Crisis doesn’t shape character; it reveals it. And so it has been with the European Union and its handling of events in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s motivations may remain unclear, but regardless of whether the ongoing military escalations on the Ukrainian border are the preamble to a full-scale invasion, or merely some stress test of Western resolve, there is no doubt that the EU’s reaction has been found wanting.

The bloc emerges as fractured; unable to agree on military support or economic sanctions, divided between bilateral and multilateral modes of engagement. While Poland and the Baltic states offer Ukraine military equipment and France makes its own overtures to Vladimir Putin, Germany’s response has been a mixture of vacillation – in its “strategic ambiguity” on sanctions and the future of Nord Stream 2 – and outright conciliation, as exemplified by its embarrassing, and tellingly symbolic, offer to send Ukraine just 5,000 helmets instead of weapons last month.

Ukraine has highlighted other historic Achilles’ heels too; a deplorable lack of investment by EU members in their own defence capabilities; the distinct reluctance of Germany and other member states to end their reliance on Russia for energy; Italy’s cosy commercial ties with Moscow, and much more. As it turns out, there is nothing like a crisis on its external border to expose the EU’s internal dysfunctions.

Some will doubtless point to the crisis in Ukraine as an argument for some kind of EU army – but the question must be: would it even be possible to organise one given the evident lack of unity displayed by member states? And if such an army existed, whose side would it be on anyway?

At best, despite their pretence at being a “global power”, the EU institutions themselves can be said to be an irrelevance. European leaders, reportedly impressed by Westminster’s handling of recent events, are said to be planning to invite Britain to lead a new security committee to discuss geopolitical challenges. The move seems as much of an admission of EU failure as a recognition of British diplomatic success – in an emergency taking place in a country that borders on a number of EU member-states, which itself aspires to EU membership, why shouldn’t Brussels itself have been the convenor?

The greatest irony of the EU’s craven response to Ukraine is that the country that most wanted to be European has been failed by Europe. When Ukrainian activists flocked to Kyiv’s Independence Square back in 2013 for the protests that would lead to its democratic revolution, they carried EU flags and appealed to “European” virtues – modernity, the rule of law, democracy, freedom. Brussels loved waxing lyrical about these values too, yet it is the people of Ukraine, in neither Nato nor the EU, who now stand ready to pay the ultimate price defending them.

Of course, establishing a cogent foreign policy among 27 members with conflicting aims and priorities was never going to be an easy task, but this was always Europe’s much-vaunted dream – using a muscular EU and the solidarity of its supposedly close-knit member-states to maintain stability. Indeed, this heart-warming fiction secured it the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago. Yet when the chips are down, it’s clear that national self-interest and the individual weaknesses of member states will always trump everything else – and it’s not the first time the EU has been so exposed.

During the financial crisis, it became obvious that the euro was not a sensible step on the path to economic convergence, but an ideological project that would sacrifice notions of solidarity and humanity on the altar of economic dogma. To this day, Greece bears the scars of the misuse of the EU’s institutions to enforce the will of the stronger powers, and the quest to push wildly differing national economies into the straitjacket of monetary union. Greece’s accession to the single currency may have required industrial levels of creative accounting about the scale of its debts, but Eurostat merrily rubber-stamped it, and Greek GDP has never recovered from the experience.

Then came the pandemic. Slow to start and overly-centralised, the continent’s vaccine rollout showcased the very worst aspects of the EU project – the deficiencies of the technocracy and its sluggishness in responding quickly to new events. Self-interest prevailed; as when Berlin put in orders for extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine even as it trumpeted the virtues of a common purchasing strategy while serving as rotating president of the European Union.

But perhaps most damaging of all was the bloc’s toxic row with AstraZeneca, which exposed a vicious nationalism that should have destroyed the EU’s reputation as a force for good on the world stage.

European leaders like Macron and Merkel openly disparaged the safety and reliability of the one vaccine which the developing world can afford. Nearly a dozen countries curtailed the vaccine’s use across Europe, after a single study revealed the vanishingly small possibility that its recipients could develop blood clots.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, EU leaders then complained they had not received enough doses of the vaccine whose distribution they themselves had delayed, and imposed export bans on AstraZeneca factories. It is hard to measure the global reputational damage to the EU of all this, but Sir John Bell, the vaccine tsar who helped broker the deal between Oxford and AstraZeneca, recently said that the European leaders’ rhetoric was probably responsible for “hundreds of thousands of deaths”.

Bullying yet toothless, simultaneously impulsive and sluggish – the imperial EU has failed on its own terms. Yet instead of sticking to narrower and more achievable geopolitical aims, such as free trade and cooperation, Eurocrats seem to specialise in over-reacting to petty infringements; just compare their relaxed attitude to Ukrainian border tensions with their policing of the Northern Irish border. When desperate to save face, they react like lightning. But when it’s time to defend their own lofty principles, they respond with a deafening silence.