It would actually be an incredibly huge boon for the EU to get Ukraine as a member. It would benefit the EU in unique ways while the challenges Ukraine faces are hardly unique within the EU.
It would benefit both Germany’s agenda of making the EU’s center move a bit east, and France’s desire to gain more geopolitical independence. Ukrainian gas would decrease reliance on US and Russian gas even in the short term as pipelines are by and large built already.
There’s the catch though, I think the US’ interest in a separate UA from the EU, with both depending on the US for either rebuilding or gas and other raw materials. While we are fighting the war against Russia, we will probably be fighting the peace against the US, and I hope Ukraine will prevail together with the EU.
fighting the peace against the US
What’d you mean by this? It left a lot to the imagination.
Believe it or not the EU and US are actually geopolitical rivals with rather different visions of how things should look in the future… that just happen to align closer with each other than with that of China or Russia.
Also, the US is fickle at best. Make a deal one president renege on it for no good reason the other and always emphasise domestic electoral politics over sane policy, domestic or foreign. E.g. how the fuck are a handful (in the grand scheme of things) exiles from the Batista regime able to keep the Cuba blockade going.
US citizen perspective:
Yeah it’s an alliance of convenience without a doubt, and the US is so variable in it’s reliability that it’s not wise to put any structural or long term relience on us. It’s not a good situation honestly.
IMO the only solution long term is an American Union (Canada, US, Mexico, probably more) that is structured similarly to the EU, not weak NAFTA shit. This has many problems and obstacles obviously: this would make the AU a much larger economic force than the EU, which makes trade deals and negotiation hard. It also requires the US to give up and spread out it’s influence to neighbor nations, which is pretty unlikely lol.
But I think if we want to be proactive about both demographic changes (ballooning populations in the indo-asia region as they rise in economic power) ahead of a seemingly likely New Cold War (at least in the structural ‘democracy vs autocracy’ sense), this needs to be the structure we work towards.
As a Canadian, I’d like to not be dragged into this. 😅 If a North American union is to be established, as a function of the economic gravity, US regulations will be adopted throughout and that will be pretty terrible for us. From corporate lobbying which is currently illegal in Canada, to the use of antibiotics in chicken. Last time I checked, a couple of years ago, the majority of Canadians, over 60%, had an unfavorable view of the United States. We can’t fix the systemic problems in the US. Those problems are just going to spread to us if we joined a union.
I think before an AU like you’re suggesting could work, the US would need to get its house in order. Just from a Canadian perspective, the States already have a strong influence on us culturally/socially and economically. Tying ourselves even more closely to the US while one of the major parties is actively flirting with fascism is (I hope) pretty well out of the question.
I think Ukraine needs to win two wars in oder to be able to join the EU. One against Russia and one against corruption. They can’t afford to loose either.
Winning by 1/4 of their country still being in enemy hands and every counterattack failing?
Russia has been conducting this war for over a year, and they’ve still only managed to capture “1/4” of the country. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a much smaller neighbor that’s right on their border. Russia’s ineptitude is pathetic.
“Every counterattack failing”? Thousands of Russian soldiers would disagree… if they weren’t too dead to talk.
Yep, and what more is that Russians had a year to dig in with anti-tank defenses, but once those are gone or penetrated, then Russian are very well and truly screwed. They’re not well trained, they lacked resources, they are running on old technologies, and there are 3 or more warlords having contentions with each others. Soldiers that could have racked up experience in the fighting wouldn’t be given the choice to fight another day, because of the barrier troop that would shoot them if they retreat.
I think once the defensive lines are gone, we’ll see something similar to a Thunder Run by America during the battle of Iraq.
Funny to think one day supporters of 2nd best army of the world is so proud that they are not losing “yet” for a 3 days “operation” that lasted one and a half year.
