Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine on February 24 2022 and the war that has ensued are part of the history of what happened in eastern Europe in the years following the cold war. As the European Union is debating what to do about Russian aggression, it is important to remind ourselves of that complex history of relations between the bloc and the nations on its borders.
This war is part of a story of how eastern European countries rebuilt nation-states after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And it is about the role successive versions of the European Union’s neighbourhood policy played in this process of state-building – and how Russia responded. It is a story about how, in Ukraine, the project of state building came to be tied to European integration. Russia’s attack on Ukraine is also an attack on the idea of European integration.
For a long time, for many Europeans, Ukraine has been a country without much agency. It was deemed to lie outside Europe. And it was often seen as a mere geopolitical bridge between the EU and Russia.
