed out and instead pledged to join the Russian customs union under pressure from Moscow.

The Russia-led Customs Union membership is not compatible with the DCFTAs which we have negotiated with Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, the European Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy, Stefan Fule said.

“This is not because of ideological differences; this is not about a clash of economic blocs, or a zero-sum game. This is due to legal impossibilities: for instance, you cannot at the same time lower your customs tariffs as per the DCFTA and increase them as a result of the Customs Union membership,” he said during the European Parliament plenary meeting in Strasbourg in a statement on “the pressure exercised by Russia on countries of the Eastern Partnership.”
“It may certainly be possible for members of the Eastern Partnership to increase their cooperation with the Customs Union, perhaps as observers; and participation in a DCFTA is of course fully compatible with our partners' existing free trade agreements with other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) states,” Fule said.

EU officials saw Armenia, which also faced economic and political pressure from Russia, as a warning sign and stepped up contacts with Ukraine. EU leaders expressed confidence the Ukraine deal would be signed, believing Mr. Yanukovych wouldn't reverse course after coming this far.

At an October meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Minsk, Mr. Yanukovych made his last strong defense of the European pact. He also had a brief meeting with Mr. Putin that day, and U.S. officials believe that was when a more forceful Russian campaign began.

European divisions over Ukraine, with EU member states worried about antagonizing Russia, weakened the bloc's ability to influence Kiev's decisions, some diplomats said. Many member states believed the roadblock to a final agreement wasn't Russian pressure, but Kiev's refusal to meet European demands that it release—at least temporarily—imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to receive medical treatment in Berlin.

U.S. officials believe Russian officials persuaded Mr. Yanukovych to finally reverse course in a series of meetings in Sochi in early November.

In one of those meetings, the Russians presented the Ukrainian delegation with a dossier spelling out potential damage to Ukraine's economy if the government moved ahead with the EU agreement, Mr. Yanukovych's advisers told U.S. officials. The dossier, U.S. officials said, set out specific financial losses and percentage declines in such sectors as aerospace and defense.

While top European officials were meeting almost weekly with their Ukrainian counterparts, the U.S. had little in the way of high-level contacts.

But on Nov. 18, a few days after Ambassador Pyatt's unexpected conversation with Mr. Lyovochkyn in the presidential office complex in Kiev, Vice President Joe Biden called Mr. Yanukovych, suggesting the U.S. could help counter Mr. Putin's offer.

Mr. Biden, during a visit to Ukraine in 2009, had gotten along well with Mr. Yanukovych, a senior administration official said. He seemed receptive to Mr. Biden's blunt style, the official added.

Mr. Biden's message was that the U.S. was prepared to work with both the IMF and the EU "to deliver the support Ukraine needed to get through the economic troubles," said a senior administration official briefed on the call, which Mr. Biden made while visiting Houston.

The next day, Mr. Yanukovych met Stefan Füle, a former Czech foreign minister who was the bloc's point man on the deal, at the presidential palace. As the two officials sipped tea surrounded by top aides, Mr. Yanukovych presented new figures amounting to tens of billions of euros Ukraine would need to see through the reforms embedded in the EU deal.

Frustrated by a fumbling translator and determined to convey a clear message to Mr. Yanukovych, Mr. Füle, who studied in Moscow in the early 1980s, switched into Russian during his response. The EU official rejected the numbers the president was citing and questioned whether Mr. Yanukovych was looking for excuses to justify his reversal.

Mr. Yanukovych didn't respond to the appeals. On Nov. 21, the Ukrainian government announced it was putting the EU deal on hold, blaming the EU for failing to offer enough economic support.

Even then, some European officials hoped Mr. Yanukovych would make a last-gasp change of heart when he arrived at a summit in the Lithuanian capital on Nov. 28, where he was supposed to have signed the deal.

Those hopes were finally dashed that evening in a 75-minute meeting in a sparse meeting room on the ground floor of the Kempinski Hotel in Vilnius' central square.

