Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine's National Resources

Buzogány, Aron; Varga, Mihai Article — Published Version Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine's National Resources JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Buzogány, Aron; Varga, Mihai (2024) : Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine's National Resources, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, ISSN 1468-5965, Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 63, Iss. 1, pp. 108-126, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13587 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313735 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Making Markets Through Coalitions: The European Union and the Debate Over Ukraine’s National Resources ARON BUZOGÁNY 1,2 and MIHAI VARGA 3 1 Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy (InFER), Universität für Bodenkultur (BOKU), Vienna, Austria 2 Institute for Political Science, Budapest, Hungary 3 Freie Universität Berlin Osteuropa-Institut, Berlin Abstract This article studies how the European Union (EU) influences the dynamics between supporters and opponents of market liberalization in partner countries. We focus on Ukraine’s attempts to safeguard timber trade and agricultural land sales from international markets through moratoria before 2022. We find that the EU intervenes in domestic debates both directly and through domestic pro-market coalitions to frame these moratoria as expressions of ‘vested interests’and instances of state weakness. The EU effectively linked the free trade argument with protecting the environment (as the moratorium tolerated illegal logging) and human rights (as the land moratorium denied landowners their property rights). The EU thus fostered discourses and coalitions prioritizing liberalization over protectionist interests and environmental concerns. This article implies that the EU should encourage debates around market liberalization rather than de-legitimize opponents, as reconstruction in Ukraine following Russian aggression will require both EU assistance and broader internal coalitions. Keywords: constructivism; discursive institutionalism; external economic relations; international political economy; single market and monetary union; trade and investment policy Introduction Scholarship on the genesis of trade agreements emphasizes participating states’interests, the norms they share, the powerful hegemon’s role or the negotiation dynamics that empower certain actors to demand and expand such agreements (Kentikelenis and Babb, 2019). Issue linkages, for instance, between supporters of free trade and environmentalist groups, were found to play an important role in broadening support coalitions and thus increasing the adoption chances of trade agreements (Davis, 2004; Jinnah and Lindsay, 2016; Maggi, 2016). These actors also play an important role in the context of the European Union’s (EU’s) free trade agreements (FTAs), some of which became heavily contested within the EU as they affect domestic standards and industries (De Bièvre and Poletti, 2020; De Ville and Orbie, 2014; Dür, 2008; Siles-Brügge, 2011). Contestations of FTAs have left their mark also on the design of agreements, often leading to the inclusion of social and environmental clauses (Lechner, 2016; Morin et al., 2019; Postnikov, 2018). However, as Europe-wide mobilizations against controversial FTAs such as the EU– Mercosur treaty have shown, FTAs often cause contention not only within the EU but also in ‘partner’countries or regions. Despite the impressive development of EU trade policy scholarship over the last decades, the strong focus on FTA design and the design process [Corrections added on 8 March 2024, after first online publication: Changes have been made to Table 1 columns 2 and 3, Acknowledgement section and references Mylovanov, T. (2015) and Spets Kor (2013) to improve clarity in this version.] JCMS 2025 Volume 63. Number 1. pp. 108–126 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13587 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. itself has distracted attention from the ‘receiving side’of these agreements and their afterlife. Beyond studies focusing on public attitudes towards international trade (see, e.g., Spilker et al., 2018), research on the external perception of the EU in the domain of foreign policy analysis (Chaban and Elgström, 2021) or studies interested in the diffusion of ideas in some trade-related policy fields (Kourtelis, 2021; Roccu, 2018), comparatively little research addressed the role of domestic actors in the ‘partner’countries implementing EU FTAs and the mechanism the EU uses to promote market liberalization. We argue that a focus on actors’interests and discourses in partner countries offers valuable insights into the practices of trade and market liberalization. This is important because there is a notable gap in our understanding of how actors in recipient nations advocate for their interests, particularly when these conflict with fundamental free trade principles. Specifically, our