Die EU und die Ukraine

Since the implementation of the European Security Strategy in 2003, the Ukraine crisis has been the first security crisis on the immediate periphery of the European Union. This study by Rainer Bühling goes in search of the European Union’s strategy in addressing this crisis. He examines the integration conflict between Moscow and Brussels over the Ukraine and describes both the road to the crisis and the EU’s response to it in detail. In conclusion, he points out that although the administration of the EU offers a variety of ways to respond to a crisis, the national sensitivities of the EU’s member states have taken precedence in this case. This means that intergovernmental bodies are almost exclusively dominating the events. The result is an intergovernmental approach shaped by ad hoc reactions instead of a possible EU crisis strategy that uses the existing supranational institutions of the EU’s CFSP and CSDP.