My name is James Sherr. I am the senior fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London.
Chairman, distinguished members of this committee, I have been asked to speak about Russia's response to Ukraine's European policy. That response is proactive, multidimensional, and hostile.
Integration with the European Union represents a civilizational choice, and successful integration would have civilizational consequences not only for Ukraine but for Russia itself. For Russia's governing elite and much of Russia's society, Ukraine is a part of Russia's own identity. This is also true for many of the most liberal opponents of the Putin system who subscribe faithfully to Vernadsky's axiom that Russian democracy ends where the question of Ukraine begins.
For the illiberal Russian state that exists today, identity politics play a central role in foreign policy and they exacerbate every other serious issue—geopolitical, geo-economic, commercial, and security—in the relationship between Ukraine and Russia.
The second reality I wish to discuss is the EU itself. Within the past 10 years, Moscow's views about the European Union have changed decidedly for the worse. In the 1990s, there was a positive attitude about the strengthening of the EU because the EU was seen as a geopolitical counterweight to NATO and the United States. Today, Russians now correctly understand that the EU is first and foremost a project and mechanism of integration on the basis of a sociopolitical and business model different from and antithetical to those that prevail in the post-Soviet states. That model in the post-Soviet states is driven by networks rather than markets. It is producer- rather than consumer-oriented. It is monopolistic rather than competitive in ethos. It is not built on property rights and judicial integrity, but on patron-client relationships, negotiable legal order, and privileged relations at all levels between business and structures of power.
It is also a model based on co-optation and money—lots of money—which is not only being used to reward the networks that sustain it, but to expand those networks and undermine the rules-based ethos and regulatory structures of the EU member states.
My penultimate point is that despite all I have said, the greatest obstacle to Ukraine's EU integration is not Russia but Ukraine itself, specifically the Yanukovych regime and the interests that sustain it. President Yanukovych is an individual who is impervious to his own inability to understand the premises upon which EU integration is based. For him, the EU is about markets, not about making the changes that would enable Ukraine to exploit these markets to its own benefit.
It is doubtless true that Yanukovych would prefer an association agreement with the EU to integration into the Russia-sponsored CIS customs union. But the bigger truth is that Yanukovych would rather be president of a Ukraine reintegrating with Russia, than not be president of a Ukraine integrating with the European Union.
In view of the time constraints, I will leave my final point—the issue of what Canada can do—for our Q and A.
Thank you very much.