The Aftermath of the EU's Actorness in Ukraine

Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ was the first major crisis between the EU and Russia. One of the central issues of contention was whether Ukraine’s future lay with the EU or with Russia. The Kremlin sought to persuade Ukrainians to choose the latter. The EU’s position was more cautious, but when mass protests over election fraud took place, it sent a diplomatic mission to Kiev. It provided the catalyst for the negotiations that ensured the victory of the pro-EU candidate Yushchenko. The result was a drastic transformation of Russian perceptions of the EU. Five years since Yeltsin embraced the EU as the acceptable face of the West, key Kremlin officials conceived the EU as a threat to both the stability of the post- Soviet space and the Kremlin’s foreign policy with Kiev. This paper argues that the confrontation between the EU and Russia during the ‘Orange Revolution’ was caused by the EU’s acquisition of ‘actorness.’ It analyses why the EU’s interference in Kiev precipitated a crisis in EU-Russia relations. After the ‘Orange Revolution’, the EU was perceived by Russian policy makers as an aggressive organization seeking to enhance its sphere of influence over the post-Soviet space. Paradoxically, during the current crisis in Ukraine, Russian policy makers mock themselves about the EU’s limited capacities as an actor in international politics. On the one hand, this paper seeks to explain why the Russian policy makers’ perception of the EU changed. On the other hand, it seeks to address which nuances this changing perception reveals about the EU’s ‘actorness.'