The Ukraine-EU summit, which took place on July 12th, brought Ukrainians back to a reality that they did not want to admit. EU leaders refused to include the words from the preamble of the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement that “the European Union acknowledges the European aspirations of Ukraine and welcomes its European choice” in the joint statement, which is why it was not adopted at all. According to the DW source, the Netherlands firmly opposed such wording, while being indirectly supported by Germany and France.

For the six countries of the Eastern Partnership, or EaP, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union meant that independence was as much an urgent crisis as it was an overnight opportunity.  Burdened by the seven decades of Soviet rule, the challenges of independence proved daunting as each of these states was unprepared for statehood and under-equipped for democratic governance. Although the starting point of independent statehood was roughly equivalent, their shared Soviet legacy was quickly replaced by a diverging trajectory with a pronounced variance in their political, economic and security reforms. Of these six states, four were constrained by a conflict from the very start, as Armenia and Azerbaijan were consumed by Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia was collapsing under the weight of a civil war and separatism, while Moldova was confronting the Transnistrian conflict. For the other two states, despite the absence of outright conflict in the early period of statehood, both Belarus and Ukraine were constrained by corrupt and authoritarian regimes.