ABSTRACT
In recent years, the rivalry between EU and Russian deep integration projects has moved to the centre stage in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. It reached its climax in Ukraine in 2013-14, when President Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an Association Agreement triggered massive protests that ended up in a change of power, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and hybrid warfare in Eastern Ukraine (Ademmer et al. 2016: 1). This suggests that the policy transfer process of EU norms and standards in the post-Soviet space is increasingly shaped by macro-level variables that predominantly involve external actors. However, the study of macro-processes alone fails to explain the baffl ing discrepancies in the countries’ responses to the EU’s and Russia’s policies, let alone variation across sectors and over time in the policy transfer process within a given country (Delcour 2017).
