Top 3 #Hashtags and the Eastern Partnership

Eastern Partnership summit,  Foto: Paweł Supernak

#Hashtags dominates the social media universe. The Eastern Partnership topic has been dominated by #Hashtags long before the 3rd Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius (Lithuania) started and is dominated after the summit. Three #Hashtags highlight the issue: 1. #EasternPartnership; 2. #VilniusSummit and 3. #євромайдан #евромайдан #Euromaidan.

#EasternPartnership and #VilniusSummit

Eastern Partnership Beyond Vilnius, Infographic @ eu2013.lt

The Lithuanian capital hosted the 3rd Eastern Partnership summit on 28-29 November 2013. The EU officials displayed poor results:

• EU-Republic of Moldova and EU-Georgia Association Agreements including DCFTAs have been initialed
• Visa facilitation Agreement with Azerbaijan
• Framework agreement on Georgia's participation in EU crisis management missions
• Air services agreement with Ukraine. 

On the whole, one must agree that these outcomes were failure for EU's Eastern Europe policy. The main country, Ukraine, and its government decided not to sign any Association Agreement with the EU under the big pressure from Russia and personally from Vladimir Putin. However, all EU politicians tweet the outcome of the summit as a victory for the EU except big disappointment on Ukraine's decision not to sign the finalized Association Agreement. 

• Stefan Füle, EU Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighbourhood policy: "Great end to #Vilniussummit with @euHvR acknowledging European aspirations&choice of some partners &offering to support them along this road."

• Herman Van Rompuy: "#EaP summit over. High level participation strong message of shared commitment. Good substantial list of deliverables."

• Carl Bildt, Swedish Foreign Minister: "President Yanukovich must show what we wants. Rumours he has promised to leave European Energy Community. Would kill Association Agreement."

#євромайдан #евромайдан #Euromaidan

#євромайдан #евромайдан #Euromaidan, Foto @Twitter

Ukrainian people were disappointed on President Yanukovych's decision not to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. Pro-European Ukrainians meet every day on the main square of the capital Kyiv. The protests created their own #Hashtag: #євромайдан (in Ukrainian) #евромайдан (in Russian) #Euromaidan (in English).

It is incredible how the #Hashtags is spreading on the whole net. A quick search on Google comes to the following result: #євромайдан (303,000 results), #евромайдан (35, 200 results) and #Euromaidan (68, 800 results). Results were taken on December 1, 2013. 

The excessive use of force on November 30, 2013 by the police in Kyiv to disperse peaceful protesters, who over the last days have expressed their support for Ukraine's political association and economic integration with the EU, was an additional input for the use of the three #Hashtags in different social media, mostly Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The universe of social media is creating different #Hashtags for different purposes. In the case of Ukraine and the Eastern Partnership initiative, #Hashtags is changing preferences.