2023 annual report: One year of fighting. Lessons for the EU from Ukraine’s resilience and the energy sector

Ukraine’s resilience and the renewed sense of purpose in the liberal West

With a winter milder than usual and almost over, a new sense of unity and confidence is visible these days in what Putin and his propagandists call “the collective West”. There is a relative stabilization on the energy markets after a very turbulent 2022, while the Ukrainians continue to fight heroically against the Russian aggression, marking one year of resistance this week to what was supposed to be – for Kremlin – a three day victorious campaign. On the broader scale, the liberal world seems to have found its pace and direction, setting itself for the long run on a new trend of re-globalization: cooperation and interdependence, not national autarchy, but with an increased emphasis on political values (democracy and human rights) and the security dimension (friend-shoring).

Energy: what did we learn in the EU from the past year of war?

Russia’s full scale invasion in Ukraine put under the spotlight the interdependencies between the global security and energy, as well as the extent to which the Kremlin has become a threat not just to its immediate neighborhood, but to the entire West. As the past year’s experience shows, the collective West is weak when disunited, fearful and hesitant – but invincible when principled and coherent.

The report and event benefited from the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, Romania, and Republic of Moldova (FNF) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)