Ukraine and the EU

Timothy Garton-Ash, in the Guardian, with an excellent article on Freedom's Front Line:

Actually, it's in places like Kiev, rather than in Brussels, that you see what a great story Europe has to tell, if only we knew how to tell it. It's the story of a rolling enlargement of freedom, from a position 60 years ago when there was just a handful of perilously free countries in Europe, and virtually the whole continent was at war, to a position today where there are only two or three seriously unfree countries in Europe, and almost the whole continent is at peace. Today, the front line of that forward march is in Ukraine.

Orwell writes somewhere that "from inside, everything looks worse". Whatever its faults seen from inside, and they are many, seen from outside the European Union is a great magnet and promoter of freedom. Most of our neighbours want to join it in order to become more free (as well as richer), and so as to secure the freedoms many of them have fought for in velvet revolutions.

In the longer term, to say, as I believe we should, that a democratic Ukraine has its proper place in the EU, is the best support we could give Ukrainian democrats. Immediately, though, we need the hardest, sharpest warning that Europe, the US and any other democracy that has influence in Kiev or Moscow can deliver. A group of students in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv send us this appeal via the BBC website: "We just hope Yanukovich decides not to turn the guns on us ... Don't let them kill our will."