The collective setting of EU foreign policy-making sometimes leads ends to be kept vague or means to be applied without consideration for overarching ends, i.e. to proceed, instead, from institutional path-dependencies or member states’ interests. These structural deficiencies are particularly salient in EU policies towards the Eastern Neighbourhood: they have allowed a modest and eminently technocratic program like the Eastern Partnership to provide the sparkle to a full-scale geopolitical conflict in Ukraine and have, more generally, largely prevented the EU to act strategically in the region. This paper uses the Ukraine crisis to revisit some of the most popular concepts used to characterise EU actorness in international affairs (i.e. ‘constructive ambiguity’, ‘normative power’ and ‘capability-expectation gap’). It explores and develops in particular the notions of ‘destructive ambiguity’ and ‘undirected power’. The former refers to the fact that ambivalence regarding the overarching ends of the Eastern Partnership (accession? transformation? containment?) has somehow allowed the Yanukovych government to divert process, Russia to misrepresent it, and both to instrumentalise it. The second refers to the idea that, as demonstrated by field research, the EU’s yields significant transformative power in the region but that this power is slow, incremental and largely unspecific and thus that it can hardly be harnessed or levered towards the pursuit of EU interests, which are not clearly defined anyway.
