Ukraine, the biggest challenge for the European Union

The European Union has experience in integrating countries from the socialist orbit and even former Soviet countries, such as the Baltic countries.. But it has no choice in doing so with a country that is suffering the worst armed invasion since the Second World War, with devastating missile and drone attacks every night and part of its territory in the hands of an enemy that swears and perjures that it is fighting a war.” existential”, although in reality it is only existential for the members of that regime.

Ukraine today represents the greatest challenge for the EU, more than disconnecting the United Kingdom, more than integrating the Eastern countries. Brussels combines a good dose of faith and much more relaxed conditions than those its last members had. Everyone knows that the first objective is to win the war and that can delay some issues that, over time, can be worked on calmly.. Right now Europe cannot turn its back on Ukraine, possibly the country whose population is most eager to join the European project, and which suffers Moscow's wrath precisely for this.

One of the issues that the EU is most concerned about is the fight against corruption.. Ukraine, like all the countries of the USSR, maintains a system with a certain level of corruption inherited from the old socialist order. It is in all social orders, but it is very tangible in the political world. kyiv has already taken significant steps in the fight against these practices, even in the middle of the war, such as ousting its former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov for a massive purchase of winter clothing for the army in which a commission agent earned a good premium.. But the problem is not so much the individual actions but the system that allows them and the few counterweights that monitor it.. In Ukraine the health system is public, but a doctor will not see you if you do not give him a bite.

However, the will of Brussels coincides 100% with that of the vast majority of Ukrainians and the process is unstoppable.. “There is no way to understand why one country can invade another with strange, vague excuses that there are Nazis. That's nonsense. And that puts the European security architecture at risk and therefore, people have understood that helping Ukraine is a just war and it is what we have to do also from an ethical point of view,” says socialist MEP Nacho Sánchez Amor.

Russia has become Europe's greatest enemy and this is what neighboring countries have understood, who already know from experience its imperial ideology and its militaristic tendency.. Moscow has financed ultra parties and secessionist movements where it could destabilize the EU, including Puigdemont's sovereigntist project, Le Pen's party or Brexit supporters themselves, such as Nigel Farage.. With its gray zone strategy, it has invested mountains of money in state propaganda and has persecuted opponents, even with murder, in several European countries.. The Russian pilot who took refuge in Spain and was shot dead in Alicante is the latest in a long list.

“The weakness of the Russian arguments and the solidity of the Ukrainian ones allow us to think that although there are problems to be solved, although the war is of course creating problems in some economic sectors in Europe, although there are others derived from the shortage, for example, of grain , people understand that military aid to Ukraine is fair, it is ethical because you have to help those who have been attacked,” says Sánchez Amor, who also refers to Russian propaganda: “Russian propaganda tries to polarize Europe by presenting the European Union as a thing that is always on the verge of self-destruction. If it was for Brexit, for Brexit. If it was because of the pandemic, because of the pandemic. According to them, the European Union is about to collapse but it has been collapsing for 25 years and here we continue giving vaccines and providing weapons.”

Ukraine applied for accession to the EU in February 2022, that is, in the midst of Russian escalation, and was granted the status of EU candidate country in June 2022.. In December 2023, EU leaders decided to start accession negotiations.

When we talk about integrating Ukraine we are talking about integrating at least three different countries: the first of them is born in the center of kyiv, Lviv or Dnipro and dies a few kilometers from its municipal limits.. These are those cities of skyscrapers, elegant tsarist buildings and beehive neighborhoods with ugly buildings in the style of the Warsaw Pact, where there are Crossfit gyms, sex shops and house music clubs attended by thousands of teenagers.

These cities, with very little crime and rattling nineteenth-century trams, are not part of the European Union but are full of EU flags in their schools, official buildings and sports halls. The Euromaidan of 10 years ago broke with Russian influence and changed everything. Even the traditional drink of the Soviet world, tea, has been replaced by a very Western addiction to coffee.

Sometimes we are not aware, in Western Europe, of the extent to which this political battle to integrate Ukraine is also vital.. Members of the Friends of Europe organization define the EU accession process in these terms: “Ukraine is crucial for the enlargement processes. If Russia prevails there and the EU proves incapable of defending it, the credibility of the EU will suffer an almost mortal blow.”. And they make the following criticism of this process: “It is not easy for countries that have suffered totalitarian regimes and a centrally planned economy to adopt the EU acquis, made up of thousands of rules and regulations.. “The EU must better supervise and help the candidates more.”

Nacho Sánchez Amor believes that “if Putin wins this war, we would be almost guaranteed that there would be another one in the near future with another aggression against another country. That is, it already happened in Georgia, it already happened in Crimea, we cannot let it happen again, because that will be an invitation to Putin and other autocrats to say, 'well, in the world in which we have managed to create dictatorships, these things have already happened. “They can't stop them.”

The second country contained within Ukraine, although in fact it may be the first in importance, is the rural world, that of the brick jatas (country house) and colored windows with a fireplace and a small garden in the front.. If the American dream exists in the capitalist world, those small properties surrounded by a wooden fence represent the Soviet dream. In this world of rural Ukraine, the most driven car is the Lada, a true unbreakable tank.

Most of its inhabitants are born in a place and are buried in the cemetery 100 meters from that same place after having lived tied to the land.. Most only allow themselves a weekly walk to the gold-domed Orthodox church that stands out in every village.. Even the field is organized and labeled under the old criteria of Soviet communal farms or kolkhoz.. In that flat horizon of sunflowers and cereals, the vatniks live. The vatnik is the traditional Soviet coat and is used to pejoratively refer to those nostalgic for the USSR.

In the countryside, the pro-Soviet or Soviet-nostalgic feeling in older people is more tangible.. That universe of babushas (grandmothers) with headscarves, monuments to the heroes of the Second World War and gardens with flowers is in the fields of Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Chernigiv, and Donbas.. Integrating this Ukrainian rural world represents another major challenge, especially considering the agricultural quota models of the European Union.

Regarding this, the MEP believes that “all entries into the European Union by any country generate tensions in one sector or another.”. We Spaniards remember how Spain's entry into the EU was not easy, precisely because our interests or our agricultural sector was viewed with suspicion by others, such as the French.. But those are things that fit. That seemed like a world. And then we have arrived at a system of production, distribution, sale and export of agricultural products that works reasonably well.”

The third country within Ukraine is a line with more than 800 kilometers of front and the places through which that same line has previously passed, that is, the liberated territories. They are semi-abandoned and destroyed villages and cities, where there are no public services left and where demining and reconstruction will take years. Only a Marshall Plan could make this enormous scar habitable. “When we say that there will be reconstruction, it is not reconstruction after the war, it is reconstruction now. That money, the 50 billion from the Ukranian Facility plan, will be ready to be executed in the coming months,” concludes MEP Sánchez Amor.