Johansson-Nogués, ElisabethLeso, Francesca2024-09-022024-09-022025Johansson-Nogués E Leso F. Geopolitical EU? The EU's wartime assistance to Ukraine. J Common Mark Stud. 2025 Jan;63(1):127-42. DOI: 10.1111/jcms.136130021-9886http://hdl.handle.net/10230/60978This article explores the European Union's (EU's) assistance to Ukraine through the lens of critical geopolitics with a view to ascertaining whether the EU has become more geopolitical in its thinking and actions towards Eastern Europe. Our findings point to a mixed picture. Whilst the EU ‘mindscape’ appears to have shifted in relation to Eastern Europe, Ukraine and itself as an actor in the region, it is less apparent that the EU's foreign and security policy action has become geopoliticised. The 2022 Russian invasion has certainly seen a step change from the hesitant and self-conscious approach that characterised the EU's engagement with Eastern Europe prior to 2022. However, declarations such as that by the High Representative and Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP) around the ‘birth of geopolitical Europe’ appear to be somewhat premature, as there is limited evidence at this stage that the EU is willing to provide leadership on the geospatial (re)ordering of the region.application/pdfeng© 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/articleAssistanceEUGeopoliticalMindscape and geospatial orderingUkraineWarinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess