Carl Bildt: The history of Ukraine is different from the history of Russia

let me try to put things into some sort of context from my point of view having dealt also with Ukraine and with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine for quite some time or the not quite for this long time this particular person is one of the reason favorites of mr. Putin which he speaks about quite a lot it is Vladimir the great Vladimir the great was is some time ago is of course the man who brought Christianity to the Eastern Slavic word his name is Vladimir popularly this is the statue of him that you find overlooking the Knepper in Kiev but his proper name was actually Valdemar and I would say although we don't know that the language that he spoke with his mother today we would classify as Icelandic he acquired power in a battle with his brothers with the help of the warriors that he brought from his tribe the Norwegians and the swedes those were the days but eventually complicated story he was baptised in the year 988 in a place called ke soreness which is today Sevastopol or roughly Sevastopol and had either nothing to do with Russia I would say this is the favorite of mr. Putin at the moment he sees him as the ancestor of everything that is Russian but it's at Valdemar with a slightly different ancestry and the seat of chaos owners when he became baptized had been a Greek city for thousand years at that particular time but this only by saying that there are very deep they're complicated historical roots that resonate very deeply in the politics of Russia and in the politics of Ukraine the common roots that are there which started in Kiev his story with the key of yin Russia and then later of course changed it should be added this is that you're forming Kiev and those of you who have been to Moscow recently will notice that an even bigger statue is now right outside the walls of the Kremlin since less than a year ago it is worth reminding audience in the West that the history of Ukraine is very different from the history of Russia from that Russia that takes its origin in Moscow or in Muscovy Ukraine or the areas of substantial parts of the areas that are today's Ukraine was for a very long time part of the polish-lithuanian Commonwealth and as you can see here these are areas of the polish-lithuanian Commonwealth that are subsequently ended up as Poland ended up as Belarus and it up as Lithonia and ended up as Ukraine and the history of the nation formation and the state formation in this vast space between the Baltic States of the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea has dominated the politics of the eastern part of Europe for a very long time with the battle between these emerging nations emerging States and the power of Moscow and to a certain extent the other powers that were there competing in this space on the European continent notably Vienna for a long time and later of course Berlin significantly the you see other parts of Ukraine have a somewhat different history particularly the southern ports which were a part of what the Crimean Khanate for a very long time the Tatas the steppes and it was only fairly lately fairly late that they were brought into Russia or the Russian Empire and later with the economic development coming there but this explains to a large extent the cultural divide that is still there between an outlook that you can find in Moscow and an outlook that you fine in Kiev and by the way even if you go to the Soviet Museum that is to certain extent Belarus you can sense that it's a culture and a background that is different from what you find in Moscow the defining issue of the modern age is of course the breakup of the Soviet Union and I would argue that the dispute that we are dealing with today and a lot of the issues that we have been dealing with the last few years or still part of the break-up process of the law the integrated phase thing that was the Soviet Union and prior to that that saw his Russian Empire that encompassed part or significant parts of this particular area so back to there in the early 1990s and the breakup of the Soviet Union when we look at the breakup of the Soviet Union from the Nordic perspective we were very much preoccupied of course with the Baltic States we were preoccupied with the reunification of Germany we are preoccupying with the Poland democracy coming there but from the Moscow point of view these things were I wouldn't call them irrelevant because they were fairly relevant but the key thing was Ukraine it was the break with Ukraine that was the breakup of the Soviet Union that defined everything else and this is the referendum that was held in Ukraine on December 1st I think it was in 1991 and it's worth reflecting on it because it is of course worth noting is often pointed out that there is a different mean with the west and the east of Ukraine it's a big country there are differences between the countries between the different parts of the countries you find that in different parts of Norway you find that the different parts of Sweden you find that in different parts of Germany and you certainly find it in Ukraine but the support for independence was very strong even in these the most pause even Crimea and I would say even sevastopol which is a fairly Russian place both in terms of population