[pllbnk]

I think it's simpler than that and isn't talked much. Ukraine has been on a direct path to join European Union. Russians and Ukrainians have had significant ties - parts of families living in one country, parts in another, marriages, shared language, given that all Ukrainians know Russian and a lot of them have even spoken Russian at home at least until the war broke out.

Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.

Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).

[rchaud]

Not trying to defend Russia in the least, but isn't their fear more about Ukrainian accession into NATO rather than the possibility of joining the EU?

EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.

[pllbnk]

My guess is as good as anyone's. But I think NATO was used as an excuse for war because it's a military (although defense) alliance. It would be impossible to justify war for country joining the EU.

As for the golden ticket metaphor, I agree, but when the country is so economically and institutionally behind than the rest of the EU, this would still benefit them a lot. All Eastern countries experienced big emigration but a lot of the citizens previously having emigrated are now returning.