The European Union and Ukraine will sign a new enhanced agreement on partnership and cooperation in early 2009. This was disclosed by Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France which now holds the EU Presidency in his address to the 5th annual Yalta European Strategy Summit (ARC, South Ukraine), as reported with reference to the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation web-site who is an initiator of the forum.
Sarkozy sees signing of the instrument as the goal of France's EU Presidency.
Sarkozy assured the summit participants that Ukraine "has a strategic task for Europe", and he personally, right after he came into office as French President, sought that the EU and Ukraine "establish special relations".
Over several months, the address reads, France had been petitioning its partners in the EU and the European Commission for holding talks enabling to conclude a new enhanced agreement between Ukraine and the EU. "We hope that during the Evian Summit on September 9, the EU and Ukraine will be able to sign historical accords about the principles, goals, volume and component parts of the partnership. The Evian Summit should give decisive impetus to the talks on the new agreement which afterwards will be drawn up and signed in early 2009".
The current agreement on partnership and cooperation between Ukraine and the EU expired early in 2008. In 2006, the parties launched negotiations on the content of a political part of the new agreement and the talks are now in completion stage. Kyiv expects that the instrument will include a clause on the start of talks on introducing a visa-free regime between Ukraine and the EU member-states, as well as Ukraine's EU-membership prospects. Meanwhile, the talks on the economic part, a basis of which should be an agreement on creating a free trade zone between Ukraine and the EU, had started only in 2008 after Ukraine's WTO accession. Realizing that this stage of talks will last for several years, Kyiv proposed Brussels to put the free trade zone in a separate document to be signed later on.