in terms of history voted overwhelmingly for independence in December of 1991 that led to the famous Accord in the woods outside of Minsk when the leaders of Russian Federation mister Yeltsin the leader of Belarus and with the president then of Ukraine signed an agreement and Gorbachev was still president of the Soviet Union the Soviet Union survived only two weeks when that particular agreement had been signed that was the end of the Soviet Union and that was the end of the Russian Empire but things are difficult when things have been integrated for a very long time it takes time to break up break apart and make the new settlements and we are dealing here with the gas issues but there are endless issues that are complicated I'm just having this is one of the examples of the effects of an integrated Soviet economy with significant high-tech parts of the Soviet economy being in Ukraine this is the company called stitch I think you pronounce it roughly something like that which is their number-one producer or was the number-one producer of gas turbines in the Soviet Union primarily for aircrafts and primarily for helicopters doing very good stuff and as it was in the Soviet Union there was a sole producer this means that up until this day Russia has enormous difficulties with managing without the products of this particular enterprise and I can take X numbers of others example the Russian ship naval shipbuilding program is significantly behind because the big diesel engines were made in Soviet days in Ukraine and they can't really replace them they're also sanctions they can't build naval units of a certain size because they were built at the dockyards that are today part of Ukraine it is obvious that this has led to a number of a series of conflicts difficulties disputes that we are dealing with and where the gas issues is of course the most the most controversial the most intrusive in a number of ways these are two individuals that you might have heard of or might have seen mr. Yanukovych politician started as matter of fact is a small-scale criminal in Donetsk and you have to start somewhere in politics and work himself out in that very particular political environment that is eastern Ukraine and the other personality here so cause Yulia Tymoshenko very talented politician has to be said she has a talent for populism that is unrivaled I would say and has developed a certain over years charisma that is fairly obvious the battle between these twos is very much a history of these particular contracts it goes back of course to 2004 the Orange Revolution or the election in 2004 where mr. Yanukovych supported by mr. Putin thought that he had won that particular election he had and there was the Orange Revolution there was heavy European efforts to try to settle it it was a new election under somewhat more fair conditions mr. Yanukovych lost and there was the coalition between the damn President Yushchenko and Yulia that took over later of course things went out when somewhat differently and then we Unchained to the real story of the gas contracts the contract in 2009 which has been alluded to is an issue that I'd been forced to deal with quite extensively but then primarily of course from the political point of view mr. Yanukovych returned as president of Ukraine in 2010 he had at that time by the way we had already started negotiations on an association agreement between the European Union and an Ukraine that had been started in 2007 those particular negotiations mr. Yanukovych was initially somewhat hesitant what to do these were not really his issues to put it mildly he had other issues that he was more focused about but eventually you can say that his policies as president was yes continue the European course I think he was driven to very large extent I would say by the interest thought what I called the red directress the party of regions that he represented was a lot of the ex-soviet industries and the leaders of the ex ovet industries and they saw the European markets at their future and the Russians at their competitors so they were driving a European direction not from an ideological but from a self-interest economic point of view and that made mr. Yanukovych who's not necessarily the most convinced Europeans in terms of values and principles and things like that to continue that particular course but then he had some more private economic interest building in so the Empire one of the most corrupt creatures that we've seen on the European continent for a very long time and that also meant that his economic policies we're in complete disarray complete disarray that led to this combination led to the profound crisis and inside Ukraine add to that the fact that mr. Putin returned as president of President of Russia again there had been the Medvedev interlude he returned in 2012 and mr. Putin then suddenly had a project and the project of mr. Putin was the Eurasian Union and the customs union and we do respect to Kazakhstan and we do respect to Bella without Ukraine it wouldn't be very much mr. Putin understood that so from the summer of 2013 onwards the trust of the policies of Russia was to force Ukraine off the European approach and take it back in some sort of fold under Moscow as part of building the Eurasian Union a mr. Yanukovych was a fairly easy prey in this