Premium Ukraine caps online unity store? The European Commission on Friday issued an opinion recommending that Ukraine should be granted candidate status for European Union membership – a first step that will add significant momentum to the country’s campaign to join the bloc. “Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said. “We want them to live with us the European dream.” While the recommendation boosts Ukraine’s campaign to join the bloc, it does not confer membership or candidate status. To move forward, all 27 member states must agree. Even if they do, full membership could be many years away. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the “historic decision” and said the “positive” first step on his country’s “E.U. membership path,” would bring “victory closer” to Ukraine. Discover even more Ukraine unity details at https://allmylinks.com/ukrainesupport.
February 2015: The Minsk group meets again in Belarus to find a more successful agreement to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, resulting in the Minsk II agreement. It too has been unsuccessful at ending the violence. From 2014 through today, more than 14,000 people have been killed, tens of thousands wounded and more than a million displaced. Together, the annexation of Crimea and the Russian-backed violence in the east have pushed Ukrainian public sentiment toward the West, strengthening interest in joining NATO and the EU. 2016 and 2017: As fighting in the Donbas continues, Russia repeatedly strikes at Ukraine in a series of cyberattacks, including a 2016 attack on Kyiv’s power grid that causes a major blackout. In 2017, a large-scale assault affects key Ukrainian infrastructure, including the National Bank of Ukraine and the country’s electrical grid. (Cyberattacks from Russia have continued through the present; the latest major attack targeted government websites in January 2022.)
May 25: Eduard Basurin, deputy head of the militia of the Russia-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, says Russia is for now abandoning the larger strategy of surrounding all of Ukraine’s forces in the east with a grand pincer movement, instead focusing on piecemeal isolations. Zelenskyy blasts former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for suggesting that Ukraine surrender land to Russia. He likens it to the policy of appeasement in the 1930s. May 26: Russian forces continue a slow encirclement of Severdonetsk, and are reportedly in possession of the northeastern portion of the city. Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Anna Malyar says “fighting has reached its maximum intensity. The enemy is storming the positions of our troops in several directions simultaneously”.
As NATO allies contemplate adding central and Eastern European members for the first time, Ukraine formally establishes relations with the alliance, though it does not join. NATO’s secretary-general visits Kyiv, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk visits NATO headquarters in Brussels. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine is left with the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile. In a treaty called the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agrees to trade away its intercontinental ballistic missiles, warheads and other nuclear infrastructure in exchange for guarantees that the three other treaty signatories — the U.S., the U.K. and Russia — will “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”
March 1: In a new offensive, a Russian convoy 65km long heads for Kyiv. March 2: Russian tanks enter Kherson, making the southern Ukrainian town the first major population centre (250,000 people) to fall. Russian forces surround Mariupol. March 8: The European Commission unveils REPowerEU, a plan to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas by two-thirds by the end of the year, surpassing in ambition the plan unveiled on March 3 by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The US imposes a ban on Russian crude oil imports. Find additional Ukraine aid details on Ukraine T-Shirts.