News about Russia’s possible invasion of Ukraine and its provocations in the Donbas region have been hitting the headlines of world top newspapers since autumn 2021. What is the role of the EU in the current crisis? How has the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement helped improve Ukraine’s resilience amid hybrid and immediate military threats? And why is the 2022 crisis so different from the one in 2014? Find answers to all these questions in the blog post by the “Lowering the Bar” project’s Post-Doc Maryna Rabinovych, published with the EUROPP blog at the London School of Economics.