Mr. Yanukovych told the EU's two top officials he could advance the bilateral deal but offered no time frame for signing it, and demanded three-way talks with Russia and the EU in the meantime, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Those were deal-breakers for European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, who refused to give Moscow direct say over the fate of a bilateral EU-Ukraine pact.

The meeting ended in farce the next day. After the summit was formally over and faced with growing protests at home over his U-turn on the EU deal, Mr. Yanukovych rushed over to Mr. Van Rompuy and Mr. Barroso to urge them to agree to a Ukrainian drafted joint statement saying talks would continue. It is too late, the EU leaders told him. 

EU was too arrogant to really look into the difficulties Ukraine was facing.They thought the Ukrainian government was just trying to get a better bargaining position by buffing.
The decisive day was Dec. 15, 2013 when Mr. Stefan Fule, European commissioner for enlargement and European neighborhood policy, said earlier on Twitter that the words and deeds of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his government on the proposed pact were "further & further apart. Their arguments have no grounds in reality."

Fule said he had told Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov in Brussels, Belgium, last week that further discussion on the agreement was conditional on a clear commitment by Kiev to sign the deal, but he had received no response.

"Work on hold, had no answer," he tweeted.

U.S. officials said they believed Mr. Yanukovych was looking for the easiest way to raise cash, regardless of the strings attached. EU officials said they weren't prepared to match the eventual $15 billion loan package from Moscow.

U.S. officials tried to convince Mr. Yanukovych it was a bad deal. Moscow offered Ukraine cheap natural gas for three months. After that, prices would rise and Ukraine would be required to buy more, increasing the country's dependence on Russia.

In his calls, Mr. Biden warned the besieged Ukrainian leader that he was "behind the curve" and putting himself in an "impossible position," said a senior administration official briefed on the calls.

U.S. officials said Mr. Yanukovych was responsive at times, reversing some of the government's anti-protest laws after one of Mr. Biden's calls. "But it would always be grudging and halfhearted and too late," a senior administration official said.

In Washington, Mr. Biden pushed to "wield the threat of sanctions" if Mr. Yanukovych decided to crack down on protesters, a message the vice president conveyed directly in a Dec. 6 call. But the Europeans were torn about sanctions, arguing against the risk of backing the Ukrainian leader into a corner.

U.S. officials said the tipping point came on Jan. 16, when Mr. Yanukovych pushed through laws that effectively banned peaceful protests and outlawed opposition group activities. State Department officials and intelligence analysts warned the White House that Ukraine could be engulfed in civil war.

In the last week of January, at a Situation Room meeting at the White House, Mr. Biden urged the administration to spell out in more detail what financial aid would be provided if Mr. Yanukovych and the opposition cut a deal, said U.S. officials briefed on the session. Mr. Biden was backed by Secretary of State John Kerry, officials said, and President Barack Obama agreed.

A few days later, Mr. Kerry huddled with senior European officials on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich and delivered Mr. Obama's message: Get money ready, according to officials briefed on the discussions.

In February, EU foreign ministers closed ranks with the U.S., saying they would respond quickly if the situation deteriorated, and, later, agreeing on sanctions.

Mr. Kerry was in Paris in the third week of February for meetings when his French, German and Polish counterparts decided to fly to Kiev to try to broker a deal between Mr. Yanukovych and opposition leaders. The U.S. was skeptical, but Mr. Kerry and Mr. Biden agreed to help behind the scenes.

In the end, U.S. officials said, they believed Mr. Yanukovych got cold feet about the power-sharing proposals, and then he disappeared. Many street protesters, meanwhile, resented the U.S. for saying it wanted to work with Mr. Yanukovych instead of booting him.

The Obama administration is now preparing sanctions to respond to Russia's military intervention. "We're not putting Europe in the lead on this anymore," a senior U.S. official said.

EU got a bloody nose & USA will have to re-allocate its tight resources to stall the polar bear again. What will those so call partners in SE Asia think, what will the Japanese militarists think, at the end with too much to police, should USA just sink back to its isolationism?