EU Global Strategy signaled the EU’s growing ambition of international leadership and a foreign policy focus on the exercise of global and regional political and economic stewardship. Yet, as our paper argues, external recognition of its role as a legitimate leader and credible and just partner is not a given. We propose that such recognition is a function of external perceptions of the EU, and specifically as an advocate and promoter of values and justice at the global level. Informed by a tri-partite conception of justice (Sjursen 2017) featuring non-domination, impartiality and mutual recognition concerns, we study EU perceptions in one key ENP partner – Ukraine. A country embroiled in an ongoing violent conflict, Ukraine also declares its ongoing commitment to the ‘European vector’ in its foreign and domestic policies including embracing a set of European norms and values. Analysing media and elite images of the EU in Ukraine, we empirically test the three conceptions of justice and engage with a set of spatio-temporal explanations (Chaban and Chaban, 2018) behind the external visions of a ‘just’ foreign policy.
