The European Council in 2022 : overview of dynamics, discussions and decisions

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including the military build-up before the invasion began on 24 February, dominated every one of the nine meetings of the European Council in 2022. It affected most issues with which the European Council dealt during the year, ranging from energy policy to the broader economy, to security and defence, to enlargement, to external relations. The extent of the EU's humanitarian, economic, political (notably in the form of EU candidacy), and even military assistance to Ukraine was extraordinary. But it came at a cost for the European Council, as leaders grappled with the nature, amount, and timing of the EU's support, and with the ancillary energy crisis and economic distress. Many eastern European leaders, passionate in their support for Ukraine and critical of what they saw as the long-standing naivety towards Russia of several of their western European counterparts, chafed at the traditional leadership in the European Council of France, Germany, and the fabled Franco-German engine. By the end of 2022, the European Council had taken many consequential decisions in the shadow of a large-scale war raging just outside the EU's eastern border. The fallout from that war was bound to affect not only the EU as an entity, but also the European Council as an institution.