Does the EU want Ukraine to join it?

I have now had time to look into a remarkable statement which Roger Boyes made in the Standpoint debate about Russia and Ukraine.

 

Roger Boyes (1.32)  (I have cut out various blobs of stuff about ‘evil plots’):  ‘I just want to set one thing straight, that there is no European Union plan to swallow up Ukraine that is just an absolute absurd fantasy. …If you’d talked to European Union politicians six months ago they would have fallen off their chairs rather than admit that they wanted Ukraine at any time within the European Union….Nobody actually wanted Ukraine..."

 

Also (approx. 1.39) :  “I don’t like it when the European Union is somehow portrayed as an aggressor in this whole situation which is absolutely bonkers… it is quite clear that the European Union is almost helpless in this situation…”

 

 

Leave out what is in this case the apparently inexplicable presence of Catherine Ashton in Kiev during the attempts to overthrow President Yanukovich, and the mere fact that the ‘Association Agreement’ sought by the EU with Ukraine was a document with an explicitly political character, I ask readers to compare and contrast Mr Boyes’s assertion (and he is after all Diplomatic Editor of Britain’s newspaper of record, so we must take it seriously ) with an interview with Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland, in the Washington Post of 18th April, a version of which can be found here :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/talking-with-polands-foreign-minister-about-the-ukraine-crisis-and-russias-next-moves/2014/04/17/f1811e84-c5ad-11e3-bf7a-be01a9b69cf1_story.html

 

 

Question (from the Post’s Lally Weymouth) You worked hard to make Ukraine an E.U.-associated country, didn’t you?

 

Answer (from Radek Sikorski) :

 

It was under the Polish presidency that the text was agreed, and we had persuaded most of the E.U. to say officially that the association agreement would not be the last step in our collaboration. If Ukraine had carried out the reforms, it would eventually have been able to lodge an application to the E.U.

 

 

My note : I believe that Poland’s presidency was in the second half of 2011.