Our colleagues Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism” (member of WG1 UNP) and expert team at Civic EaP Tracker has just released discussion “Can the economy and trade keep the Eastern Partnership policy afloat?”

Ukrainian Prism, European Policy Centre and Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum hosted experts from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine in Brussels for the hybrid Policy Dialogue on the Eastern Partnership.

Panel 1. Trade and economic integration in the Eastern Partnership: New ambitions for the candidates’ trio

The discussion kicked off with the debate of the Trio Ambassadors to the EU:

✅ Vsevolod Chentsov, Mission of Ukraine to the EU: The Eastern Partnership initiative for Ukraine has ambiguous meaning, but at the same time it remains relevant and could have future.

✅ Daniela Morari, Misiunea Republicii Moldova pe lângă UE: For Moldova, it is important to find as many intermediate yardsticks for the gradual integration with the EU, and the Eastern Partnership policy allows us to pragmatically take as much as possible to prepare ourselves. But EaP can’t take us fully to the integration. Now we are in the stage where we’re trying to merge both neighborhood and accession policies.

✅ Vakhtang Makharoblishvili, Ambassador, Mission of Georgia to the European Union: The EaP has brought benefits to the region, but in the current conditions, we need to be creative and come up with new ideas on how to keep this policy alive. It has to be more particularly topic-focused. Otherwise, it will not be interesting to participate for the front-runners.

Panel 2. EU financial and investment toolkit: Keeping the countries of the region engaged

The experts are preparing a thematic brief. It  is the fifth instalment in a series of studies conducted by the team of the project “Civic EaP Tracker: Monitoring EaP targets, deliverables and related reforms”, dedicated to the involvement of the EU in transformations in the countries of the Eastern Partnership.

Together for resilient, sustainable, and integrated economies in the Eastern Partnership region: state of play in 2022 and recommendationsVeronika Movchan, Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting

Source

Photo Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism”

A think tank consortium led by Ukrainian Prism with the support of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum is continues a set of thematic expert debates in Brussels, devoted to five key priorities of the EaP. The project team is involved in the monitoring of the EaP policy implementation in each of the partner states. We look into the performance of each partner country along with the key priorities and invite you to the discussions about the future shape of the region and EU policy towards it.