AS European foreign ministers get ready for their Gymnich meeting on Friday and Saturday, it would be nice to think that Ukraine's increasingly casual attitude to the rule of law would be on the agenda. In early August a bunch of senior Americans dealing with Europe wrote to the leaders of the EU (Herman Van Rompuy, José Manuel Barroso, Catherine Ashton and Radosław Sikorski) asking them to suspend Ukraine's EU talks following the arrest of Yulia Tymoshenko.

It was a private letter, not an open one, but got no reply.

Here's an extract of the text, written (all in a personal capacity) by David Kramer (formerly of the Bush administration State Dept, now president of Freedom House); A. Wess Mitchell, President of the CEPA thinktank; Kurt Volker, former ambassador to NATO, now at SAIS; and Damon Wilson of the Atlantic Council.