Europe and Ukraine recent history, how we got there and how the Russian invasion has changed the Union. These were the important issues touched by the panel on “The Russia-Ukraine war and the European order” at the War, Peace and the World Order Summer School. The panel included Lazslo Andor, economist, the Secretary General of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) and former European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and Volodymyr Ishchenko, a sociologist from the Freie Universität in Berlin. Maria Chiara Franceschelli (SNS) and Andrey Maliuk (Università di Trieste) were the discussants.

What follows is a summary of Andor and Ishchenko lectures, who both presented an original and informed point of view on the European and Ukrainian recent path.

“The war has shaken up the EU… Although the EU for long has been described as a peace project, more and more people identified with a new mission, which is to actively support Ukraine’s defensive struggle, and potentially to prepare for future conflicts. By and large, it has been accepted that the EU should subordinate its economic policy to the interest of the war, and roll out sanctions on Russia, even if those have substantial costs”. With the Von Der Leyen second mandate the Defense Commissioner was introduced and the second Trump term also contributed to this boost of the military dimension.

The call for more military spending that became central in the EU discussions does not address the need to better coordination to boos collective defence, says Andor, no methodology and “arbitrary numbers thrown to impress the audience” while “diplomacy has taken the back seat and conflict prevention is almost vanished from the EU policy map”. The war also weakened the promise of the UE being a geopolitical actor: Europe acceppted tariffs, 5% of military spending to keep the US involved in Ukraine, which points out how more than a political giant, Europa ”is dependent, and even subordinated, to the US in several areas”.

The four cardinal dependencies that make the EU more of a strategic periphery are:

• military-security issues;
• digital services (Dependence on digital services means that most purchases in Europe now also go through US service providers (through market research, product search, payment, etc.), which also means that in most of these digital operations, an American company either receives revenue or useful information;
• energy supply (the EU will replace its unilateral dependence on the East with a Western one in the area of ​​gas imports);
• the hierarchy of the financial system (Euro has failed to significantly increase its share of international trade and reserves).

Andor lists a series of what he calls miscalculations and follies from all the actors involved in the Russia-Ukraine War.

Russia’s follies include the idea that the campaign would be a blitzkrieg and that military strength is enough to achieve political goals, that russian soldiers would be welcomed or that the EU would not support Ukraine.

US’ folly was to assume that it is possible to walk away quietly from such a war while on the ukrainian side the mistake was to think that the western support would achieve a better agreement that the one reached in Minsk in 2015 and that NATO and EU membership was something quick or that the UK/US/EU would enter the war if things went badly.

Europe’s miscalculations list is the longest: to believe that the US out of principle supports a war for the rules-based-int’l-order, to suggest that Russia’s war against Ukraine is an attack on Europe from the outside and not an intra-European conflict, to assume that economic sanctions can weigh down Russia in a few years, to expect an incremental buildup of Ukrainian military arsenal be effective against overall Russian dominance in personnel and amunition, to assume that the Global South can be talked into an isolation of Russia, to expect that the European public remains committed to a war with maximalist objectives and fully supportive of Ukraine’s ambitions (with readiness for endless sacrifice), to suggest that it is Putin’s manipulation of Trump and not the battlefield reality which is shifting the Ukraine policy of Washington, to assume that maximalist objectives can be upheld during negotiations between the warring parties even if the battlefield reality does not support them, to think that war without any diplomacy should determine our future relations with our largest neighbour.

“Internationally, the result is a deep and genuine transatlantic crisis, and, within Europe, a new divide between the verbally courageous who would be keen to militarize the EU and the quiet pragmatics who wish to maintain the integrity of the European single market and social model” (…) For Europeans it is increasingly clear that much of the reconstruction costs (on Ukrainian territory which is not controlled by Russia) will fall on European countries. Obviously, the longer the war lasts, the higher costs will be. Europe’s interest is to create the conditions of reconstruction as soon as possible.  However, since it is rather hard to admit to miscalculation and strategic failure, the only preoccupation of many European leaders is just to prolong the war and postpone the moment of truth, irrespective of the price Ukrainians and EU citizens have to pay for it. It remains a question whether the EU can continue to represent its own values without undermining its strategic interests (to the extent that the latter has been defined at all).

Andor’s conclusion is bitter:  ”It is a kind of commonplace today to suggest that the world is in a transition. With this transition the world system is headed towards multipolarity. The analysis I gave you today suggests that among the major players of the world, Europe is the least prepared for multipolarity”.

