Ukraine

On June 27, 2014, Petro Poroshenko, newly elected President of Ukraine, will sign the economic part of the Association Agreement with the EU, political part of which was signed in March 2014. Same day Georgia and Moldova will also sign the Association Agreements with the EU.

In March, Russia annexed Crimea, a peninsula with population of 2.4 m in the south of Ukraine, after it failed to divert Ukraine from the course for European integration. The escalation in Donbas could have been a first step of a large scale Russian intervention into the mainland Ukraine.

In Ukraine, the main channel of the impact of remittances on GDP is consumption. The scope of impact depends on two factors - the marginal propensity to save and the propensity to purchase imported goods and services.

From among the EU member-states, the Hungarian government used the most lenient approach to the Russian operations in Ukraine. The opposition parties’ immediate reactions to these events made the government party express its opinion too.

That is, economy. The West has all the necessary means at its disposal to stop Putin from breaking the law. It only lacks the will to do so.

Ukrainians today are more serious about liberal democracy than many Europeans have been for a long time. The traditional values of Europe – self-reliance, self-determination – today are much stronger in the Maidan square than in parts of, say, Greece.

I wish I were wrong, but all the piece come together reminding of the Munich scenario, the defence of the Russian minority, Ukraine waiting for its allies to take action, the allied armies standing idle, the aggressor producing facts and a desperate fight to keep up pretences of law and order by the West.

I am writing to you as a former prisoner of conscience from the times of Brezhnev. All other titles, which I have been awarded throughout my whole life, do not matter in the light of the Ukrainian Maidan, which is now bleeding.

The Kremlin’s influence has always been a reality. It is naive to negate it.

With this in mind, we wish the protesters in Ukraine well and hope that their situation, where the confrontation with the state is direct, visible and imminent, also clarifies it to the rest of the world that the struggle is always there.