Let us take one point that is so serious, which I warned my people about and tried to correct in the association agreement with the European Union - this is a free trade area. That was an important part of the agreement. We were opening up our market to the goods of the European Union, while the European Union was effectively keeping its market closed. Why? Because it was included in the association agreement, and we have been trying for three years to change this situation, that industrial goods supplied to the European Union from Ukraine must meet the standards and norms of the European Union's technical regulation.
As you know, Ukraine's industry, which we inherited from the Soviet Union, operated according to its own standards. These standards were sometimes stricter than the European Union's standards, in most cases they were stricter, especially with regard to food quality, for example. In some places they were lighter, but in general they were absolutely, shall we say, normal. For example, say, the deviation of the frequency of the current in electrical appliances from the accepted one, the deviation parameter. I could go on quoting many such technical norms. As a result, it turned out that every refrigerator manufactured in European Union countries had access to the Ukrainian market, but our refrigerator did not. Why? Because by some parameters, technically, by half a degree, by half a hertz, or there by a quarter of a hertz, or by some other parameters, somewhere it did not meet.
And that is what worried me, because it meant that we were opening up our market for free to the strong, competitive sector of the European Union, and we ourselves were getting nothing in return. That is why I put the question to the leadership of the European Union: we need to rebuild our industry to your standards, but that takes a lot of money and a lot of time. We estimated that it would take about eight years to rebuild all our factories, plants, factories to European Union standards and, for example, as a minimum, about EUR 100 billion. The European Union refused to do this.
