Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, called The Last Dictator in Europe, at the last moment skipped coming to Prague last week for the launch of the European Union’s much-vaunted Eastern Partnership to woo former Soviet Republics into the EU’s corner, but he wasn’t alone, as most of the EU’s leaders stayed away too.

The event was designed to strengthen political and economic ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova in the wake of last year’s conflict between Georgia and Russia, but it became a tentative affair as some analysts said some of Russia’s former states, awed by the military response against Georgia and Russia’s warnings to the United States and the EU not to try to draw those countries into NATO scared them off. The EU has said it’s not trying to undermine relations with Russia, but was so anxious to gain some footholds into the former Soviet states that it even reached out to Lukashenko, who, before he came, said there would be no democratic reforms there, in direct contradiction to what the EU said it wanted, even risking the wrath of Russia.

Under the programme, the EU has pledged USD 799 million in aid from 2009 to 2013, while promising to accelerate energy projects in the region, encourage democracy and eventually ease EU visa restrictions, but Russia said its suspicious the real plan is to get is former neighbours moving toward the west and EU and American influence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned before the meeting that the EU’s overtures in the region had raised concerns in Moscow. “We shared our concerns that there are those who may wish to present the invited participants with the choice: either you are with Russia, or with the European Union,” he said. Even some of the countries who stand to benefit from the programme said it was the wrong time to make such a move, pointing to the economic recession, Russia’s stranglehold on energy supplies, and political upheaval in the territories.

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, struggling with social unrest, dismissed the Eastern Partnership-related grants as “candy.” Top leaders of four of the five EU heavyweights - Britain, Italy, France and Spain – stayed away from the planned high-level meeting at boosting ties with six ex-Soviet states, a flagship initiative of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the European Union. But French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Italian and Spanish counterparts, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Luis Zapatero, didn’t attend, a sign, analysts said, that the event carried little importance for them. Only German Chancellor Angela Merkel was among the leaders of the EU’s biggest countries to show up. She said that the Eastern Partnership was “an important dimension of EU cooperation.”

LUKASHENKO’S HAPPY

Lukashenko said he was pleased with the prospects offered by the meeting even though he stayed away so as not to offend other countries. Czech President Vaclav Klaus had said he wouldn’t even shake Lukashenko’s hand. “Judging from the information I received, things ended up as we thought,” Lukashenko, quoted by the official BELTA news agency, told reporters on a trip to southern Belarus.“We sell half our goods to the EU and we have to overcome duties and barriers. Doesn’t it make sense to fight for a free trade zone with the European Union?” Lukashenko, accused for years of crushing fundamental rights, was given an invitation for Belarus to attend the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague, which launched a programme to ease rules on visas and strengthen energy and economic ties but he sent a deputy prime minister.

The summit meeting came at a time of heightened tension between Russia and the West and as Georgia accused Moscow of engineering a mutiny before NATO training exercises in the country that Russia had complained were an unnecessary provocation. Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, insisted in an interview with the New York Times that the EU’s outreach in the region was not directed at Russia. And he said he was encouraged that the election of President Barack Obama had ushered in a new era in relations between East and West.

“Russia is not an easy partner or neighbor,” he said, “but the situation today is better than it was before.” Alexandr Vondra, who was the Czech Foreign Minister until leaving last week as the government fell, said that the absences of the EU’s top leaders sent the wrong signal to new member states on the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s reform pact aimed at streamlining decisionmaking through institutional reform, which critics fear will be a boon for the EU heavyweights.

Following a series of delays, the Czech Senate was the last parliamentary chamber in the EU to ratify the pact, which has been stalled since Ireland turned it down in a June 2008 referendum. EU leaders tried to put a good face on the event even as some analysts said it fell on its own face. “If we don’t export stability, we have seen that we will import instability,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, one of the project’s creators, whose country will take over the EU’s rotating presidency from July. “With this partnership, the EU is, as it were, founding peace and stability not just for member states but for the region around the EU,” he said.

EU politicians say that they are deeply worried by issues such as Georgia’s recent war with Russia, the frozen conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Ukraine’s economic and political crisis, a lack of democracy in Belarus and April’s riots in Moldova so the plan was to have th4e EU offer the six former-Soviet states freetrade agreements, assistance on issues such as border control and environmental protection, and help in bringing their laws and economies into line with European standards.

The partnership “should be a pragmatic cooperation of equal partners on social, economic, security and human-rights matters,” former Czech premier Mirek Topolanek said just as the event wrapped up and his administration ended. Sweden and Poland initially proposed the partnership in 2007, in a bid to make sure that the EU did not ignore its Eastern neighbours as it sought more influence in the Mediterranean. The EU declared it a priority after Russia’s August, 2008 invasion of Georgia.

After that declaration, Russia accused the EU of trying to build up a “sphere of influence” around its borders, something the EU firmly rejected. “The Eastern Partnership is not directed against someone else, it is not to build up a European sphere of influence,” Topolanek insisted as he opened the summit.

The presidents of Belarus and Moldova have been criticised in Europe for their human-rights records and before the conference began dispute also raged over the question of what the partnership’s emphasis should be, with the six partner states reluctant to sign up to democratic or human-rights reforms, instead demanding better trade access and visa-free travel. They also opposed the idea that they should work together more, instead pushing for closer bilateral relationships with the EU. Ukraine wants to sign a bilateral deal on energy with the EU by June, and wants a “special road map” for further cooperation, its president, Viktor Yushchenko, said as he arrived. But Reinfeldt said that he was not worried by the disagreement between the EU and its neighbours on what the partnership was for. “It’s always what they start with:we want to have visa facilities or opening borders to be able to travel, because there’s a lot of love for Europe ... But then we say well, it’s on its merits, this is a family of values and we have conditionality,” he pointed out.