Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia: Three Case Studies Kamil Całus, Laure Delcour, Ildar Gazizullin, Tadeusz Iwański, Marta Jaroszewicz, and Kamil Klysiński No. 10 | April 2018 WORKING PAPER SERIES 2 | EU-STRAT Working Paper No. 10 | April 2018 EU-STRAT Working Paper Series Edited by the EU-STRAT Project ‘The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries – An Inside-Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment’ (EU-STRAT) The EU-STRAT Working Paper Series serves to disseminate the research results of the research consortium by making them available to a broader public. It means to create new and strengthen existing links within and between the academic and the policy world on matters relating to the current and future enlargement of the EU. All EU-STRAT Working Papers are available on the EU-STRAT website at http://eu-strat.eu. Copyright for this issue: Kamil Całus, Laure Delcour, Ildar Gazizullin, Tadeusz Iwański, Marta Jaroszewicz, and Kamil Klysiński Editorial assistance and production: Elyssa Shea Kamil Całus, Laure Delcour, Ildar Gazizullin, Tadeusz Iwański, Marta Jaroszewicz, and Kamil Klysiński: Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia: Three Case Studies, EU-STRAT Working Paper No. 10, April 2018, ‘The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries – An Inside-Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment’ (EU-STRAT). ISSN 2510-084X This publication has been funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Freie Universität Berlin EU-STRAT ‘The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries - An Inside-Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment’ Ihnestr. 22 14195 Berlin Germany Phone: +49 30 838 57656 Fax: +49 30 838 55049 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 [email protected] research and innovative programme http://eu-strat.eu under grant agreement no. 693382. Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia | 3 Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia: Three Case Studies Kamil Całus, Laure Delcour, Ildar Gazizullin, Tadeusz Iwański, Marta Jaroszewicz, and Kamil Klysiński Abstract Asymmetric interdependencies with Russia have been identified as a key factor influencing domestic change in response to EU policies in Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. As argued in the literature, interdependencies can either facilitate or constrain EU-demanded change, depending on whether they are associated with EaP countries’ sensitivity or vulnerability to Russia’s policies. In this paper, we provide a systematic mapping and process-tracing of interdependencies in three EaP countries (Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine) and four key sectors (trade, migration, energy and security). We further explore Russia’s use of interdependencies and attempts at issue-linkage between the above sectors. Finally, we scrutinize domestic elites’ responses to Russia’s strategies. Drawing upon the distinction between sensitivity and vulnerability, we seek in particular to identify the conditions under which Russia’s policies effectively incentivize or disincentivize the political elites in EaP countries to engage with the EU’s and Russia’s policies. We find that Russia’s attempts to link issues (even if to varying degrees across countries and sectors) effectively undermined further integration with the EU in those cases where policy alternatives were too costly for the incumbent elites. By contrast, Russia’s use of nexuses between different policy sectors have facilitated or even supported integration with the EU when the latter offered an affordable alternative to the EaP countries. 4 | EU-STRAT Working Paper No. 10 | April 2018 The Authors Kamil Całus is a specialist on Moldova and a Senior Research Fellow at the Warsaw- based Centre For Eastern Studies (OSW). He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Poznań, Poland. His main research interests focus on Moldova (including Transnistria), Romania and Ukraine. Most of his recent publications cover the political, economic and social situation in Moldova, European integration and the reform process as well as the relation between Moldova and its key international partners. He has recently contributed to ‘The European Union and its Eastern Neighbourhood: Europeanisation and its Twenty-First-Century Contradictions’ (Manchester University Press, 2018). Dr. Laure Delcour is a researcher under the EU H-2020 project EU-STRAT (www.eu- strat.eu) and a visiting professor at the College of Europe. She was previously a scientific coordinator of the EU-funded FP7 research project “Exploring the Security-Democracy Nexus in the Caucasus” (project CASCADE, FMSH, Paris). Her research interests focus on the diffusion and reception of EU