While Laszlo Andor focused on the role of Europe in the Russia-Ukraine war, Volodymyr Ishchenko has given an intriguing reading of the Ukranian socio-political situation before the conflict started. Ishchenko’s point of view stresses that what we tend to see as the pro-Russian and pro-western camps in the Ukranian society do not help us understanding the conflict.

His approach assumes that in Ukraine’s case, the more relevant framework is political economy and class dynamics shaped by its post-Soviet and geopolitical context and not nationalist identity politics (pro Russia/Ukranian nationalists). Illiberal populism in Ukraine did exist, but it was not primarily nationalist. Instead, it emerged from working-class grievances over economic decline, especially in the eastern and central industrial regions of the country. The label “pro-Russian,” often used by the nationalist-liberal camp to discredit political actors from the East, obscures the underlying class-based frustrations that many Ukrainians, particularly in post-industrial areas, have experienced. These frustrations did not find meaningful expression in nationalist identity politics, whether pro-Western or otherwise. Instead, they helped fuel the rise of political figures like Volodymyr Zelenskyi, whose 2019 electoral victory reflected widespread disillusionment with both nationalist and neoliberal elites. His success points to the fact that in Ukraine, anti-establishment sentiment and working-class populism have largely taken a non-nationalist form. It is therefore a mistake to interpret the post-1989 transitions of former Soviet countries as a linear move toward 20th-century-style liberalism.

Ishchenko concluded with an analysis of State of the war

– Military, first quick victory of Russia, then victory of Ukraine, now “stalemate”. This is not stalemate but Russia is having an upper hand, very slow retreat but don’t be misled by the slowly moving frontline (calculations of how many decades it may take to get to Kyiv), the strategy in the attrition war is different – exhaustion of the adverse army and it seems like working, the Russian army is expanding still even without massive conscription, the Ukrainian army is contracting and this is happening not because insufficient support but of the crisis of motivation and crisis of legitimacy of the Ukrainian state.

– Economically Russia did not collapse because of the sanctions, they even had partially beneficial effects in particular on redistribution of property or import-substitution, not speaking about the feedback effects on the EU countries, in particular Germany. Now, they may be reaching the limits with the incapacity of the EU to join US tariffs on India and China. Instead, after decline in 2022, Russia was among the fastest growing economies in Europe. There’s much talk about the Russian economic slowdown this year, which is real, but at the same time looks like another wave of the same wishful thinking to support the war efforts. Slowdown or even stagnation does not mean crisis or collapse of the economy that is part of the Ukrainian strategy of hitting the oil and gas refineries in Russia. Partially the slowdown is intentional to curb high inflation as a result of military Keynesianism. What is even more important is that we cannot discuss the dynamics of Russian economy in isolation, we should in relation to the state of Ukrainian and capacity of Europe to support Ukraine for years and its political consequences. What is even more important is way worse economic situation in Ukraine primarily in terms of the critical dependency on the external funding from the West which is growing .

– politically: early expectations of Russian elite split supposedly uninterested in the war and instead losing from it, however, there were several major opportunities to split from Putin but they were not realized: the start of the full-scale invasion itself, the failure of its initial plan, the strong sanctions, the defeats in the fall 2022 and mobilization, Wagner’s mutiny in 2023, Ukraine’s invasion into Kursk region, now Ukrainian drone attacks, but it looks like now Russia is far more politically consolidated than Ukraine (anticorruption conflict between Zelenskyi, “civil society” and the opposition, exacerbating divides within its own party) and the West (the conflicts between the countries and within the European countries exacerbated by the war).

– international: despite initial perception of Russian isolation and Ukraine’s broad support (also the effect of the Russian initial failures), the international situation now is very different. Ukraine lost West but did not win South. Trump’s desire to exit the war and European divisions do not favor Ukraine.

– socially: much of hype about Ukrainian resilient civil society, Ukrainian unity, especially in 2022, which has been always overhyped because of the exclusion of about one third of Ukrainian population. But now moods have changed in support of negotiations even if not territorial compromise. What is even more important: behavioral indicators that most Ukrainians are not ready to fight for that state. In Russia, support for negotiations is also higher than any time since the start of the war but also there is no willingness to compromise. Russia is still capable to sustain the flow of new soldiers to the army without a new mobilization wave (not entirely volunteer).