CEU Hosts Panel on How EU and V4 Can Support Ukrainian Reform Drive

Strengthening European Bonds: Ukraine Towards the European Union, a panel discussion co-hosted by CEU’s Center for European Enlargement Studies and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung aimed to find ways for the EU and the V4 countries to contribute to the enhancement of a common European Ukraine strategy. The March 24 event was part of CEU’s Frontiers of Democracy series.

Peter Balazs, director of CEU’s Center for European Enlargement Studies, welcomed panelists Daniyil Pasko, advisor to Prime Minister of Ukraine and to the Presidential Administration, Kalman Mizsei, head of the European Union Advisory Mission to Ukraine and Andrzej Szeptycki, associate professor from the University of Warsaw, Poland. Balazs said that the situation in Ukraine “has gotten into a very dangerous curve” and asked the panelists to offer their views on how the European Union and V4 countries could support Ukraine’s renewed reform drive.   



Daniyil Pasko, advisor to Prime Minister of Ukraine and to the Presidential Administration, discusses ongoing Ukranian reforms. Photo: CEU

Pasko describes current Ukrainian reforms as “a fantastic outburst of civil society,” even though the threats the country had to face in the past few years made little things more complicated than necessary. Reforms in Ukraine are overwhelming and cover major areas, Pasko says. Although the government is criticized for taking too long implementing reforms, it only had time in the past two months, after forming the new cabinet, to execute them. The National Reform Council is a new key body that coordinates the process of reform implementation in both the public and private sectors.

The reforms with the biggest impact on Ukrainian economy affect  monetary policy, the financial sector, fiscal policy, the energy sector, and governance transparency. Easy Business, one of the initiatives Pasko is personally advocating, concentrates on economically effective, easy to solve problems through deregulation, that is eliminating the excessive regulatory barriers to business and introducing a preventive mechanism.

Andrzej Szeptycki offered the V4 countries’ knowledge and experience in EU integration as an asset for Ukraine. He also touched upon the role of oligarchs in the Ukrainian political system, the Eastern orientation of the country’s economy, the security of national borders, and immigration, issues not widely discussed elsewhere for political reasons which the V4 are unable to do much about.



“We are not Ukraine, and we are not the EU,” Andrzej Szeptycki, associate professor from the University of Warsaw, sums up the V4 viewpoint concerning Ukraine. Photo: CEU

“We are not Ukraine, and we are not the EU,” Szeptycki sums up a major challenge the V4 face. The V4’s experiences can’t directly be translated to Ukraine, and they only play a minor role within the European Union. The V4 cannot offer as substantial a financial aid that Ukraine needs or what other, more well-off EU countries could. Also, the Visegrad countries can’t offer a common strategy on how to handle Russia, as they do not have one.

There are little more important issues in Europe right now than the success of reforms in Ukraine, says Kalman Mizsei, referring back to Pasko’s presentation. However, it’s very difficult to change a system that’s built on the old Soviet system. “General corruption is not a deviation of the system, it is the system,” Mizsei observes. Deregulation is crucial in dismantling the system of corruption, and he calls for  prosecutorial reform for institution building and shrinking the size of the state. Ukraine must learn from the Georgian example: to get rid of corruption, proper salaries are needed in civil society and the prosecutorial sector. People need to trust the system, he warns.