particular respect because he was running enormous deficits he had the IMF that refused to give him the money because I met well they were ready to give you the money if he were ready to do the reforms he couldn't do the reforms because that was endangering his own private economic interest and he was absolutely convinced probably rightly by the way that if he had done them he was almost certain to lose the president's election that was starting to loom so he was really caught he had then already identified the 2009 gas agreement as the main enemy and if he could only get rid of the gas agreement then get down the gas prices then perhaps he could survive getting rid of the IMF paying of people in order to do the election and do the European thing at the same time but that didn't really materialize he had arrested Yulia already in 2011 I think put her 2011 whatever put her in prison for the gas agreement and from the European Union point of view I was foreign minister at the time and we were we were had the Swedish presidents of the European Union for the first part of 2009 so I started dealing with issues at that particular time then we did I did together with my then Polish colleague Eric Sikorsky the Eastern Partnership and then we were trying to proceed with Ukraine relationships in a number of different ways and I had to spend together with Radek Sikorski and sometimes the then German Foreign Minister Volta frank-walter Steinmeier an extraordinary amount of hours with mr. Yanukovych listening to him ranting about the endless sins of eula Timoshenko going back primarily to the gas agreement in March of 2009 he could go on forever about the evils of this particular lady and the damaging effect of this particular contract and getting out of this contract being the sole savior of Ukraine but primarily of course of him didn't materialize like that because Putin was putting on the screws from August of 2013 the one issue of the other was blocked by the Russian trade industrial agreements very heavy sanctions wasn't very much highlighted the European media at the time because other issues were a pure occupying European public opinion but it was a substantial squeeze on the Ukrainian economy and Putin saying if you just get rid of this European agreement I think I can sort things out with you so Yanukovych were forced to defer the European agreement and go to Moscow and negotiate some sort of shake not changes in the gas agreement but sort of temporary arrangements that he could by quote by quarterly peer reviews I think he could get a rebate and in addition to that short-term financing for the Ukrainian economy to avoid the immediate collapse but at the price at conditions that were extremely bad but Yanukovych was then in a game for desperate survival and nothing more than that well we know roughly what happened with that that was the people's picture sort of the the ongoing the negotiations that we've had for a long time then I said we had negotiated from 2007 the agreement with Ukraine we concluded negotiations early 2012 it's the 2,000 pages agreement and it was supposed to be signed in the first days of December of 2000 13 at the summit in Vilnius but it was then Yanukovych and the pressure from Moscow had to back off temporarily because that was then the number one foreign policy priority of the Russian Federation to prevent this form from happening well Maidan followed I've even remembered by the way at the Vilnius summit when we were in some thought of I have a Congress Hall in the outskirts of Vilnius and all of the leaders were there and a lot of focus was on this particular issue and I vividly remember standing at the end of the meeting I was standing with the the the president of Lithuania and couple of others and mr. Yanukovych was leaving the hall and it would have been sort of fairly natural of him to say goodbye to us because we were standing there we could probably be avoided and you can see the man leaving the whole dead scared dead scared because he knew that he was going to back back to Kiev that was going to be different it was going to be however very much more different than I think he had envisage because it exploded in Maidan and without going into all of the details of what happened in the months when he tried to get rid of it at the end of the day your hundred persons were killed in the streets in his final attempt to clamp down and that led of course to the complete collapse of the regime the final days there was an agreement negotiated with between the Europeans and mr. Yanukovych and with the seamy agreement of the Maidan to have a presidential elections by December of 2014 but before the end of that particular day President Yanukovych took the assets that he could take fiscal in helicopters and deported his position and deported Kiev afraid of what's going to happen and then of course panic set in in the Kremlin and mr. Putin started the sequence of events that we are aware of we saw immediately or a week later I think we are talking about ten days later we saw the appearance of the small green man these are the small green men outside the Parliament building in Simferopol in Ukraine in Crimea early in the morning of February the well when forget the dates I think 27th of early very early in the morning we had Russian Special Forces entering the