THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

Lessons learned from the war in Ukraine 81 be what is adopted now in all likelihood. Ukraine was not pressured to comply with the Minsk II agreements that would have led to a federal state that Moscow would have had to accept, but military support was reinforced making Kiev believe that it could recover all its territory. Nor were security guarantees given to Ukraine to endorse this attitude or while its entry into the Atlantic Alliance was in progress. In short, on the one hand Russia was being told that Ukraine would align with the West, be- cause that was its right, and that it would be even more hostile to its Russian neighbour, but at the same time, it was stating that NATO/the West would not come to its defence. It was practically an invitation. The Kremlin responded to these strategic errors with an even larger one. With interventions in favour of the Russian or Russian-speaking minorities, in Transnistria, Abjasia, South Ossetia and finally, in 2014, in the Donbas and Crimea, including annexing the latter territory, the Russian regime already hinted that it was feeling strong enough again to forego an unlikely pan-European security architecture, and it proposed a unilateral, illegal and inter- ventionist policy in its immediate surroundings, without concern for the consequences, which were not particularly severe at that time. By attacking Ukraine, it has crossed all the red lines and it has come up against a solid, uni- fied reaction, not without certain difficulties, from NATO, the EU and allied countries, that is going to hit Russia’s economy hard, and sentence it to isolation for decades, unless there is a radical change of regime in Moscow that does not look very likely. NATO was weakened by Donald Trump’s presidency and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has been revitalised to once again become the undeniable benchmark in European security, to the point that it is highly likely to welcome two countries that have remained neutral so far: Sweden and Finland. If there was any chance that Ukraine might take an amicable position concerning Russia in the future, this intervention has destroyed it, strengthening the country’s pro-European identity to the detriment of the segment of the population closest to Russia. This might have conse- quences in other countries close by. The EU was their main business partner, both for ex- ports and imports and it will no longer be so. All bridges have been burned and it will be enormously difficult to re- build them.The possibility of pacific economic cooperation that offered so many advantages to both sides has gone up in smoke, without the political or territorial gains ob- jectively representing minimum compensation for damage to Russia’s economy and its international position that it is suffering and going to suffer in the next few years.As much as Ukraine was very important, as much as its leaders thought it was a good idea to recover the military power role, everything points to that fact that Moscow - perhaps considering the precedents - did not properly evaluate the intensity and the scope of the Western reaction. Russia’s second mistake was not defining its stra- tegic goals properly in this intervention. Was this about the neutrality and the demilitarisation of Ukraine and containing NATO as Putin mentioned in his letters from December 2021? Or about defending pro-Russians in the Donbas against attacks from Kiev? Or about using any legal statute it could to grab a substantial part of Ukrainian territory? Or about dominating all of Ukraine and imposing an allied regime that would breaks its ties with the West? Russian military operations in Ukraine might fit with almost any of these goals, perhaps with the exception of the last one for which greater manpower would have been required. However, it seems, at least so far, that the ultimate goal is not guiding operations, but is subject to their result, which is always a bad strategic plan as it is impossible to plan the use of resources and set realistic intermediate goals. As the Hispanic-Roman philosopher Seneca said, there is no favourable wind for the sailor who does not know where to go. In turn, the EU can learn many lessons from this war. The first, that it cannot trust - as Germany has done regarding gas - a country whose regime is not trans- parent or democratic, even if it claims to hold elections, because its reactions can be unpredictable. The second, that forming strong commercial and economic ties with this type of country is not a sufficient guarantee as it has clearly chosen to sacrifice its economy in favour of