Russia had launched a devastating attack on Ukraine, a European democracy of 44 million people, bombarding its cities and closing in on the capital, Kyiv, prompting a mass group of refugees. This has shattered peace in Europe and thrown the continent’s entire security structure into jeopardy. Europe, as EU High Representative Josep Borrell has highly mourned and is not really active when it comes to dealing with the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
The European Union had very little to say about the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian crises. The war took place at a time when then the British prime minister was absorbed by a domestic political scandal that threatened his hold on power. But, in contrast, the UK has been taking a leading international role in halting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, attended a meeting of European Union ministers in Brussels to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, a move that, in pre-Brexit days, would have been routine. In the devastating aftermath of Britain’s exit from the European Union, the relationship between the two sides degenerated into discord, distrust, and open sniping. But confronted with the war in Ukraine, and resulting issues that are several orders of intensity deeper than rifts over fishing rights or the movement of sausages, the pass opened up by Brexit is beginning to narrow.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the US has become ever more powerful relative to its European allies. The transatlantic relationship has not become more balanced, as seemed to be the trend in the early 2000s, but more dominated by the US. Furthermore, Europe’s lack of agency in the Russia-Ukraine crisis stems from this growing power imbalance in the Western alliance.
The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday that the Ukraine crisis has grown into “the most dangerous moment” for Europe in decades. The statement was made during a time when his top diplomat held icy talks with her Moscow counterpart who said the Kremlin won’t accept lectures from the West. NATO’s defensive alliance has made clear there are no plans to send combat troops to Ukraine. But member countries have provided weapons and field hospitals and the EU, for the first time in its history, is to buy and send arms and other equipment. Europeans are trying to use competition policy to push back against this dominance but, unlike the Chinese, they have been unable to develop local alternatives – so, these efforts seem doomed to failure.
