EU Learns Lessons a Year after Start of Ukraine Crisis

When Ukraine pulled out of its association agreement with the European Union a year ago, kicking off its revolution, it took Brussels by surprise.

Twelve months later the EU is still learning bitter lessons about geopolitics and Russian aggression, experts say.

"We walked into a fight almost without realizing it," Vivien Pertusot, an expert at the IFRI think-tank in Brussels, told AFP.

"Even the experts, the universities that follow this closely were surprised."

The Ukraine-EU association agreement was supposed to be the culmination of long efforts to bring Kiev back in from the cold, only for pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to pull the plug on November 21, 2013 in favor of closer ties with Moscow.

There then came weeks of protests, the flight of Yanukovych after dozens of protesters were massacred in February, and the annexation of Crimea by Russia the following March, while Brussels stood by largely helpless.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine between pro-Kremlin rebels and government forces then began in April and has since claimed more than 4,300 lives, including nearly 300 on a Malaysian Airlines plane shot down over the region.

"Nobody had predicted this chain reaction, maybe not even Russia," said Giselle Bosse of Maastricht University of in the Netherlands.

The EU has since had to face searching questions.

Most crucially, did it sow the seeds of the conflict with its push eastwards over the past decade into the former Soviet and Warsaw pact states that used to be Russia's backyard, especially when Moscow is trying to reassert itself?

"The (European) Commission did not realize the geopolitical implications opened up by the association agreement that it was negotiating" with Ukraine, said Pertusot, adding that the country of 45 million people should instead have been an example of the benefits of EU "soft power."

While European officials and experts were concentrating on the technical details, Poland and the Baltic states were thinking more politically, trying to "set down an irreversible barrier" with Russia and stop it having free rein in the region.

"The EU might have triggered something it didn't mean to," she said.

Meanwhile Vladimir Putin's Russia, seeking to restore its international clout two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, saw Brussels' behavior as part of a broader Western conspiracy, experts said.

"The EU became increasingly coupled with NATO in Russia's perception. When the Eastern Partnership's offer materialized... Russia adopted an overtly confrontational position vis-à-vis the EU", Laure Delcour and Hrant Kostanyan said in a paper for the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS).

Russia has long felt threatened by the "Eastern Partnership" that the EU launched five years ago with Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus.

The first three finally signed the association and free trade deal in June, marking a leap forward in relations with Brussels, even if it is not planning to integrate them any further for now, and winning hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in funding.

Russia meanwhile has tried to create its own club, setting up a customs union and Eurasian economic union bringing together Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, which enters into force on January 1, 2015.

Moscow's war with Georgia in 2008 and a gas war with Ukraine at the start of 2009 also showed Moscow could take more aggressive action.

But the Eastern Partnership does not bear all the blame for Russia's involvement in Ukraine since March, experts say.

"The Russian reaction has much more to do with Nato and Russia's security interests than with the EU as such," said Bosse.

Russia's main concern in Ukraine was to secure its strategic naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, she said.

"It was predictable that if Russia feels insecure enough it would seek to extend it's security zone, like any other great power does."

In future the EU had to realize that Moscow sees a Western military threat behind everything it does, something that Brussels seems not to have factored in in the past.

"The EU should not forget that the shadow behind us is NATO -- you have to be aware you have this shadow," she added.