RIA Novosti: Russian pundits expect Ukrainian pro-EU protests rallies to fizzle out

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(RIA Novosti – November 25, 2013) The pro-EU protests in Ukraine will not bring about any serious political changes and are likely to fizzle out over time, according to analysts questioned by state-owned news agency RIA Novosti on 25 November.

Pavlovskiy

The level of protest of the supporters of Ukraine’s European integration is not high enough for one to talk of a danger of the current authorities being overthrown, political analyst Gleb Pavlovskiy has said. “The protest is not as deep as it is being shown. Here one should not keep one’s hopes too high. This is rather an indicator of the low quality of the Ukrainian leadership’s policy,” Pavlovskiy told RIA Novosti on 25 November.

“The protest is very mixed. There are people who are morally offended, there is certainly the urban middle class, which is to a significant extent focused on the European Union, and there are activists of opposition parties who are getting ready for the year of presidential election campaign and they have tasks of their own, and there are also radical forces,” Pavlovskiy said.

Lukyanov

The chief editor of the Russia in Global Politics magazine and the chairman of the presidium of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council, Fedor Lukyanov, said that unlike in 2004, the external forces were not particularly interested in supporting the protests.

“The scale is not the same and the external factor is not so powerful,” Lukyanov said.
“At the moment there is no great interest from the external forces, say, EU, in stimulating protest activities in Ukraine and by doing so pushing for a decision of some kind, and without this, I think, things will not develop,” he added.
In Lukyanov’s view, the decision taken by the government and the president is very advantageous to the opposition because it gives the opposition an extremely favorable opportunity to use the year-and-a-half that remains until the presidential election in its interest. “There is a wonderful subject – ‘[President Viktor] Yanukovych stole Europe from us’,” the expert said.

According to him, Yanukovych’s situation is generally very difficult. “Any step has a very high downside but what he did will probably be less painful and less dangerous for him than if he had signed the association agreement and by doing so would have essentially condemned himself to gigantic political and economic problems,” Lukyanov added.

Lukyanov predicted that the mass protest rallies would fizzle out and the authorities would carefully disperse the more resilient protesters while trying to avoid a scandal.

Suzdaltsev

A deputy dean of the world economy and world politics department at the High School of Economics and an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, Andrey Suzdaltsev, has said that the current events have little in common with the 2004 protests as the position of the opposition at present is not radically different from that of the view of the Ukrainian authorities.

Suzdaltsev said that “they (the opposition and authorities) do not have fundamental differences – Ukraine has not moved away from the European track. There will be no revolution and there will be no early elections,” he said.

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