The Balamand Agreement is one that is highly controversial within the Orthodox world for a number of reasons, and the strong grass-roots opposition to it has caused most jurisdictions to back off from considering it to be of any kind of binding effect.
But from the Catholic side, the Agreement has never been controversial that I can tell. What the Agreement basically says is that the right to exist of the alreday extant Eastern Catholic churches is acknowledged by the Orthodox side, and that the Catholic side renounces any further use of the principles of Uniatism as a means to unity.
Of course, the Catholic interpretation of the Agreement is that they won't try to co-opt entire dioceses and national churches one at a time, nor will they blatantly run campaigns to convert Orthodox to Eastern Catholicism. But in practice, by pouring money into their Eastern Catholic churches, they can continue to attract "spontaneous converts" on an individual basis (which the Agreement does of course allow, as a matter of acknowledging religious freedom.)
It is clear that there will be no full-scale conversions of dioceses or national churches anyway (the Eastern Catholic churches that exist in Eastern Europe all came into being in geographical areas that had come under the control of Catholic political entities,) so this was never the Orthodox concern. The Orthodox concern was the use of the Eastern Catholic churches as "missionary" bridgeheads for attracting Orthodox away from the Orthodox Church through a sort of "bait and switch," since by definition, the idea of Uniatism was that the Eastern Catholic churches would look exactly like their Orthodox counterparts.
The Orthodox point to the language in the Agreement that specifically addresses the use of financial incentives to convert -- obviously this is a very hazy area, and one that is impossible to define with precision or to enforce.
The Patriarchate of Russia (and other Eastern Slavic Orthodox Churches) feels that the Balamand agreement has already been violated by Catholic missionary activity amongst the Orthodox in Eastern Europe.
All of this is a long way of explaining why I said "at least officially," when I said that Catholicism had given up Uniatism as a means of unity. This is still a very, very sensitive area for the Orthodox, and it never ceases to amaze me that even knowledgable Catholics speak about the Eastern Catholic churches as entities that could possibly aid in achieving unity, when their effect has been exactly the opposite...
We have never established our own Patriarch of Rome, and when Catholic areas came under political control of Orthodox rulers, there were never any attempts to set up Latin-rite parishes and parallel ecclesiastical structures that looked exactly like the Roman Catholic churches -- but with the primate commemorating the Patriarch of Moscow or whatever.
Why should this amaze you? This isn't exactly front-page stuff for us. I hadn't read the Balamand Agreement, never heard of it. Perhaps it is front and center for you, but it is practically unheard of in the US, unless one is Eastern, I suppose. I do thank you and Kolo for your correcting me on this, but don't be surprised that other Catholics have the same concept. Very few of us are aware of your points of view on this subject, as you are unaware of many Catholic issues.
Regards