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There are moments in life that are hard to forget and remain etched in the collective memory of those who witnessed them: a natural disaster affecting our hometown, a terrorist attack in our country or the outbreak of a full-scale war.
“You can ask every Ukrainian— no matter where they were, in Ukraine or abroad —and they will remember moment by moment where they were and what they were doing the moment Russia started its full-scale invasion,” Euronews’ correspondent Sasha Vakulina told Brussels, My Love?.
Together with Marta Barandiy, founding president of Promote Ukraine and Katharina Emschermann, head of programme European Union (EU) and international politics at Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Euronews’ Ukraine correspondent joined this week’s episode of the podcast to discuss the fourth anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
How are Ukrainians coping? Is the EU doing enough to support them?
The morale in Ukraine
Marta Barandiy founded her non-profit organisation Promote Ukraine in 2014, the year Russia annexed the peninsula of Crimea. “The war started in 2014, let’s not forget that, the full-scale invasion started in 2022,” Barandiy said.
Over the years of Barandiy’s activism in Brussels, she witnessed how slowly things were moving to provide support and maintain attention on Ukraine. “I sort of imagined that it [the war] could last so long,” she said.
Barandiy explained that Ukrainians are resisting by creating communities of veterans, of families of abducted children and abducted prisoners of war: “The whole of Ukraine is living in activism in order to help each other to cope with the situation and to not lose.”
The EU’s role
On Tuesday, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Council, António Costa and some European leaders went to Kyiv to show their support for the country on the day of the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The meeting, however, came just one day after Hungary vetoed both a new package of sanctions against Russia and a €90 billion loan to Ukraine. “That undercut the message that European leaders wanted to send,” Emschermann said.
According to the expert, Hungary’s veto puts the EU in front of a broad question regarding how it makes decisions on security challenges, its efficiency and its unity.
The loan had, in fact, been approved in December 2025 at the European Council after long negotiations among 27 heads of state and governments.
Also according to Vakulina, Hungary’s last-minute veto and the meeting in Kyiv are very representative of the EU challenges.
“The EU has done a lot,” she said, commenting on Brussels’ involvement in Ukraine.
“Even the EU itself wishes it could do more, but there are some hurdles, political issues, nuances, vetoes on some occasions, which is very frustrating not only for Ukraine but for the EU,” she said.
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Additional sources • Georgios Leivaditis, sound editing and mixing