Ukraine signs the EU deal whose rejection by former president Viktor Yanukovich last November meant protests across the Eastern Europe country that led to him being overthrown last February.
In the aftermath of Yanukovich's UN rejection, a bloody civil war ensued in Ukraine and continues through pro-Russian separatist regions; Crimea was officially annexed to the Russian Federation last spring, an adhesion only recognized by five United Nations members, including Russia. Other Ukrainian regions, particularly Donetsk and Luhansk in the East, have been incited to rebel by Russian authorities.
The conflict started as Yanukovich refused Ukrain to sign a EU deal that would bring the former Soviet republic a step closer to the European Union. The negotiations for the agreement were seven years in the making, and put Ukraine in the path towards EU adhesion.
Since Ukraine signed the EU deal, Kremlin representatives have vehemently opposed it, United Kingdom's newspaper The Telegraph reports. Because of the country's acute political crisis, the bigger economic points of the deal will not take full effect yet, but rather by the end of next year; however, the rest of the EU countries will begin to open their own markets to the country immediately.
This comes because as Ukraine signed the EU deal, Russia threatened it would block Ukrainian goods entering their country if they entered a free trade deal with the European Union, Al Jazeera reports. However, the EU allowed Ukraine to keep its current tariffs until early 2016; however, they had to undertake major political and economic reforms to fully enter the Schengen area.
As Ukraine signs EU deal, the symbolism involved in the entire pact seems to be the most important point to study: thanks to this, the new Ukrainian government (a supposedly better representation of the citizenship's desire to be adhered to the EU) sets itself farther away from traditional Russian control over its territory.
