Ukraine is entering the third year of Russia’s full-scale war on its territory – and the tenth of Russian warfare against the country. The battlefield situation looks more critical than ever, and the future seems even bleaker as the crucial US support starts faltering and the EU lacks the capacity to step in, certainly in terms of military support. In the EU as well as in the US, it is mainly the impact of an increasingly influential radical right that endangers support for Ukraine.
However, as several authors of this dossier highlight, next to the loss of thousands of lives and the evident destruction, the war has far-reaching consequences in the country’s politics: democracy is under strain. And the EU has a crucial role to play in stabilising it. Also, economically, much could be done to re-orient the Ukrainian economy to a fully-fledged war economy. This, however, would require Keynesian interventionism, which would go against a neo-liberal mainstream in a country that is still reeling from the hyper-state-interventionism of the Soviet past.
The situation looks bleak indeed but has the EU not shown in 2022, as well as during the pandemic, that, when worse comes to worst, it is able to mobilise? Now certainly is such a moment again!