knowledge is limited regarding EU strategies for promoting trade liberalization beyond FTAs. Existing attention often remains limited to issues directly relating to FTAs and leaves untouched the aftermath of FTA adoption and the larger landscape of pertinent trade and power relations. Consequently, there is a need for a more comprehensive understanding of both preand post-FTA adoption domestic drivers of contestation in partner countries. This contribution provides remedy by suggesting that the EU’s external liberalization impetus encompasses more than just FTA promotion. FTAs often remain contested after the ink of the signature on an FTA has dried. Accordingly, this article focuses on how domestic stakeholders react to the EU’s trade liberalization agenda and how the EU responds to stakeholders’arguments in partner countries. We are interested in how the EU reacts to protectionism and ‘resource nationalism’, the latter understood as a discourse linking state sovereignty and territory to citizen rights and privileges, turning state territories into national markers serving ‘national’interest and development (Koch and Perreault, 2019, p. 612). As we will show below, EU-triggered policy liberalization can lead to defensive reactions of developmentalist domestic elites, calling to exempt ‘national resources’from liberalization and exclude foreign actors from taking hold of these. We illustrate our argument using two cases of EU influence on market liberalization in Ukraine before the Russian invasion in 2022. Ukraine is an important example of advanced but differentiated integration with the EU (see Buzogány, 2013; Dimitrova and Dragneva, 2023; Rabinovych and Egert, 2023; Tyushka, 2022). It is also a country that experienced domestic conflicts related to FTA because of the controversies and mobilization surrounding the Association Agreement (AA; Raik, 2019). Before the war, Ukraine’s political elite tried to balance opening up to EU markets and investments with protecting national businesses from EU and international competition through moratoria that limited foreign companies’market access. The EU advanced its free market position through issue linkages and discursive de-legitimization of opponents, framing their arguments as expressions of ‘vested interests’,‘oligarchic influence’or outright corruption. The argument made in this contribution does not deny the existence of vested and oligarchic interests or corruption in pre-war Ukraine. These were –as we will show – particularly evident in the timber moratorium loopholes that allowed Ukrainian timber to reach EU markets unprocessed. Paradoxically, however, the EU’s argumentation has hardly been about closing those loopholes. Following a standard free market discourse, the European Commission insisted on portraying acts of the Ukrainian Parliament – the moratoria –as illegitimate expressions of ‘vested interests’standing in the way of free trade. The EU and Ukraine’s National Resources 109 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Our case contributes to a larger literature on the role of ideas and scriptwriting by international organizations (Kentikelenis and Seabrooke, 2017) and, more specifically, by the EU (De Ville and Orbie, 2014; Jacobs et al., 2023; Nessel and Verhaeghe, 2022; Welfens and Bonjour, 2023). We connect this constructivist perspective with critical studies dealing with effects of trade agreements that pay attention to discursive struggles taking place at the ‘receiving side’of FTAs, including cases as varied as the Zapatista contestation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in Mexico or Egyptian bureaucrats contesting EU policy templates (Duina and Bok, 2014; Montessori, 2019; Roccu, 2018). More recently, this literature has started highlighting the crucial role of international organization in countries hit by conflict, suggesting that conflicts might provide windows of opportunities for policy change (Dolan-Evans, 2022; Mathers, 2020). The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shows the necessity to rethink EU trade and neighbourhood policies (see also Burlyuk et al., 2023; Rabinovych and Egert, 2023). The post-war reconstruction in Ukraine will require both the involvement and agency of local businesses and the EU’s assistance (Rabinovych et al., 2023). This applies also to sectors critical for the country’s revenues, such as agriculture and food, Ukraine’s main export-based source of wartime income. At the same time, as the price increases following Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea and the destruction of Ukrainian transport and storage infrastructure have vividly demonstrated, Ukraine’s wheat exports also have global significance for preventing food crises and hunger (Parasecoli and Varga, 2023). The lessons learnt with the management of accession and post-accession democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe suggest that the EU is well advised to facilitate different developmental policies and more open debates around the reforms it pursues rather than to de-legitimize opponents (Bruszt and