EU leaders signal readiness for long-term Russia strategy

PanARMENIAN.Net - European Union leaders warned Moscow they were ready exercise their combined muscle over the long haul in a confrontation with an economically wounded Russia if President Vladimir Putin refused to pull back from Ukraine, Reuters reports.

"We must go beyond being reactive and defensive. As Europeans we must regain our self-confidence and realize our own strengths," said Donald Tusk, the former Polish premier who chaired a brief EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, Dec 18.

"It is obvious we will not find a long-term perspective for Ukraine without an adequate, consistent and united European strategy towards Russia," he said. "Today we are maybe not too optimistic. But we have to be realistic, not optimistic."

Some in the EU have said they should switch their focus away from supporting Ukraine to seeking a detente with Moscow. That might be in the longer term interests of businesses, which have suffered loss of trade and fear a spillover from the Russian financial crisis. But for all their differences in attitudes to Russia, leaders made clear their determination to stick together as they have over the past year, while offering Putin both the threat of stick and the carrot of mutually beneficial commerce. They agreed to keep up financial aid to help Ukraine carry out reforms to its post-Soviet political and economic systems, Reuters says.

"Russia is today our strategic problem, not Ukraine," said Tusk, who as Polish prime minister was among the hawks from Moscow's former communist satellites who pushed for sanctions. "The biggest challenge today is the Russian approach, not only to Ukraine but also to the EU."

Having enacted some previously agreed new sanctions on Thursday, they made no move to further escalate measures against Moscow, and indeed made clear that, like the United States, they were ready to ease them if they concluded Putin was implementing a peace deal made with Ukraine at Minsk in September.

"The door is always open if Russia changes its behavior," said British Prime Minister David Cameron. "If it takes Russian troops out of Ukraine, and it obeys all the strictures of the Minsk agreement, these sanctions can go."

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has taken a lead in unsuccessful negotiations with Putin, stressed: "Sanctions ... can only be lifted if the reasons for them change."

Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Luxembourg premier who has taken over as head of the executive European Commission, told a news conference with Tusk that dialogue was still important. "We have to keep channels of communication open," he said. "I have known Mr. Putin for many years and I intend to swim in those channels and take advantage of that communication."