Prague, Dec 11 (CTK) – The EU lacks the leaders who support Eastern Partnership significantly, Michael Carpenter, a foreign policy advisor to former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, said during a conference on the future of Eastern Partnership in Prague on Monday.
Carpenter said the initiative that was to link the EU with the countries to the east of its border had turned into occasional meetings at joint summits during the past eight years.
Unfortunately, the EU has somewhat dropped the instrument. Most important, the energy devoted to Eastern Partnership has evaporated in the course of time, he added.
Tomas Pojar, a Czech deputy foreign minister at the moment the project was started, said it was designed to direct the attention of the EU to the areas encompassing Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
“Until then, only Moscow was to the east of the EU,” Pojar said in the discussion.
Eastern Partnership enables the participating countries to solidify their relations, but it also requires activity of both sides, he added.
Carpenter said there was the problem that the cooperation had turned into formal meetings at summits.
At present, these are more or less routine meetings, with discussions of some affairs and formulations of declarations, but this is not something with a real interest of EU leaders behind it, he added.
Carpenter said it was a strategic interest of the EU to be interested in the developments in the East.
The leaders of the EU and member countries must really see the region as strategic from the viewpoint of security and also prosperity of Europe, he added.
Carpenter said a European activity in the region could not be considered anti-Russian at the moment Russia itself was actively trying to undermine Western democracy by spreading disinformation and cyber attacks.
There is certainly an effort to increase the resilience of these countries to the Russian aggression, but this is not any anti-Russian tendency, but an effort to protect these countries, Carpenter said.
The latest Eastern Partnership summit, held once in two years, took place in Brussels in November.
A future integration of Eastern Partnership countries is a delicate question of mutual relations in particular.
At the summit, the EU and Eastern Partnership countries passed a declaration recognising the European aspiration of the eastern countries, but also said that the scope, depth and speed of the reform and cooperation with the EU was determined by the “ambitions and needs” of the European partners.
