The EU’s Green Peace Narrative and Russia: Russia’s War in Ukraine in the EU’s Climate Narrative

Abstract

The article looks at how Russia’s war in Ukraine enters the EU’s climate narrative. The European Union has over time developed a narrative of itself as the global green leader. This narrative has increasingly served as a complementary one to the EU’s foundational peace narrative. For the peace narrative, the EU’s own violent past served as ‘the other’, whereas for the green leader narrative other world powers less willing to participate in climate action, including the US, China and Russia, have served as ‘the others’. The current war merges the two narratives and posits the EU as the peaceful green leader in contrast to the brutal aggression of the authoritarian Russian oil and gas economy. The war discourse, moreover, facilitates the concrete work with the EU’s Fit for 55 climate mitigation agenda, and during the second half of 2022, several important milestones were reached in this respect.

Keywords

• european union
• ukraine
• russia
• climate policy
• narrative analysis