Parliament building of Crimea and within a couple of hours unseated they elect the leadership of Crimea in stated a new guy who I think had gotten less than two percent in the last crimean elections and then they proceeded with the block aging the by then thoroughly confused ukrainian troops and with the help of these particular green men coming from Russia and some Ukrainians has to be said of the Ukrainian special forces that are part of the Yanukovych outfit they eventually of course took over as we know Crimea then I think he got somewhat overextended I have to say because by yet the enthusiasm of annexing Crimea March 18th 2014 he annexed Crimea it was was probably high point of his political career the speech that he gave at the Kremlin which was immensely popular with Russian political opinion no question about that and he was on a run and then they started to say that Ukraine is a mess Ukraine is in a desperate financial position Ukraine is in a politically very difficult position let's proceed and dismember the entire thing and for mid-april 2014 starting in slaviansk they started with trying to create what they called novorossiya taking all of the southern parts up until adesso Transnistria Moldova and they were convinced at the time that this was going to be a fairly easy go for gonna take roughly one or two months to complete it and reduce the rest of Ukraine to sort of Greater galactic way miraculously bounced back in this spring of 2014 managed to hold the presidential election which wasn't entirely obvious that that was going to be possible in the mess mr. poroshenko was elected will support from every region of Ukraine and they started a highly incompetent counter operation highly incompetent counter operation to retake territory and even the highly incompetent counter operation was on the verge of complete success in August of 2014 so that mr. Putin after having sent in so-called volunteers and sent in equipment and sent in some forces you are deeply aware of the fifty-third air defense brigade from Kursk by now which is possible for the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner made 17th in mid-july but in August he was forced to send in the regular mechanized fighting battalions into Ukraine in order to save the entire novorossiya project from collapse and that he did because the ukrainians could not resist the onslaught of the regular russian army and we got the Minsk agreement the first one then without going into the details later on where there was a repeat of that performance in the early parts of 2015 but I'm you're saying this in order to illustrate that he really overextended himself there is the what you have today the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics some people there roughly half as many as they were before by the way so as people's republics they're not particularly successful but you see there are only parts of Daniels skin Luhansk that they control and the scale of these two maps is the same so you can see this was his ambition what he thought he was going to achieve and that is where he's stuck today and when I say stuck today yes stuck today that is where the relationship between Russia and the West is stuck today because the West could not accept could not accept that you start to change the borders of Europe by force and we saw the imposition of not in substantial sanctions from the summer of 2014 and onwards and the entire political relationship has been stalemate since then now what's the future of this particular relationship and where are we going from now well as I said the main aim of mr. Putin was to stop the so-called DC FTA association agreement with Ukraine and bring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union that has failed the agreement has been signed sealed and now being implemented it will be quite some time to implement all of his provisions it's a 2,000 pages very ambitious but it is 1880s there so the main objective of mr. Putin failed the subsequent objective to dismantle Ukraine also failed and I will say that the bounce-back of Ukraine has been fairly impressive in the said in the spring of 2014 Ukraine could have collapsed under the combination of the financial collapse the political orders and Russian aggression quite a lot but it did bounce back and has since not only ratified the European but done quite substantial economic reforms nafla gas part of this very impressive reforms banking system disarray it are today functioning and substantial anti-corruption issues my favourite among them is that if we go back to those days gas subsidies or energy subsidies in Ukraine was 7% of GDP 7% of GDP in subsidies these subsidies were essentially used for corruption they had a double pricing system and a double pricing system you have because you do you can do massive corruption and then I'm not talking small-scale corruption I get billions and billions of dollars in corrupt schemes that was fueled by the state budget of Ukraine and that is all gone I'm not saying that Ukraine has finished with anti-corruption certainly nope there's naught to be done but a number of we gas sector and others a number of impressive achievements have been done and then also mr. Putin has III I think when the history books are written at some point in time mr. Putin's greatest achievement might well