Vukov, 2017; Meyerrose, 2020). This article proceeds as follows. In the next section, we summarize the literature discussing how trade policies impact countries involved in FTAs. Section II presents our empirical approach. Sections III and IV present the two case studies of EU-backed market reforms in Ukraine, showing how the EU sought to overcome moratoria on timber exports and agricultural land sales. The last section concludes by discussing the EU as a market-liberalizing force and identifies further research trajectories. I. Fields of Free Trade Promoting free trade has been historically part of the EU’s DNA and is a central paradigm shaping its relations with third countries. In the context of the EU’s FTAs, constructivist scholarship has studied how ideas and norms related to free trade influenced the EU’s approach to trade policy (Jacobs and Orbie, 2020). This includes the shift from ‘free trade’to ‘fair trade’or the way the EU presents itself as a normative actor promoting liberal values (De Ville and Siles-Brügge, 2018). The overwhelming part of the literature focuses on the EU level and analyses the use of ideas and of knowledge production by EU institutions and other actors, including business groups, think tanks or social movements (De Ville and Orbie, 2014; Jacobs et al., 2023; Siles-Brügge, 2011; Welfens and Bonjour, 2023). This Brussels-centred literature is complemented by ‘external governance’scholarship (Lavenex, 2004), which is interested in local contexts but remains EU-centred by focusing explicitly on the transfer of EU norms to third countries via conditionality, functional co-operation via transnational policy networks or through empowering domestic civil Aron Buzogány and Mihai Varga110 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. society. In third countries, the EU offers trade benefits for specific interest groups, export-oriented business actors, pro-Western civil society or pockets of public administration. Whilst this literature assesses how domestic conflicts relate to EU conditionality (see, e.g., Wetzel, 2011), the focus remains on actors in the EU, with little attention given to how domestic actors gain legitimacy by shaping discourses on various issues, including trade, borders and identities (but see Kourtelis, 2021). Following calls to ‘decentre’EU-centred perspectives and to take a more detailed look at domestic contestation of EU-backed reforms on the ground (Onar and Nicolaïdis, 2013), we focus on discourses produced within Ukraine’s emergent ‘knowledge regime’ (Campbell and Pedersen, 2014). Knowledge regimes include networks of professionals (like scholars, public intellectuals or policy experts) from think tanks, universities or research centres. Research in this tradition has mostly focused on how political systems in the EU or the United States have filtered neoliberal (or illiberal) ideas (Buzogány and Varga, 2018; Mudge, 2018). Nevertheless, it can also be used in other contexts that feature reasonable democratic openness and public debate. With its well-developed think tank sector, Ukraine arguably fulfils this criterion (Samokhvalov and Strelkov, 2022). We use field theory to conceptually map organizational change, approaching actors as being embedded in societal fields marked by tensions between incumbents and challengers (Fligstein and McAdam, 2011; Martin, 2003). Incumbents –in our case, proponents of trade moratoria –maintain their position by deploying certain ideas about performing best in their field. Fligstein and Mara-Drita (1996) term these ideas ‘conceptions of control’. Anti-moratorium actors attempt to challenge incumbents by developing alternative ideas. When developing new conceptions, actors often build upon or reinterpret familiar models that seem to function elsewhere. As organizational theory highlights, such adaptation processes often occur in tightly networked spaces of organizational fields and foster ‘interpretative struggles’over institutional solutions (Zilber, 2002). Resourceful actors play central roles by ‘creat[ing] a whole new system of meaning that ties the functioning of disparate sets of institutions together’(DiMaggio, 1988, p. 14). Their preferences and interactions are crucial for institutionalization processes surrounding the establishment of economic (FTA) arrangements. This framework underlines how the ‘construction of an identifiable and attractively “packaged”form or idea’(Djelic, 2008, p. 13) proceeds through the agency of the various participating actors, forming a ‘dense ecology of carriers [of ideas] and mediators of all kinds’. From this perspective, the EU’s market-building efforts are inseparable from the coalitions of actors promoting their arguments and challenging the arguments of protectionist opponents. The EU depends on these coalitions of local actors and international organizations to claim the legitimacy of its positions and to point at the lacking legitimacy of opponents. In short, market-making means discourse-making and coalition-building, de-legitimizing opponents by discussing less the latter’s actions and more how unacceptable