EU growth too weak for Ukraine to join: economist Sachs

(SOPOT) - Economic growth in the European Union is too weak to allow for Ukraine to join the 28-member bloc, according to leading US economist and reformer Jeffrey Sachs.

"In Europe, growth is not strong enough to pull Ukraine into the EU," he told AFP Friday on the margins of a regional business conference being held in the Polish Baltic Sea resort of Sopot.

The co-author of Poland's successful 1989 "shock therapy" free-market reforms also said that the violence triggered by Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine made Kiev's integration with the EU a far fetched idea.

"I don't believe the idea that Ukraine can be integrated into Europe in the hostile environment (created by Russia). It's unrealistic," Sachs said.

He sees reforms carried out by Kiev as too weak to attract foreign investment from the West, leaving Ukraine "much more tightly integrated in the Russian economy."

The EU is slated to see its economy expand by 2.1 percent this year, up from 1.8 percent growth in 2014, according to the European Commission's May forecast.

Ukraine's economy is expected shrink by nearly 10 percent due in part to the loss of key coal and steel mining factories in the pro-Russian separatist east. Industrial production plummeted by about a fifth over the first six months of the year.