Dr. Rabinovych, from 28 April to 1 May 2025, you had the opportunity to visit the EUI through the CIVICA Call for Ukrainian Scholar Short Visits. Could you tell us about what motivated you to visit our institution and the specific project you are following?
I have been working with European integration for almost a decade. My first steps in this field were connected to the time when the Ukraine–EU Association Agreement was about to be signed. But then the whole process stopped because of former President Yanukovych and his refusal to sign the agreement. He tried to use all possible means to pull Ukraine out of the negotiations, which marked a period of significant turmoil for the country. At the same time, we were deciding, as students, which direction our studies would take – and European integration was something I felt could be truly important.
After that, I wanted to pursue a PhD at the EUI. Although I wasn’t successful in gaining admission, I later followed a different path and met many colleagues with whom I shared the EU Enlargement Hub project – including Veronica Anghel, Assistant Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre. This project involved the Kyiv School of Economics and several other initiatives with EUI colleagues. I met many of them at international conferences on the EU and therefore, I found the opportunity to visit the EUI via the CIVICA call very relevant for exploring further collaboration opportunities with Kyiv School of Economics.
Moreover, with EU enlargement high on the agenda and Ukraine’s growing need for expertise, capacity-building, and insights from the EU, the EUI represents a kind of ‘Mecca’ for EU studies – a place where one can not only find inspiration for their work but also build meaningful professional connections and opportunities for further collaboration.
At the moment, you’re working on the research project ‘REDEMOS’. Could you please explain what the project is about? In which ways does it aim to contribute to EU policy innovation through its proposed inclusive strategies for fostering democratic resilience in Eastern Europe?
REDEMOS is a Horizon Europe project with partners across various countries, including the main partner, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), along with institutions in St. Gallen, Dresden, in the UK, and in Eastern Partnership countries like Moldova and Georgia. The project aims to assess EU democracy support in the Eastern Neighbourhood from 2005 – the year following the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy – until around 2022.
We aim to help the EU learn from this experience and analyse why Eastern Partnership countries have ended up on such different trajectories. While Ukraine and Moldova are now closest to the EU, Armenia and Georgia remain somewhat in limbo, fluctuating between the EU and Russia depending on the political situation and leadership. Belarus also officially ‘walked out’ from the Eastern Partnership in 2021. If we compare this to 2004–2005 or even 2009, when the Eastern Partnership was launched, most countries were more or less on the same page. Now they’ve diverged significantly, and we want to understand why: What has the EU done to shape this, which opportunities were used effectively, what challenges emerged, and what lessons can the EU draw for future engagement with its Eastern neighbours?
At the Kyiv School of Economics, we are responsible for two work packages. The one I am most involved in deals with EU democracy funding. We’ve compiled data from 2005 to 2022 – including EU funds, Member State contributions, USAID (which was the largest bilateral donor before Trump), and support from international organisations. This resulted in a database of around 1,500 entries.
This quantitative data helps us analyse the types of projects funded, where the EU placed its priorities, and which areas were neglected. For example, in a recent policy brief, we pointed out that the EU has mainly supported the electoral component of democracy during election periods, but not in the intervals between them. There have been long gaps without engagement with electoral institutions or with checks and balances – especially those related to informal influence on politics and elections.
This is understandable to some extent, as elections are closely tied to national sovereignty. But at the same time, if no one supports the core of democracy – elections themselves –then external actors are only working around the issue.
We also pay attention to reporting practices. The way data is presented varies significantly between the EU, Member States, the US, and international organisations, which makes it hard to analyse and compare. This inconsistency affects decision-making and makes it difficult to track what has actually been funded. There are also many small, short-term projects – some lasting just six months – which raises questions about their sustainability and whether it makes sense to fund stakeholders briefly and then not return to them.
The second work package we’re involved in takes a different angle, which reflects REDEMOS’s broader ambition to approach democracy promotion from multiple perspectives. This package looks at the discourses around EU democracy support in the Eastern Neighbourhood. At the Kyiv School of Economics, we’re working on a comparative paper on Ukraine, Armenia, and Belarus, focusing on how much local stakeholders – including NGOs, civic movements, and volunteers – align in their understanding of democracy with that of the EU.
Ukraine represents a country moving closer to the EU, Armenia is in a limbo, and Belarus is an authoritarian case. However, even in Belarus, many NGOs in exile continue to receive EU support, and there is hope that this work will become useful in the political transition in Belarus after Lukashenko.
One of your research topics is based on local governance in the Arctic, and the way it has been influenced by Russia's war against Ukraine. What key questions are you exploring?
I have been working on a project on Ukrainian municipalities after the full-scale invasion, and it has been interesting for us to see why some municipalities adapted to the challenges quite successfully, while others experienced serious challenges.
