KCL Politics Society

There are two gaps in Russia-EU relations at the moment. On the one hand, there is a growing political and economic gap due to Russia’s intervention into pro-European Ukraine and the EU’s subsequent sanctions on Russia. On the other hand, there is a shrinking territorial gap with the outbreak of the civil war in Ukraine backed up by Russia, not to mention the annexation of Crimea. The key problem and the solution to the current decline in the relations between the two is the gap itself: Ukraine.

Overall, the European Union does not seem to have been particularly well-equipped to cope with the financial crisis, nor does it seem as yet to have the political will and capacity to truly move forward in the necessary process of political and fiscal integration¹.The crisis of the sovereign debt in the periphery of the eurozone seems to have been the consequence of the combined effect of the global financial crisis and the structural asymmetries that had affected the EMU from its establishment…