Power Relations Meet Domestic Structures: Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

In the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European Union (EU) had two priorities regarding the countries to its east. The first was to establish a working relationship with the Russian Federation as the official successor to the USSR. The second was to respond to the increasingly insistent aspirations being formulated by the previous satellite states of the USSR in Central and Eastern Europe to ‘return to the fold’, which implied EU accession. The second priority resulted in ten states from the former socialist bloc joining the EU in 2004/2007. As for the first, the EU signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with Russia in 1994. The outbreak of the first war in Chechnya in 1995 delayed the entry into force of the agreement, but did not shake the assumption on which it was based: that Russia and the EU shared a fundamental commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and that Russia was on a clear path towards implementing these values. This assumption set a course for EU democracy promotion efforts in Russia that continues to have important implications to this day.