Conference Paper

The establishment of the European Union as a zone of stability and prosperity in Europe is confronted today with new security challenges. For the first time since the break‐up of Yugoslavia and the wars of Yugoslav Transition in the first half of the 1990s, the EU finds itself with an unpredictable neighbour on its borders, which has resorted to the use of military force and continues to influence the territorial integrity of a sovereign state. The issue was over the trans‐border Russian population found in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which at the time of writing raises the question: are trans‐border populations to be interpreted as ethnic conflicts waiting to happen? This chapter will briefly investigate the historical background of the Ukrainian crisis, before focussing on the potential impact of these events on European security in general and the security of the European Union in particular. Not only are there differences in approach towards the implementation of sanctions, between the EU and the US, there are also different attitudes to the Ukrainian conundrum held by different member states of the EU. So, does the EU really have the appetite for imposing sanctions given the background of the recent financial crisis and the potential for a devastating tit‐for‐tat trade war? As members of the OSCE monitoring team have been 4 hostage and western journalists have been arrested on suspicion of spying, this raises a further question: is Europe lurching out of an economic crisis into a new Cold War, which some NATO leaders have already designated as Cold War II? Ultimately, what are the wider implications of the Ukrainian crisis on European security?