Two years after its ex-pro-Russian president reneged on a landmark deal to draw closer to Europe, Ukraine’s much-ballyhooed free-trade agreement with the European Union is set to come into force. And Vladimir Putin is none too happy about it.
Moscow’s food fight with the West has finally landed in Ukraine’s plate.
After slapping a ban on a range of agricultural products from Europe, the US, Canada and beyond, Putin is poised to extend those punitive measures, starting January 1, to the southern neighbour with which he’s been waging a not-so-shadow war of influence for the past couple of years.
The Kremlin insists the looming sanctions against Kiev – which will include a smorgasbord of meat, fish, dairy products, fruits and vegetables – are purely a defensive action.
They are aimed, he says, at protecting Russia’s domestic market from a flood of European goods entering illegally via Ukraine.
"We'll have to protect our market on a unilateral basis from unattended access of goods through Ukraine's customs territory, those being goods from third countries, first of all from the states of the European Union,” Russia’s Economic Development Minister, Alexei Ulyukayev, told the Rossiya-24 TV news channel last week.
But the real message behind Moscow’s embargo is a political one.
Coming a little over a year after Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, signed an Association Agreement with the EU, the country’s imminent entry into the free-trade zone adds a triumphal economic component to what has been, until now, a political rapprochement.
And Putin can’t stand that.
A rival free-trade bloc
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