Schroder was often before just as heavy-going

Yalta. The foreign affairs elite from all over the world love conferences - if possible in exotic destinations. Then these "Mr Callgirls" as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once laughingly called them, come together to talk intensely about this and that. If you travel enough then you'll see the same figures time and time again. Berlin calls them little marzipan piglets wearing name badges and on first name terms with each other. Besides them, former government leaders pop up, chilled at the idea of retirement. They feel it is important enough even as "has beens" to give the world the benefit of their advice, even though they have no more influence in it.

In Yalta in the Crimea, you could have seen plenty of representatives of both camps. Nevertheless the fourth "Yalta European Strategy Conference" is different from many other meetings of its type. The Ukrainians are inexperienced in this kind of international get-together and so are free from diplomacy-talk.

Yalta was all about Europe, or more precisely about the not so surprising wish of the Ukrainians to join the European Union, and there was much verbal debate on how to bring this about by 2020. Will this make people happy? After the conference in the Livadia Palace - precisely where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill sat 60 years ago - people began getting cold feet. No one can really believe in it, at least not those people who watch on as their party representatives lay into each other with such force even in front of international onlookers, and wish it would all end, and can only agree on two issues: a) we are all Ukrainians and b) we want to get into the EU. Even the elections in September, after which people in Brussels hope there will eventually be calm in Kiev, will not have the desired effect. The Ukrainians bicker and fight without any feeling for strategic niceties or what is important for the region.

Maybe they'll listen to Poland's Aleksander Kwasnievski who tore off the Ukrainians a strip in fluent English, "How long must Europe endure your domestic political crisis. It must stop. Yes, we need you in the EU, perhaps as early as 2020, but not in the state you're in." In some way help came also from the contribution made by the Russian ambassador and former Prime Minister under Yeltsin, Viktor Tschernomyrdin, who declared that Moscow had nothing against its Western neighbour gaining entry into the European club. Unfortunately these words that escaped from a Russian mouth were like words spoken in the wind, and that was due to the performance of a German named Gerhard Schröder.

Just as in his heyday, the former German chancellor left his audience breathless in his wake. This time not just wondering but completely puzzled. In his attitude as a statesman, Schröder appeared to the audience as a Gazprom lobbyist, only speaking three minutes about our "dear friends" and then proceeding to boast Russia's reliability as an energy supplier to a country where Vladimir Putin turned off the gas tap in January 2006. "I understand that there is a debate over independence from Russia. But this is all wrong. Who else can ensure delivery of oil and gas? Iran perhaps or Algeria? Only Russia can". The Ukraine in the EU? This seemed to interest Schröder, a director of the company building the Baltic pipeline, as little as the price of Coca Cola in Burkina Faso. Not once did the words "Ukraine and the EU" pass the lips of the former chancellor. Schröder spoke of neighbourly politics, about the Ukraine as a "bridge" between East and West, about Germany's assistance to Kiev during his chancellorship and ended each paragraph with the conclusion, "It is important to strengthen the partnership with Russia" and build the very pipeline that Gazprom is planning.

Schröder shook off criticisms of every kind. They bounced off the armoured steel of his self satisfaction like shivers of foam rubber. In the end the rest of the Germans had no choice but to add that he is no longer chancellor. Nevertheless a Frenchman came to their rescue in the person of Pierre Lellouche, who has president Sarkozy's confidence and remarked, "Schröder was often before just as heavy-going".

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