be that he lost Ukraine and lose saying he's famous for saying that the dissolution or the breakup of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster something like that yes but they never thought that they had the German Democratic Republic they always knew that that was Germany they always knew that Poland was Poland and reluctantly they also knew that Estonia Latvia and Lithuania weren't really Russia although it had been part of Russia for very long time but losing Ukraine is for every single Russian something that is very painful indeed and that is what I think will be a substantial part of the historical legacy of mr. Putin very much is going to be dependent upon the future course of reforms and stability in Ukraine presidential and meant elections are coming up next year you'll at Tymoshenko is ahead in the opinion polls but she's fairly all of the people that are in the pending polls are fairly low down in terms of figures so it's unclear what is going to happen and then it's going to depend upon the course that mr. Putin decides on for the future and that we don't know either he's been reelected for his third or fourth time depending on your definition and has powers at least four million till 2020 for numerous issues that needs to be sorted out with the West there has to be a solution on the don bus for a normalization of the relationship between the best and Russia that is an imperative Crimea yes but everyone understands that Islam netlog the mission and then we have mounting legal issues between Russia and the West and I'm not going to go into the one that we are dealing with here but just mentioned they are made seventeen issues where we have now Dutch criminal proceedings and the Dutch bloody stubborn people the Dutch and legal proceedings by Dutch people is not something and by Australians by the way is not something that is going with it can be taken very very lightly in the yes by agree with mr. Korbell ever said something which i think is fairly fundamental I'm among the things I do I'm one of the chairs of an organisation European Council on Foreign Relations and we should fairly extensive paper the other day which is the EU Russia power audit with the relationship between the EU and Russia in different fields and written by a very talented Estonian on our staff and her conclusion is which I agree with that the issue that we have with Russia is a normative conflict it's a normative conflict that will play out for quite some time because there is and then I go back to Vladimir and the reigning Polish Commonwealth and the Mongols and whatever there's a different way of looking at things there's a different way in we do we Europeans the wages of Germans or Swedes or Ukrainians also increasingly look at norms and laws and rules to be followed and the Kremlin Outlook that has been shaped by history in a different way you can explain it you can understand it when you know the history but it's something that is different from with what we have and these normative conflict is there in the one area after the other and the only way with that can be resolved in my opinion is by our side being strong Ukraine is a critical part of this and if that succeeds and if it is proceeding on these lines sooner or later later probably rather than sooner these norms will also be the norms of Russia and we've been looking forward to Europe where we will not have what we will have completed the breakup of the Soviet Union we will have completed also the normative unification of Europe but we are not there yet we have to understand the significance of the issues and it's a long-term normative battle playing out in all sorts of different arenas thank you thank you very much indeed we may have just a couple of minutes for questions I remember interviewing some time ago Oleg Deripaska who I think you can describe as an oligarch a sort of aluminium yeah and I remember saying to him you like to Norway by the way four does he right I need to be careful so he said I said how do you pronounce mud via their I'm really struggling with this name and he said this is not something you will have to worry about for very long in that ominous way that they do I'm intrigued to know Europe has its own troubles and when we look at concerns within the Balkans with of course you're very familiar with that one of the things that people are saying is well look you know we need to get our act together a bit better in Europe in order to to act more constructively in that context would you agree with that well absolutely I mean we can only be successful in this particular as well as in other issues if we keep sort of our norms intact yes and the particular European integration European Union or whatever is built very much on common standards common norms common regulations common laws and is by strengthening adherence to those that we sort of can overcome the different issues that we have and also be successful versus external actors Russia being among them yes and I'm thinking about what's happening in Britain and also watching Italy as well is that disruptive to our cause well the Brits and most things are lighted No yes it is disruptive of course loosing Britain has got to be quite something and but what we are seeing in the British case by the way is how integrated we are I mean the the divorce