Ukraine-European Union Relations
OP-ED
Andrew Wilson: Europe’s seven deadly sins
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (L) is greeted by President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker on the second day of the fourth European Union (EU) eastern Partnership Summit in Riga, on May 22, 2015.
The recent Riga Summit was a typical product of a method born in the EU's internal politics, where doing nothing – or seeking compromise and making marginal adjustments in the hope of changing policy next time – is often the only way to proceed. The summit also showed the characteristic EU tendency toward politics as textual improvement: more effort went into negotiating the final declaration that getting the over-arching politics right. But given the scale of the current crisis, neither approach is adequate. Our panel looks at the EU from the perspective of the eastern partners, where I can find at least seven underlying reasons why Europe has gotten the Russia-Ukraine crisis so wrong.
