Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has said that Kyiv "had no fundamental intention to initial the association agreement at the summit," as the initialing is a technical, rather than a political process.
"As head of the negotiation delegation, I can say that we had no fundamental intentions to initial the association agreement at the summit. The idea was to complete the talks and announce this at the political level. But no one has ever formally sought [to conduct] the technical procedure of initialing at the summit," he said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists in Brussels.
Klimkin noted that the initialing process was "a purely technical process and involves the signing of about 1,500 pages of text."
"The initialing happens at the level of the heads of delegations, rather than at the political level. The initialing simply means the fixing of the text - the time of the agreement, that the talks have formally been completed. Therefore, the initialing could happen before or after the summit," the diplomat said.
When asked when the document will be initialed, Klimkin said that "the initialing will be possible when the technical drafting of the text is completed."
"The texts are being drafted. I find it hard to say exactly when the initialing will end," he said.
Klimkin also said that preparations for signing and the signing were a political event.
"There is no political subtext in whether the document is initialed or not, unlike a political statement on the completion of talks. The signing is a political act," he said.
When asked by Interfax-Ukraine when the question of Ukraine's EU membership prospects could be resolved, the diplomat said: "I believe that the agreement in the form it is now is already a European [Union membership] prospect."