those actions are (Reyes, 2011, p. 783). De-legitimization can undermine action by sidestepping discussions about the action’s content or intent (Van Leeuwen, 2008). What the EU de-legitimizes in our cases is Ukraine’s use of moratoria to restrict foreign access to markets, depicting moratoria as illegitimate outcomes of ‘vested interests’(the timber moratorium) or ‘unlawful’protectionism (the agricultural land sales moratorium), despite the EU’s own long history of agricultural protectionism (Lewis, 2009; Wodak and Boukala, 2016). The EU and Ukraine’s National Resources 111 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. II. Empirical Approach Our case studies concern two areas where the EU exerted pressure on Ukraine to liberalize market access: the opening of the Ukrainian timber trade and agricultural land markets before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although very different, the two areas show similar patterns of sectoral contestation. This resulted in both cases in a mix of liberalizing regulations and free trade exemptions. Forestry and agriculture are subject to the EU’s AAs, the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTAs) and Economic Partnership Agreements. These seek to remove or reduce customs tariffs in bilateral trade. In both cases, post-2014 Ukrainian governments enacted or prolonged moratoria banning trade or sales, triggering conflict with the EU and International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The two fields differ in how relevant they are for Ukraine’s economy. Agriculture has been the rising star of Ukraine’s export potential, whilst the forestry sector had a more muted presence yet fundamentally impacted the country’s sustainability goals. The EU’s liberalizing impetus encouraged Ukrainian pro-reform constituencies, relying in the forestry sector on domestic supporters of its demands and in the agricultural sector on a combination of domestic constituencies and international organizations. Table 1summarizes the differences and similarities between our two cases. Methodologically, we use sources of ‘communicative evidence’(Jacobs, 2015, p. 54) to process-trace the EU’s discourse and coalition-building efforts and establish a chronology of key events and statements. Combining different sources of qualitative evidence relying on in-depth interviews, anthropological field notes and document analysis, we use exploratory process-tracing and case study chronologies to establish ‘what happened’in a particular case rather than variable-centred process-tracing approaches testing alternative hypotheses (see also Abell, 1987 as a locus classicus for the distinction between variable-centred and event-centred approaches; Bengtsson and Ruonavaara, 2017). Table 1: Differences Between the Agricultural Land Sales and Timber Moratoria. Timber export Agricultural land ownership Moratorium On log trade Since 2015, until 2027 On land sales Since 1992 but enacted in 2001 –until 2021 Political salience Low High Mentioned in the FTA? Yes No External actor working against moratorium EU EU, World Bank, IMF, OECD, EBRD Support coalition for the moratorium Developmentalist politicians Furniture industry Some environmentalist groups Large domestic companies and small farmers who remain de facto owners; large cross-cleavages of political coalitions Support coalition against the moratorium Forestry policy community Liberal think tanks Coalition of 22 companies and NGOs EU strategies to change moratorium External: arbitration Domestic: legal change Outcome Moratorium remains de facto in place No moratorium as of 2021, but no market access for foreign companies Abbreviations: EBRD, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; EU, European Union; FTA, free trade agreement; IMF, International Monetary Fund; OECD, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Aron Buzogány and Mihai Varga112 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Our case study chronologies seek to establish how the EU intervenes in debates between moratorium proponents and opponents. Our sources include (1) around 40 official EU, Ukrainian, and World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) documents; (2) 20 policy documents, including position papers, research briefs or research documents produced within the domestic ‘knowledge regime’and in particular by local think tanks, and 10 interviews with policy experts and international advocacy network representatives, carried out between 2015 and 2019; (3) 10 media and NGO reports; and (4) fieldwork in one Ukrainian region (Chernivetska). The analysed period stretches from adopting to repealing the two moratoria (roughly 2014–2020/2021 and an additional focus on the initial parliamentary debates in 2001–2002 for the land sales moratorium). In both moratorium cases, the discussions about abolishing the moratoria peaked during the presidency of Volodymyr Zelensky (Viedrov, 2022). Our focus has been to identify the legal changes, the policy process and the emerging ‘pro-reform’coalitions and ‘pro-moratoria’countercoalitions and their discourses