What were the consequences of Ukraine's Association Agreement with the European Union?
Since President Yanukovych's last-minute reversal on concluding this agreement was the last straw that unleashed the revolt, the new Ukrainian authorities sought to sign it as quickly as possible.
The Association Agreement does not offer Ukraine a clear accession path to the European Union, as many media commentators have assumed. Its tangible benefits for Ukraine include free trade with the European Union and, at some unspecified point in the future, visa-free travel for Ukrainian citizens. In the long run, the treaty committed Ukraine to aligning its legislation and production standards with that of the European Union, a process to be supported by Western funding.The Russian government objected to Ukraine's agreement with the European Union on ideological and geopolitical grounds, but advanced an economic argument as its primary reservation. Because Ukraine also had free trade with Russia, European goods could enter Russia through Ukraine with no tariffs being collected on either border. Expressing concern over lost revenues and damage to the economy, Russia threatened retaliatory economic measures. The European leaders paid attention, not so much because of this threat, as because Russia had just annexed the Crimea. As a result, Ukraine and the European Union took the unusual step of dividing the Association Agreement into two parts, general political and economic, and then signing each part separately. In order to provide symbolic closure to the EuroMaidan Revolution, Prime Minister Yatseniuk went to Brussels on March 21, 2014, to sign the mostly declarative political clauses.
Seeing that the Russian-sponsored war in the Donbas had flared up anyway, President Poroshenko signed the contested economic part of the Agreement on June 27, 2014. When the Ukrainian parliament ratified the treaty, the president rhetorically framed the vote as his country's “first but very decisive step” toward future membership in the European Union.8 The economic provisions were to come into force in November 2014.
In mid-September, however, after the first Minsk agreement promised to stop fighting in the Donbas, Ukraine and the European Union agreed to placate Russia by postponing the implementation of free trade until the end of 2015. Instead, the European Union unilaterally removed tariffs on Ukrainian goods, thus hoping to support the Ukrainian economy, while Ukraine continued to collect duties on European imports.In the end, Ukrainian exports to the European Union did not increase much because few Ukrainian producers could meet the high EU standards, and those who could were already present on the European market. The shrinking Ukrainian economy and war damage in the Donbas did not help either. Visa-free travel also failed to materialize in the year after the treaty. Moreover, after the second Minsk agreement in February 2015 reduced the intensity of fighting in the Donbas, EU representatives announced their intention to hold trilateral talks with Ukraine and Russia on ways of implementing the Association Agreement's economic clauses, which would address Russia's concerns.