Medvedev concluded his open letter with the words that “there can be no doubt that the multifaceted ties between Russia and Ukraine will resume on a fundamentally different level—that of strategic partnership—and this moment will not be long in coming.”[41] These words could be perceived by the Ukrainians as an unveiled threat, because the “strategic partnership” the Kremlin wanted to establish with Ukraine would certainly include a restriction of Ukraine’s freedom of choice over its security arrangements, a freedom that nevertheless figured prominently in the Founding Act of 1997. Since the election of the more Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 the Russian pressure on Ukraine has not subsided. On the contrary: Russian pressure on Ukraine to join the Customs Union and Eurasian Union has only increased. The Kremlin uses both carrot and stick. The carrot is represented by a Russian offer to sell its gas to Ukraine for $160 per cubic meter instead of $425—a discount of more than 62 percent![42] The stick consists of a potential restriction of the number of Ukrainian migrant workers in Russia, estimated at between two and three million per year.[43] The Russian authorities have already announced that from January 2015 citizens from the CIS countries need foreign passports to travel to Russia.[44] The Russian pressure, however, also takes the form of outright blackmail. An example of the latter is the so called “Yamal-Europe Two” project—a proposal, made on April 3, 2013, by Putin and Gazprom’s CEO Aleksey Miller to Poland, to build a new gas pipeline over Polish territory to Slovakia. This project, aimed “to demonstrate that Moscow can shift gas export volumes into new bypass pipelines, away from Ukraine’s gas transit system to Europe, eventually nullifying the system’s value.”[45] This proposal was experienced by the Ukrainians as a direct attack. Some weeks later, on April 25, 2013, Putin, in a televised phone-in session in Moscow, went so far as to issue a warning that if Ukraine did not join the Eurasian Union it faced the potential “de-industrialisation” of multiple sectors within its economy.”[46]