used to justify policy decisions (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Fieldwork –including around 30 interviews with local informants –focused on rural communities involved in agriculture and forestry in Western Ukraine’s Chernivetska Oblast (region) and was carried out via repeated annual fieldwork rounds between 2014 and 2019. The region is particularly well suited for capturing trends in the forestry and agricultural sectors. It has one of the country’s largest state forestry industry complexes administered by the State Forest Resources Agency of Ukraine, and it features an agricultural landscape in which all major Western Ukrainian agricultural landowning and processing companies are present. These co-exist with some of Ukraine’s largest relative numbers of smallholding family farms (for a broader discussion of the empirical material, see Varga, 2023). Interviews with informants active in the two fields were used to explore patterns of land use and timber exploitation. Interviews in both areas suggested that despite the moratoria, local businesses had found numerous ways to evade regulations and constitute informal agricultural land and timber markets. Rather than selling land, local actors practised formal or informal lease arrangements; and set up illegal schemes through which timber from protected areas could be placed on the Ukrainian market and undercut the prices of legal commercializers. The interviews provided evidence of how timber flows were redirected westwards to reach processing plants owned by Austrian companies on the EU side of the border (see also Earthsight, 2018,2020). Our first case study, presented in Section III, focuses on the wood processing industry, which has successfully lobbied for a moratorium on raw material exports. The timber moratorium became a major source of conflict with the EU, leading to the first arbitrage procedure with a partner country in the EU’s history of bilateral treaties. The timber case is contrasted in Section IV with another moratorium that the EU took issue with, even though its object –banning agricultural land sales –does not fall under the scope of the AA. Both moratoria are relevant as they concern domestic development policies – enacted under resource-nationalist and environmental slogans –against external pressures and influences, despite the EU’s decisive impact on Ukraine’s resource-nationalist attempts (Koch and Perreault, 2019). Our analysis of the discourses of EU experts and the wider pro-EU epistemic community shows that whilst the EU’s discourse essentially portrays itself as a principled normative actor acting out of the need to stabilize its The EU and Ukraine’s National Resources 113 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. neighbourhood, it depicted Ukraine as having weak or failing institutions and as largely taken over by ‘vested interests’. III. Timber Export Moratorium The first case study deals with the timber-processing supply chain and its export activities into the EU. Due to its size and proximity, the EU timber market is central to Ukrainian exports (Earthsight, 2018; Timber Trade Portal, 2018). Article 294 of the AA between Ukraine and the EU signed in June 2014 underlines the necessity of co-operation in sustainable forest management, including forest law enforcement and governance. Article 35 of the AA also prohibits any export restrictions, essentially opening the Ukrainian timber market for the European forestry industry. Adding to this, Ukraine is also subject to the EU’s Timber Regulation (EUTR) (995/2010), a due diligence legality regime that allows only legally harvested timber and timber products to be placed on the EU market and requires traders to provide evidence of product traceability. For the Ukrainian logging and wood processing industry, the EUTR made regulatory changes particularly pressing because timber exports required up to one fifth of the production costs to ensure compliance with EU norms (Buzogány, 2016; ECORYS, 2007). Ukraine introduced a 10-year moratorium on all types of raw log exports in 2015 (Reg. No. 1362 of 2015). In 2017, the export prohibition was extended to unprocessed timber. Ukraine justified the timber moratorium on ecological and protectionist grounds and called for a more sophisticated and higher value-added domestic wood processing industry. The moratorium was initiated by Viktor Halasyuk, the Chair on Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship Committee of the Ukrainian Rada (Parliament), and MP Ostap Yednak, a former Maidan activist, together with a cross-party coalition of MPs. The promoratorium coalition was supported by the domestic wood processing industry, including furniture manufacturers and the Ukrainian League of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which feared increasing wood prices for domestic producers and timber shortages due to international demand (Interview, Ukrainian Forest Policy Expert, 4 December 2016, Kyiv). The moratorium was met with strong criticism within the country’s dominant knowledge regime, parts of the forest policy community