From accommodation to confrontation: European Union’s approach to Russian aggression from 1994 to 2024 – developmentalism perspective

Abstract

f, as Vaclav Havel observed in 2008, Russia’s status anxiety and blurred sense of borders fuel its force projection, why did the European Union keep speaking the language of partnership, reform, and shared progress in the face of repeated force projections—and what finally broke that inertia? This study proposes that the answer lies in the EU's adoption of what can be termed developmentalist worldview — a vision in which Russia was seen as a state in transition, capable of transformation and integration into a shared European future. In this sense, the following paper traces how the European Union’s institutional discourse evolved in response to Russian aggression between 1994 and 2024, and how that evolution reflected, reinforced, or disrupted a developmentalist worldview. To this end, it introduces the Developmentalism-Aggression Response Index (DARI), a novel interpretive and qualitative framework that assesses the EU's discursive responses to Russian aggression across five key episodes between 1994 and 2024 (Chechnya I; Chechnya II; Georgia 2008; Crimea/Donbas 2014; 2022–2024) and in-between “peace periods”. In particular, the DARI breaks this transformation into five analytically distinct dimensions and 11 sub-indicators. Each dimension captures a different layer of the EU’s discourse: how it frames aggression, what goals it pursues, the tone it adopts, the instruments it deploys, and the worldview that underpins its decisions. As a result, the DARI enables a multilayered, historically grounded, and theory-informed analysis of change over time. Read through DARI, the five dimensions do not tell five stories. They resolve into one. Framing hardened faster than objectives because legal labels were the least costly way to acknowledge reality. Tone swung because it had to carry the burden of unity while instruments lagged. Objectives clung to conditional engagement well into the sanctions period because conditionality outsourced the hardest admission: that the horizon of renewed partnership had collapsed. What finally moved all four together was collapse of developmentalism. Developmentalism collapsed under a coevolutionary dynamic: EU signals of openness elicited countermoves that normalised accommodation and turned engagement into a tool. The full-scale invasion in 2022 exposed the limits of this logic and forced a securitised response. The forecoming analysis makes three main contributions: First, it explains the variation over time of the attitudes with which the European Union has approached Russia from accommodation to confrontation. Second, a reinterpretation through developmentalism that reveals both the strengths and blind spots of an approach grounded in liberal teleologies. Third, a methodological innovation—DARI—that connects words to tools and makes change over time comparable. Ultimately, this is research about the slow erosion of perceptions. It is about how discourse constructs worldviews, and how the EU, for too long, built one around a partner that was never coming or was never there in the first place.