norms and policies as part of the European Neighbourhood Policy, as well as region-building processes in the post-Soviet space. She has recently published The EU and Russia in their 'Contested Neighbourhood'. Multiple External Influences, Policy Transfer and Domestic Change (Routledge, 2017). Ildar Gazizullin is a specialist in economic policy analysis at the Ukrainian Institute for Public Policy (UIPP). Mr. Gazizullin has co-authored papers on Ukraine’s membership in the Energy Community Treaty and the EU-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement. His research interests cover such areas as Ukraine-EU relations, energy, macroeconomic forecasting and social cohesion. Tadeusz Iwański is a Senior Research Fellow at the OSW since 2011, covering Ukrainian and Belarusian affairs. He has been working on the foreign policy of Ukraine, then the economy and energy sector, and now deals mainly with internal political dynamics along with politics of memory. His main publications include ‘Russia's ploy with UN forces in the Donbas’ (OSW Analyses, September 2017); ‘A neighbour discovered anew. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary’s relations with Ukraine’ (co-author, OSW Report August 2017); ‘The stable crisis. Ukraine’s economy three years after the Euromaidan’ (OSW Commentary, May 2017); ‘Nasirov arrested: a blow against corruption in Ukraine’ (OSW Analyses, March 2017). Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia | 5 Dr. Marta Jaroszewicz is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) since 2006, and an affiliate researcher at the Centre of Migration Research of Warsaw University. Her main areas of expertise include Eastern European studies, migration, justice and home affairs, and international security. She holds a PhD in national security from the National Defence University (2008). Aside from the OSW, she also worked for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a programme manager (2008-10) and DG NEAR of the European Commission as a policy officer (2016-17). Her latest publications include ‘Combating Corruption in Ukraine. Awaiting results’ (OSW Commentaries, June 2017), and ‘Ukrainian Migration in Times of Crisis’ (Prague: Charles University, 2016, co-author). Kamil Kłysiński graduated from the Eastern Europe Studies and Politology Faculty at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Since 2007, he works as a Senior Fellow in the Department for Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw. His area of expertise include the domestic political and economic situation in Belarus, as well as Belarussian foreign policy and tendencies in society. 6 | EU-STRAT Working Paper No. 10 | April 2018 Contents Introduction 7 Moldova 11 1. Interdependence with the EU and Russia 11 2. Nexuses across issue areas 21 3. Section conclusion 25 Belarus 27 1. Interdependence with the EU and Russia 28 2. Nexuses across issue areas 35 3. Section conclusion 38 Ukraine 40 1. Interdependence with the EU and Russia 40 2. Nexuses across issue areas 51 3. Section conclusion 54 References 56 Interdependencies of Eastern Partnership Countries with the EU and Russia | 7 Introduction Ildar Gazizullin, Laure Delcour and Marta Jaroszewicz In this set of case studies on Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, we explore the extent and nature of interdependencies across the areas of migration, energy, trade and security, in which countries face significant sensitivities and vulnerabilities. We focus on issue-linkages that external partners apply and how they affect national policies and domestic actors in the three countries. We also study how partner countries respond to these issue-linkages. Finally, we suggest some ways in which interdependencies may facilitate or undermine the transformation of social orders in these three countries. We use Keohane and Nye’s broad definition of interdependence as “situations characterized by reciprocal effects among countries or among actors in different countries” (1977: 8) as well as their differentiation of sensitivities, vulnerabilities and issue-linkages, and draw on an application of this framework to study policy change in EaP countries (Ademmer 2015). ‘Sensitivity’ reflects the size of effects caused to a state from the outside without changing existing policies. In other words, it addresses the question of how quickly changes in one country bring costly changes in another, and how great the cost of the subsequent effects is. Therefore, sensitivity refers to the pressures faced by an actor as a result of another's actions, when there has been no change in its own policies. For example, such pressure can be characterized by the speed and magnitude of the impact that a major increase in the price of an imported commodity has on budget revenues