proceedings are very painful and they encountered the one issue of the data that we weren't aware I'd my favorite without carrion to the brexit eaters is I wasn't aware of the fact and I've been dealing quite extensively with European affairs I wasn't aware that we had passports for dogs and cats in Europe do you know that well as a Brit yes I was aware yeah you were and I wasn't but we do have that so people can travel with us or the door but of course that's not going to be possible so we have to negotiate the dogs and cats passport agreement with the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom will have to set up at dogs and cats passports Authority which we will have to be recognizing from the European Union point of view this is perfectly possible but it's time-consuming it is bloody bureaucratic it is expensive and profoundly unnecessary but it and you find this form to take the more complicated aviation regulation rules for aircrafts nuclear safety issues the amount of issues that we have to so but you're doing encouragement from that because what you're saying is Europe is very integrated and therefore we don't realize how I think Beck says Rexes had Beck's it is essentially a very damaged for everyone concerned but it had been it has been good at illustrating how dependent we are each other that the divorce is a very complicated and painful process I'm not going to go into the Norwegian debate because that's sweet shouldn't do that too much but of course Norway has sorted itself sorted out its own issues yeah by being a rules taker without being part of deciding on the rules I mean sometimes I say the satellite relationship in the sense that all of the European rule supplies in Norway with some exceptions the food and food in agricultural sector is outside of it but everything else is essentially inside of the European Union but one has done that by sort of sacrificing its own influence over these particular things that it's the shape of its economy though I think it's or it suits the shape of the Norwegian economy better maybe and I don't feel like getting into it but any questions from the audience we've done them in start yes I apologize what's your name please wave from sook an ambassador of Ukraine to Norway just echoing mr. built very interesting presentation I would like to remind one interesting case in 2014 then mr. Putin visited her sonís he was trying to clarify her sonís as a new cradle of the Russian world and me and Carl Bildt made a very pertinent remark the fact that scandinavian prince Waldemar was baptised in a greek city of kurzon s it's very much true but how does it relate to the russian world and actually he was very much right that this project has failed but i would like to come back to the energy realm in my question of course this Naftogaz Gazprom Stockholm arbitration is a very important battle one as an ambassador to Norway I'm very proud that the Norwegian flame in this context but we all know too much that the wider boy is yet to be won and the major stake in these voids of course to prevent Russia from using energy as a political tool as a instrument in the hybrid warfare and we all know that the situation is not yet that promising especially with the like projects like nordstrom to project so my question to you do you believe the Europeans really mature enough to understand what is at stake because Russia has very few leverages and energy is one of them and by encouraging North stream project it's it's very does Europe understand what's at stake here well some do and some don't I mean that's all this case Europe is a big place but I would say primarily the Ukrainians would have to understand what's at stake because we've gone through the same wagons the same to certainly stand with Estonia Latvia Lithuania in terms of their dependence which is even more complicated in certain respects and Ukraine energy policies has been a mess Ukraine has had dependence upon gas which has been insanely dangerous it has it has been one of the most wasteful economies in terms of inefficiencies we used to say that if if you could take the level of energy efficiency of the Ukraine economy down to the level that old Czechoslovakia had Ukraine doesn't even need to import anything whatsoever but it was the waste of energy that created dependence that was dangerous have things been done in Ukraine yes it has has that being completed no it hasn't there's quite a lot that Ukraine can do to be less dependent I would say on imports and I was also also less dependent upon the transit money because even the transit money has been one of the sources of corruption of Ukraine and for the politicians of Ukraine to stand on their own feet it's a big country it's a rich country it can become in the energy independence more or less but that requires primarily efforts by Ukraine itself we're going to be exploring some of the answers to that question in terms of energy independence in a moment thank you very much Colbert group much obliged

Channel: Naftogaz Ukraine

Views: 515,040

Keywords: Carl Bildt, Western Europe, Wikborg Rein, Gazprom, Naftogaz, oil and gas company, Gazprom of Russia, Nord Stream 2, Oslo, arbitration, international experts, law, Minister of Sweden, AtlanticCouncil

Id: 8_SQuLf74n4

Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018