The Ukrainian Crisis as a Challenge for the Eastern Partnership

EU Soft Power in the Eastern Neighborhood and the Western Balkans in the Context of Crises

“…Georgia is an illustrative case of the first one, while Serbia, whose affiliation with the EU is usually thought of as driven by the utilitarian desire to gain material benefits (Economides & Ker-Lindsay, 2015), seems exemplary of the second one. Importantly, motives for alignment may alter over time: to illustrate, for Ukraine, which traditionally used to pragmatically balance between Russia and the EU, a pro-European orientation turned into a comprehensive national idea after it suffered Russia's aggression in March 2014 (Tsybulenko & Pakhomenko, 2016). I abstain, however, from strictly subdividing all the target states into three groups by the logics of their integration intentions, since, first, relevant case studies are missing on some of them and, second, most of them are likely to display a mix of several logics with no single logic strictly prevailing over the others.…”