Europe, not NATO, is what appeals to Ukraine

“The day the Ukrainian government decided to stop the agreement with the EU, I almost cried in disbelief,” said Anastasiia, a young protester in Independence Square in central Kyiv, in November 2013.

Her sentiments were echoed by thousands across Ukraine who risked their lives in a protest known as the Euromaidan. It began after the government of corrupt and unpopular President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an accord with the EU for closer ties with Russia. The ripple effect swelled to a tsunami as security forces fired on the protesters, killing more than 100, and ending with Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, and the crumbling of his government.

Enraged, President Vladimir Putin took swift revenge. He launched an attack on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, annexed it illegally, and announced a massive bridge building project to connect it with Russia.

This is the recent history that some in the West have forgotten, awash in Putin’s propaganda that his “special military operation” was the inevitable result of NATO aggression and its determination to dominate and weaken Russia. They believe that conceding that Ukraine will never join NATO, and that the military alliance will admit no new members, will bring about an end to Putin’s aggression and illegal dismemberment of Ukraine.

In fact, it was the benefits of joining Europe, and not NATO membership, which motivated the protests, the backlash and the war that is devastating Ukraine today. And Putin’s rage was directed at the EU, which the majority of young Ukrainians saw as their future.

The second-largest country in Europe, Ukraine has substantial agricultural, mineral and energy resources as well as a manufacturing base. But its standard of living was low, corruption was rampant and the new generation looked to an EU Association Agreement for freer trade and travel, job opportunities, the rule of law, and eventual inclusion in the largest economy in the world.

By contrast, Russia offered membership in its Eurasian Economic Union, joining a handful of former Soviet states, whose combined GDP was a fraction of the EU’s. For Ukrainians with their sights set on Europe — and their right to choose their future — it was no contest. For Putin, a European Ukraine did not threaten a western military invasion, but a declaration of democracy in a country bordering his increasingly authoritarian regime: a country he insists that Russia rightfully owns.

“In a very clear pattern, Moscow’s complaints about NATO spike after democratic breakthroughs” (in countries it formerly dominated), say Russia experts Michael McFaul and Robert Person. “There should be no illusions about Putin’s long-term strategic goal of stopping democratic expansion, in Ukraine and the rest of the region.”

Putin’s insistence that a brutal invasion of a sovereign country is an existential war against a rapacious military alliance has become a propaganda pillar that supports his war within Russia. And it has found some traction among westerners looking for an exit from a costly, increasingly risky, and seemingly open-ended conflict.

But in more than 10 months of relentless destruction, war crimes and unremitting terror, Putin is no closer to winning than in the first chaotic weeks of the invasion, despite his portrayal of the war as a life-ordeath battle against western hegemony. Russians may succumb — or give in — to his lies. But for Ukrainians, the lights of Europe remain a beacon above the darkness cast by one murderous despot in Moscow.