Despite what you might think, some parts of the Ukrainian government are still actively working towards EU membership. I took the fact that Yushchenko attended the summit in Helsinki with Ukraine to mean that Yanukovich didn't care enough to go himself. Nevertheless my visit has ended on an unexpected upbeat note.
We met some interesting new organisations working on the last phase of our work. A specially created unit in the government is designed to help cooperation between European institutions and their Ukrainian equivalent. The excellent practical technical discussion we had with a senior manager was spoilt by the team of three young people who sat like stones throughout the discussion, but were introduced as the "future of the unit". As their leader only spoke to them in Russian, we assumed they were not understanding anything, or we were dealing with a unreformed Soviet organisation, where you do not speak (or even look) out of turn. When he went, they turned into humans again and we saw that they spoke good English, so we made our own deductions.
Then we went to the organisation helping Ukraine change its legislation to comply with EU legislation, which had just started work. All the projects were delayed over the summer while the government crisis went on. There is a whole change of culture needed in Ukraine. New laws are regarded as little more than bits of paper if they get in the way of businessmen and the government, so they aren't really important. Even so, if they are thought to really make a difference, there is a battle to get them through the Verhovna Rada, and so we thought we would start now. And then there is the need to implement the laws. So many people say that recent laws are not bad but nobody knows how to implement them. It's more accurate to say that vested interests are not too interested to make them work, so the implementing organisations are never set up and the government never makes the rules and regulations that are needed to make the primary law work.
In fact we came across an interesting problem of translation. In the EU, the Directives have the force of law and although each Member State can choose how to turn them into a law in their own country, the EU monitors the progress of transposition and implementation. Some countries have a rather poor reputation of turning EU Directives into law and regularly find themselves in court with the European Commission chasing them.
But in Russian, a directive is more like a recommendation, with no force behind it. So there is plenty of scope for misunderstanding what implementing an EU Directive means. With no real force behind the process of adopting EU legislation, it will be interesting to see what really is working in 5 years time.
*with apologies to the national anthem of Ukraine
