With EU leaders putting €600 million in the pot for the Eastern Partnership, the European Commission is mulling over how to assign personnel to run the new project.
“The means are there for this to start up, that’s the most important thing,” Czech EU presidency foreign minister Karl Schwarzenberg said in Brussels on Friday (20 March), after EU leaders approved the policy at a meeting dominated by multi-billion euro plans on the economy.
The Eastern Partnership is to build closer political and trade relations with six former-Soviet countries of “strategic importance” – Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
Last-minute debate covered whether to invite authoritarian Belarus President Lukashenko to a special Eastern Partnership summit on 7 May, whether to hold the summit in Prague or Brussels and whether to insert a clear reference to visa-free travel.
“[The invitation] will depend on the behaviour of Mr Lukashenko and the Belarus government in the coming weeks,” Mr Schwarzenberg said.
The invitation might be made at a lower political level if Belarus in April recognises disputed Georgia territories South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, so as not to jeopardise the summit attendance of Georgia leader Mikhail Saakashvili, a Dutch diplomat told EUobserver.
The summit venue will also be decided later, amid an organisational clash with an EU jobs summit the same day. A reference to “visa liberalisation” as a long-term goal went into the official declaration on the initiative.
Andrew Rettman