Kyiv desperate for signs of heading towards West - Kosachyov on Ukraine's plans to hold referendum on NATO membership
MOSCOW. Feb 2 (Interfax) - The announced plans to hold a referendum on Ukraine's NATO membership mean that Kyiv is eager to at least somehow move towards the West, Federation Council International Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachyov said.
"The idea announced by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, of holding a referendum on joining NATO, shows that today Kyiv desperately needs at least some signs of it heading towards the West," Kosachyov told Interfax on Thursday.
"It never got the lethal weapons. Cash just barely trickles in, on the requirement of genuine results in combating corruption and reforms, of which there have been extremely few. [Kyiv] is waiting apprehensively for Trump's decisions on sanctions, the European Union is increasingly split on the same issue, and in 2017 nothing bodes well in this respect," the senator said.
The subject of the "ill-fated visa-free issue" with the EU, which was to become a symbol of a "breakthrough into Europe," has instead turned into an outright irritant, especially against the backdrop of today's voting in the European Parliament in favor of scrapping visas with Georgia," he said.
In this situation, "throwing in the issue of a referendum on NATO membership aims to create an illusion that someone out there is really waiting for Ukraine," Kosachyov said.
When Ukrainian President Poroshenko claims that the number of Ukrainians favoring NATO membership has risen substantially over four years, "this is more of an indicator (if one is to believe it) of the atmosphere in which the population of this country has lived in recent years," he said.
"With no real alternative media and a defeated opposition, people are being told round the clock about the 'Russian aggression' from which only NATO membership ostensibly can save them," the senator said.
Increasingly it is becoming obvious why Kyiv "needed an escalation of the situation in the southeast and a show with the president's visit to Germany cut short," he said.
"Having turned Avdiivka into an informational analog of Aleppo, Kyiv is trying hard to return to the front pages of world newspapers in the role of a victim, while simultaneously stoking up belligerent hysteria at home. But how long it will last is a big question," Kosachyov said.
"We are no longer in 2014, and the 'Russian aggression' as a central or only point of national ideology is proving ever weaker. And there is no alternative yet: they did not get into Europe, didn't defeat corruption, didn't achieve prosperity. So, only NATO remains," the senator said.
Earlier Poroshenko said in an interview with the German newspaper Funke Mediengruppe about plans to hold a referendum on Ukraine's accession to NATO.
