Introduction

Russia's war against Ukraine since 24 February 2022 calls for a re-evaluation of the European Union's (EU) policies and concepts in different fields.1 On the political level, the EU's long-standing self-image as primarily a normative and soft power projecting its norms in post-Cold War Europe and beyond has been shaken (Manners, 2002). All efforts to integrate the Russian Federation in a common European space of peace and security seem to have failed in the face of Moscow's imperial turn, which defines post-Soviet states as a zone of special Russian interest. In its so-called Near Abroad (blizhnee zarubezh’e), states would have only limited sovereignty in various policy fields ranging from membership in transnational organizations such as NATO and the EU to domestic policies such as the citizenship regime.

The Russian rationale for the necessity of the war against Ukraine and its war aims call imperatively for revisiting some scholarly concepts as well. Vladimir Putin and other leading politicians and ideologues from the Russian Federation posit two main reasons for the war. The first is to safeguard the Russian population in the self-declared republics in eastern and southern Ukraine, in Crimea, and in the whole of Ukraine from acts of genocide perpetrated by Ukrainian Nazis. The second line of argumentation is more far-reaching, calling the very existence of the Ukrainian nation and state into question: once the Ukrainian regime is removed from power, the Ukrainian nation is destined to return to the common Russian cradle, and the state is doomed to be dissolved territorially and politically and to be incorporated into the Russian Federation.