Technocratic integration in times of war: Collaboration between EU agencies and Ukraine 1994-2024

The geopolitical rupture triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has exposed the limits of the Eastern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Whereas Ukraine's demand for EU accession has received increasing attention, comparatively little is known about how war has reshaped the technocratic, transgovernmental layer of cooperation in the ENP, and in particular the ties linking EU decentralized agencies (EUAs), European regulatory networks (ERNs), and Ukrainian regulators. This paper asks how such cooperation evolves under conditions of existential threat: does war stall transgovernmental links, or does it accelerate Ukraine’s integration into the emerging European administrative space—and in which sectors? Bringing together scholarship on external differentiated integration and research on war-induced state-building, we theorize that wartime shifts external differentiated integration from functionalist to foreign-policy logics, privileging core state powers over market-making. Using three original datasets on Ukraine’s de jure and de facto cooperation with EU agencies and its participation in European regulatory networks, we demonstrate that war has indeed redirected Ukraine–EU transgovernmental cooperation toward security-relevant state capacities. While the long-term outcome of this integration is far from clear, our findings resonate with Milward’s insight on the “European rescue of the nation state,” revealing a sovereignty-first pathway of Europeanization that departs sharply from traditional models of market-led integration and is particularly pronounced in Ukraine’s wartime context.