All’s well that ends well: short story of Ukraine’s road towards European Union membership

Abstract The state of the EU–Ukraine relations cannot be comprehended without a profound understanding of its historical, legal, and political evolution. In fact, the EU–Ukraine relations have always mirrored the entire complexity of the EU’s external policies, ambitions, and difficulties of the EU enlargement and today’s search for EU strategic autonomy. The objective of this article is to fill in the gap and to offer a three-dimensional analysis of the EU–Ukraine relations. The first dimension is the study of the historical evolution of the EU–Ukraine relations from the time of Ukraine’s independence in 1991 till Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Therein the EU–Ukraine relations are looked through the prism of geopolitical changes within and outside the EU. The full independence of Ukraine in 1991, so- called ‘Orange revolution’ in 2005 and the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in 2014 have been linked to the evolving EU policies towards Ukraine and the entire post-Soviet area. The second dimension is a legal scrutiny of the main contractual documents between the EU and Ukraine since 1991. This article offers an in-depth study of bilateral EU–Ukraine agreements (Partnership and Cooperation Agreement of 1998 and Association Agreement of 2014). The third dimension is an attempt to comprehend how Ukraine’s bid for full EU membership in 2022 could help to stop the blatant military and humanitarian aggression by Russia and to contribute to a fair peace deal. The purpose of this article is to set out the framework of the study of EU relations with third countries in context of historical evolution of such country, geopolitical challenges around it, and legal nature of bilateral contractual tools and policies that, eventually, may lead either to a gradual integration with the EU or to the full EU membership.