UKRAINE’S new president’s decision to sign the economic clauses of an association agreement with the European Union means that Brussels has got its way — for now.

The abolition of tariffs and cancellation of public subsidies for industry — though car manufacturing has been given a 15-year reprieve — open up a large new market which, if the EU’s prior record on international trade is any guide, will soon be flooded with German goods and French agricultural produce at the expense of local enterprises.

“Free trade” in Ukraine is unlikely to improve either living standards or public services in the country. 

It is true that Ukrainians already lack much in the way of democratic control over their economy — after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, virtually all the country’s public assets were snapped up by a dozen oligarch clans who have kept their monopoly on national wealth ever since.

Ukraine has not recovered from that catastrophe. It lost 60 per cent of its GDP and nearly 12 per cent of its population in the ensuing 10 years — a drop from 52 million to 45 million. The population is still falling.

But increased integration into the undemocratic, corporate stitch-up that is the European Union is not a cure for these ills.

Those in western Ukraine who believe eventual EU membership is a ticket to German-style prosperity should pause to look at the economic “restructuring” — privatisation and attacks on working people’s pay, conditions and pensions — forced on the bloc’s peripheral economies such as Greece and Ireland in order to shore up the finances of the big banks and pave the way for foreign takeovers of their energy and transport infrastructures.

The neoliberal bloc has succeeded in extending its tentacles right up to the Russian border, but it has not been a pretty process. 

This “association agreement” is what sparked the chaos in the country last year, since then president Viktor Yanukovych U-turned on signing the document over fears about its consequences for Ukrainian industry.

The US and the EU immediately threw their lot in with protests dominated by fascist paramilitaries and racist thugs which succeeded in February in overthrowing the elected government.

The far-right character of the new regime has been apparent since, with its attempts to ban the Communist Party, attacks on Russian-speakers and willingness to unleash neonazi irregulars to terrorise its opponents — with the burning to death of 42 people in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions on May 2 merely the most dramatic example.

The subsequent election of chocolate billionaire Petro Poroshenko may have given the Kiev authorities a veneer of legitimacy — although large parts of the country did not participate — but he has continued an all-out war on resistance in the east which sees soldiers butcher civilians and Ukrainian warplanes conduct lethal bombing raids on their own cities.

The terror Kiev’s new rulers are visiting on their fellow Ukrainians is such that only yesterday the United Nations revealed that 110,000 people have fled to Russia this year — with 16,400 fleeing their homes in the last week alone.

The torment inflicted on southern Europe in the name of “austerity” laid bare the big business loyalties of the EU. 

Its unholy alliance with unrepentant fascists in order to overthrow a government that resisted its advances now provides ample evidence of its contempt for democracy.

The bigwigs in Brussels will be popping the champagne corks tonight. The rest of us should show solidarity with the anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine and put pressure on Kiev to end its terrible war.