Brussels walks tightrope with Russia over Ukraine

PARIS - Fifteen years ago, geography lessons were simple for young Europeans. They learned that the European Union's border ended at the Iron Curtain that separated East and West Germany for more than four decades.

The map abruptly changed in 1990, when German reunification shifted the EU's border several hundred kilometres eastwards to the Oder-Neisse line, on the border with Poland.

In May this year, there was another big eastwards push when 10 new states brought the EU's roll-call to 25, taking the frontier right up to the three Baltic states' borders with Russia.

Now, as Ukraine stages a presidential vote that could see it edge towards the EU and Turkey clamours to join the Brussels club, speculation is growing of yet another eastwards shift of Europe's borders and the uncertainty is fuelling problems with Russia.

The Kremlin is traditionally suspicious of the West, the source of invaders from Napoleon to Hitler. Today, Russia is fretting as it sees its Soviet-era security buffer and zone of economic interest - the "near abroad" as it is known in Russian - eroded, helping to create an EU that is an economic titan and politically assertive.

This concern is now turning into a bear-like growl as President Vladimir Putin watches events unfold in Ukraine, where he sees nothing less than arrogant meddling by the EU in Russia's traditional sphere of influence.

Pressure by the EU, applied at key points via diplomatic protest, press statements and mediation, has been vital for Ukraine's pro-democracy movement.

It provided political momentum that caused the country's Parliament to outlaw the results of the November 21 presidential elections, which had declared Russia-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovich the winner.

Stung by this humiliation and worried that the pro-EU candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, will win the runoff election on December 26, Russia has been making noises redolent of the Cold War.

"We are alarmed by attempts by certain Governments to steer the situation in Ukraine away from a legal path," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last month.

"These declarations make one think that someone would very much like to draw up new partition lines in Europe."

He warned: "We are not indifferent to what happens in Ukraine. Geographically, Ukraine is near the West, but also near Russia."

At a summit in The Hague late last month, Putin banged out his support for Yanukovich, saying his victory was "absolutely clear", and declaring that the EU had "no moral right to push a major European state into mass mayhem".

The EU said bluntly that the presidential results "did not meet the international standards" and so were unacceptable.

The tough talking marks a big change in Russian-EU relations. Brussels has traditionally been accommodating towards Russian fears of the West, taking a slow, helpful and financially generous approach on German reunification and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland.

Until only a month ago, the idea of Ukraine - impoverished, distant, autocratically run - joining the EU was laughable. Indeed, former European Commission chief Romano Prodi once famously said Kiev was as likely as New Zealand to become an EU member. Ukraine was kept at a friendly arm's length with a Partnership and Co-operation Agreement, a woolly good-neighbour accord.

But the political upheaval in Ukraine has changed things, prompting the EU to take a closer look. In this new light, Ukraine's credentials no longer look so ludicrous, especially given the encouragement afforded to Turkey, a Muslim country with a scant claim to be European, to join the EU.

"If there are fast, democratic changes in Ukraine, it will completely change the situation," said Wojciech Saryusz-Wolski, of the Brussels-based European Policy Centre.

"It would be very difficult ... for the EU to refuse - the next few years might be a watershed in Ukrainian history. The EU cannot turn its back on Ukraine in splendid isolation, as the future costs might be simply too high to bear."

But in Moscow, things look very different. Russia feels wounded by the loss of its superpower status and by its economic decline.

It is straining with the cost of dealing with the separatist uprising in Chechnya, it has loosened its grip over Georgia, and it allowed the US a foothold in the Central Asian former Soviet republics, which now have American military bases.

Ukraine has traditionally close cultural and economic ties with Russia and is the transit point for Russian oil and gas pipelines. To Russian hardliners, a pro-Western Ukraine would be a loss too many.

The EU "now faces serious problems in its already strained relationship with Russia", say analysts Katinka Barysch and Charles Grant, of the Centre for European Reform in London, in a new study.

The EU is on a tightrope, they say: "It needs to stand up for its principles - while doing its best to limit the damage to that important relationship."