Упрощенная HTML-версия
http://interaffairs.ru
Author : V. Chizhov
Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the European Union
TWENTY YEARS AGO, on June 24, 1994, on the
Greek island of Kerkyra, also known as Corfu, the
Russia-EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement
(PCA) was signed. It entered into force three years
later, on December 1, 1997, and is in effect to date.
It can be said without exaggeration that at the turn
of the century this breakthrough laid down a stable
legal foundation for the comprehensive development
of the Russia-EU dialogue in various spheres.
During the two past decades, Russia and the EU
have conducted 32 summits and five meetings in the
Russian government-European Commission format. Interaction has been established on the ministerial
level - initially in the form of the Cooperation Council and later, by mutual agreement, in the more
flexible format of the Permanent Partnership Council.
I happened to be not only a witness to but also a direct participant in the efforts to implement PCA
provisions signed in pursuit of sectoral agreements, as well as the roadmaps on the creation of Russia-
EU common spaces that were approved at the Moscow Summit in 2005.
It seems that plenty has been done during the past two decades. Today, the European Union is Russia's
largest trade partner.
There is ample evidence that we are inseparably linked to each other. The European continent is in-
conceivable without Russia while Russia's roots go deep into European civilization. And although dis-
putes have been going on for centuries about Russia being part of Europe, about alternative ways of
development for our country, there is no doubt that the peoples of the European continent are insep-
arably interconnected by millions of the "unseen threads" of Greco-Roman and Christian culture, a
centuries-long history and a common legacy of shared values.
This is why the ongoing crisis in Ukraine today is becoming not only a test for the Russia-EU multilevel
system of interaction that has evolved in the past two decades but also "a moment of truth" for the
entire Euro-Atlantic space.
The EU's stance on the Ukrainian crisis has proved, to put it bluntly, far removed from the spirit of
partnership and cooperation as conceived by the authors of the 1994 Agreement.
Against the backdrop of the Ukrainian events it becomes clear that Russia-EU relations are definitely
in need of critical rethinking. Ukrainian events have shown that our EU partners have misinterpreted
this concept from the very outset. They believed that Russia - purportedly due to a lack of any other
civilizational alternatives - would sooner or later follow the EU policy course, and that its interests, in-
cluding those in the post-Soviet space, could thus be ignored.
We hope that sober-minded forces will eventually prevail in the European Union, aware of their re-
sponsibility for the maintenance and consolidation of peace on the continent, hard won by our pred-
ecessors.
Russia and the European Union: 20 Years After