and market-liberal groups within think tanks and universities that were generally critical of state intervention in the economy (Mylovanov, 2015). Critics argued that the moratorium violates the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA), the AA (Article 35) and the standstill obligation included in Regulation 374/2014, granting autonomous trade measures for Ukraine (De Micco, 2015). Other important moratorium opponents –arguing that it foments corruption, fails to protect forests and should therefore be abolished –included liberal think tanks such as the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER), the EU’s strategic partner in the field of civil society support (Anhel, 2021), or the think tank Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO, 2016), which has been active in the field of deregulation with a focus on policy implementation. Whilst the export moratorium led to heated political debates, Ukraine also introduced sectoral reforms to make the timber supply chain EUTR-compliant. These measures included splitting the controlling and economic functions of the State Forest Resources Agency into different government agencies to reduce corruption risks (ENPI FLEG, 2015). Aron Buzogány and Mihai Varga114 © 2024 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The State Forest Resources Agency has also introduced the system using unique barcodes for logs and electronic wood auction schemes to make timber trade more transparent (Davidescu and Buzogány, 2021). Allegations of rampant corruption surrounded Ukraine’s forestry sector, with environmental NGOs and the press delivering mounting evidence that Ukrainian timber continues to illegally enter the EU market despite the log export moratorium after being misclassified as firewood or as ‘sanitary felling’used to prevent diseases from spreading in natural parks (Earthsight, 2018; Spets Kor, 2013). Unlike the think tanks mentioned above, the environmental NGOs’criticism of Ukraine’s moratorium did not translate into calls to abolish the moratorium but to close existing loopholes. In an influential report, the London-based NGO Earthsight (2018) presented a detailed study about illegal logging and the massive ongoing deforestation in the Ukrainian Carpathians. Based on 2 years of intensive research in Ukraine and abroad, Earthsight accused Ukrainian forestry authorities and EU-based timber companies of being involved in illegal transactions themselves and linked the ineffective EU timber legality regime to the weak capacities of the member states to control timber exports at the EU–Ukraine border. Our fieldwork respondents also detailed and helped periodicize the workings of such often-used loopholes in the legislation (both prior to and after the moratorium) as the misuse of sanitary logging. They traced many loopholes back to practices emerging in the late 2000s and connected these to the emergence of wood processing plants on the EU side of the border. Sanitary felling and other practices of misqualifying timber allowed the felling and also the export of ‘low-quality’timber throughout the 2010s and also after the Rada adopted the moratorium. According to our respondents, including one who himself participated in such forms of logging and theft from state forestry, the misuse of sanitary logging intensified in 2010–2011, with the coming to power of Viktor Yanukovych (president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014). According to respondents, the local representatives of Yanukovich’s Party of Regions ‘purged’the State Forest Resources Agency of local staff, replacing it with protegees that turned timber trade into a more lucrative source of personal revenue. One was fired after failing to come up with the €25,000 asked from him to be allowed to keep his job (interviews with two former forestry engineers, Chernivtsy, August 2016). Nevertheless, they described the problem in broader systemic terms –not only related to the Party of Regions –highlighting that already around 2008, Ukrainian authorities were implementing legislation doubling the amount of timber allowed to exit the state forestry. They were taking advantage of exporting opportunities to a nearby wood processing factory opened in 2008 by Austria’s Egger company on the EU(–Romanian) side of the border (Interviews with two former forestry engineers, August 2016, and interview with a former director of a timber-processing plant, Chernivtsy, August 2015). In line with the EUTR, the European Commission claimed to support Ukraine’s efforts to reach sustainability goals and protect the environment and repeatedly accused the Ukrainian forestry management of corruption in its reports on illegal felling and deforestation in Ukraine (Commission Expert Group on EUTR, 2020). Claiming that Ukraine breaches the AA, the Commission also insisted that Ukraine renounce the moratorium. The Juncker Commission has made macro-financial aid and later visa-free travel conditional on abolishing the ban (Interview, European Commission, Kiel, 29 April 2015). 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