Of course, there have been many objective factors related to the war that influenced the situation – for instance, municipalities near Lviv or Uzhhorod in the west may have had it easier compared to those on the frontlines. At the same time, we also found the influence of institutional factors – leadership, innovation, and the previous experience of municipal leaders played a big role. That’s why I also looked into the roots of this, particularly the decentralisation reform in Ukraine, which started in 2014. It aimed to increase the capacity of local municipalities by merging them into larger units and providing them with support in terms of finance and capacity building. It included fiscal decentralisation and, to some extent, political decentralisation, although the political part was never really completed. The results of that very first wartime study are presented in this article for Governance.
This is a bit of a separate story, but what I wanted to explore was whether there are experiences from other countries that are also interesting in terms of how municipalities deal with big challenges. One case I found particularly interesting was the Arctic – a geopolitically important region since the Cold War and even before. Nowadays, even though it’s a cold region, it’s very ‘hot’ in terms of geopolitical competition. Russia, China, the US – all of them are interested in its resources and the new trade routes emerging because of climate change.
On the one hand, there are these big geopolitical issues. On the other hand, municipalities in the Arctic deal with very local problems – they’re often small, far apart, with poor infrastructure and long distances between them. In terms of preparedness – whether for hybrid threats or kinetic attacks – it’s really challenging when municipalities aren’t well connected, especially in terms of transport and infrastructure. They carry a lot of responsibility as the main governance units, and I wanted to see how this amalgamation of local and geopolitical challenges plays out for them.
My key question has also been linked to the war. Since the war in Ukraine has had big geopolitical consequences for the region, I wanted to know how local stakeholders make sense of that, how they deal with it, how they react. The concept of sense-making here involves two main questions: What is the story and what now? These were the questions we asked respondents. In many cases, their answers went back to stories of previous cooperation with Russia – cooperation that continued even after the war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas. That hadn’t changed much, because stakeholders at the local level often made a clear distinction between the Kremlin and their local counterparts in Russia’s north, who weren’t seen as directly connected to Moscow.
But the full-scale invasion changed that. It made many realise that some of their counterparts actually supported the war – like the case of a Russian mayor driving with a pro-war sign on his car, which led the mayor of Kirkenes in Norway to end their friendship agreement. After years of cooperation, there were many formal ties, many funding programmes, and the war forced local actors to rethink all of this – to find new partners, and to look seriously at how they can improve their preparedness. So, in many cases, Russia shifted in perception from a partner to a threat – a 180-degree turn, which is very interesting to study, especially if you can do it empirically.
How did the EUI’s research environment complement your work? Were there any particular perspectives that stood out during your visit?
In terms of my visit, I was looking forward to presenting a draft of a paper on the EU’s approach to the challenges in the High North and in the East. I approached the topic by examining how the EU has changed its TEN-T (Trans-European Transport Network) planning and implementation, focusing on these two strategic frontiers. My aim was to gather feedback from colleagues on both the use of the ‘frontier’ concept and the comparative design of the paper.
One of my colleagues at the EUI, Max Weber Fellow Alexander Mesarovich, raised a thought-provoking question: Should the EU treat its entire border with Russia as one long, unified frontier, or should it instead view these as distinct frontiers that require separate strategies?
This question made me reconsider my approach. While I still want to focus on the regional differences and specific frontiers, I now realise the importance of also highlighting the common logic in the EU’s thinking, particularly the shared perception of threat. This is something I plan to emphasise more in the revised version of the paper.
What role do initiatives like CIVICA for Ukraine and the CIVICA Ukrainian Scholar Short Visits play in fostering cross-institutional collaboration?
This initiative is very valuable, especially for Ukrainian state universities, which have limited travel support, and academics often struggle to find opportunities like this.
With CIVICA, it would be beneficial to have more pathways for institutionalised cooperation, including with Ukraine. Currently, many opportunities are limited to CIVICA universities, which is great, but once visits are made, there should be opportunities for continued collaboration. Institutions also need to build their own capacity – EU funding alone isn’t enough.
Administrative personnel are also often overlooked, but without them, research is much harder to carry out. In Ukraine, administrative challenges are even more pressing due to staff shortages or low salaries. For these institutions, finding inspiration and support is crucial, and mixed positions combining research and administration could offer a good solution for those looking to balance both aspects effectively.
Maryna Rabinovych is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Kyiv School of Economics. She also currently does postdoctoral research at the UiT: the Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests encompass international and EU development policy with a focus on political development and fundamental values, international and EU trade policy, EU external relations and their legal regulation, as well as the actual issues pertaining to Ukrainian politics and law.
The CIVICA for Ukraine project aims to develop and strengthen cooperation and dialogue between the CIVICA alliance and the academic communities of selected Ukrainian universities, particularly in the social sciences, humanities, management, and public policy. The project includes a variety of activities for students, doctoral candidates, faculty and staff exchanges from Ukrainian universities, such as conferences, study visits, internships, summer schools, seminars, workshops, and more.