Baku-APA. According to an old folk tradition, if a man knocks on the door of a Ukrainian beauty with a marriage proposal but does not win her heart, she will reject her suitor by presenting him with a pumpkin, APA reports quoting Associated Press.
Who will get the pumpkin from Ukraine at the end of this month — Russia or the European Union?
More than 20 years after gaining independence from the Soviet Union and painfully searching for its place on the geopolitical map, Ukraine has a critical chance to firmly align itself this month with the EU's democratic standards and free-market zone.
The alternative is to slide back into Russia's shadow, both politically and economically, a result that Russian President Vladimir Putin's government is pushing hard to achieve.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has declared that Ukraine's future lies with the 28-member EU and has pushed through a flurry of pro-EU laws and reforms. But he has resisted fulfilling the most important condition set by the EU in order to sign a political association and free-trade agreement at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Nov. 28-29: the release from jail of his top political rival, former premier Yulia Tymoshenko, who is serving a seven-year sentence on charges the West considers politically motivated.
"We have a chance to be finally together," said former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, an EU envoy who has traveled to Ukraine 27 times over the past 1½ years to urge Yanukovych to release Tymoshenko and sign the EU deal. "Never (was) Ukraine so close to being inside the European community."
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