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Conflict prevention has a central place in the foreign policy of the new European External Action Service (EEAS). However, the EU has not managed to translate its commitment to conflict prevention into specific policies and strategies the mobilization of expertise and allocation of resources The EU‟s current conflict prevention strategies include diplomatic political dialogue with conflict-prone countries outside the EU, generic democratization and development assistance programmes (which have only a random chance of preventing conflict) and crisis intervention. Conflict prevention is not mainstreamed into long-term development and political reform assistance, and targeted interventions into conflict are ad hoc and short-term. The potential of the sophisticated conflict early warning system available to EU policy makers is seriously levelled by the “response gap‟ that exists. The EU‟s ability to act quickly to prevent a conflict is restricted y clash of national interests of Member States and lack of leverage with countries outside the EU that are arenas for latent or acute conflicts to generate consent to a conflict prevention intervention.
This paper analyses EU policies that concern Ukraine(such as the European Neighbourhood Policy [ENP]and the EU Association Agenda)with regard to the prominence of conflict prevention as a goal and as a criterion for the assessment of political and economic reform proposals and their implementation .Four major conflict risk areas are described and the deficiencies in the EU policies with regard to each of these areas identified. On this basis, recommendations are made. This paper contends that the EU may succeed in the prevention of conflict in Ukraine and the consolidation of peace if this becomes the focus of the EU-Ukraine rapprochement. Achievement of this goal requires the conceptual adjustment of the political and programmatic components of the EU-Ukraine relationship, along with the effective coordination of efforts with other agencies, both international and domestic, that work on conflict prevention in order to avoid duplication of conflict prevention efforts and to increase their cumulative cost effectiveness