Europe Looks Away From Troubling Signs in Ukraine
The Continent’s leaders, seeking a buffer against Russia, ignore perils to democracy in Kyiv.
April 5, 2026
The Wall Street Journal
Europe’s policy toward Ukraine is becoming more candid in private even as it grows more guarded in public.
Publicly, European leaders describe their support for Ukraine in moral and ideological terms, pitting democracy against authoritarianism, sovereignty against imperial conquest, and the rule of law against brute force. True, Russia’s invasion is an act of aggression, and Ukraine has every right to defend itself. But that isn’t the whole story.
In some of my closed-door conversations with Europeans, a harder logic is increasingly dominant: Their support for Ukraine is no longer primarily about solidarity with a fellow democracy. It’s about buying time for themselves.
That logic is understandable. Europe fears that if Russia emerges from the war less constrained, more confident and no longer tied down militarily, the threat to the rest of Europe will increase. Reuters captured this last year when it reported that most European Union countries believe that as long as Russia remains militarily engaged in Ukraine, it is less likely to attack an EU member. In other words, Europe sees Ukraine not only as a nation to be saved but as a buffer to be maintained.
The problem isn’t that Europe has interests; every serious foreign policy begins with interests. The problem is that Europe refuses to be forthright about the nature of its own strategy. Europe wants the strategic benefits of using Ukraine as a shield while continuing to speak as though it is engaged chiefly in a noble democratic mission.
That deception is becoming dangerous. It encourages European governments to judge Ukraine by its willingness and ability to keep fighting to the exclusion of any criticism of the quality of the Ukrainian state. So long as the front holds, almost everything else becomes easier to rationalize: coercive mobilization, executive overreach, suspended accountability, corruption that remains endemic, incompetence and political dysfunction in Kyiv. The moral narrative remains intact, and the harder questions are deferred.
Defensive wars don’t merely protect states, they also deform them. Ukraine is showing signs of that strain, with the growing standoff between the presidency and Parliament, the difficulty of converting presidential will into legislation, and the fiscal fragility exposed by Ukraine’s reliance on external financing. An International Monetary Fund mission was in Kyiv in March as lawmakers struggled to pass unpopular tax measures tied to a new IMF program, and Ukrainian officials warned that missed commitments could jeopardize billions in external support. This is evidence of institutional stress in a state fighting for survival.
Europe should be more concerned about this. A country can survive militarily while decaying politically. That is one of the classic dangers of long wars of attrition. They tend to centralize power, normalize coercion, and create powerful incentives to postpone scrutiny in the name of necessity. The issue doesn’t disappear simply because Western politicians find it inconvenient to acknowledge.
This is important because Ukraine’s trajectory is unfolding in a world where democracy is already under pressure. The 2026 democracy report from V-Dem, a think tank based in Sweden, says a “third wave of autocratization” is deepening and that the average person’s level of democracy worldwide has fallen to roughly 1978 levels. Freedom House reported a 20th consecutive year of global decline in freedom. In such an environment, it is especially reckless to assume that war, no matter how justified, will somehow purify institutions rather than corrode them.
The European bet seems to be that these distortions can be managed later. That is a wager, not a strategy. If the current trend continues, Europe may not end up with the inspiring postwar democracy it imagines. It could instead inherit a heavily armed, deeply traumatized, politically brittle country on its border—one that is anti-Russian, but not liberal, well-governed or easy to integrate. Ultimately, the risk is that prolonged war and indulgent external backing produce a state whose pathologies are dangerous in and of themselves.
That possibility remains taboo in many European circles. It shouldn’t be. It isn’t anti-Ukrainian to say that democratic decay matters in Ukraine.
None of this means Europe should abandon Ukraine. A stable and genuinely sovereign Ukraine remains in Europe’s interest. But if Europe wants to support Ukraine as a future member of the West rather than merely as a glacis against Russia, its policy has to change.
That starts with honesty. Europe should admit that self-preservation is now a central motive of its support. It should also stop treating military endurance as the only measure that matters. Aid should be tied to battlefield needs and to institutional development: legislative function, transparency, anticorruption enforcement, competence rather than the blind celebration of supposed political savvy, limits on arbitrary power, and a clear understanding that wartime necessity cannot become a permanent political principle.
Otherwise, Europe risks creating the very outcome it claims to want to avoid: a source of instability on its frontier. A buffer can buy time. But if not handled carefully, it can also become the next problem.
Mr. Rodnyansky is an economics professor at the University of Cambridge and a former economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.