After securing an agreement from EU leaders on filling the bloc’s top jobs, European Council President Donald Tusk didn’t head to Disneyland Paris to celebrate. Instead, he took a victory lap even more joyful for the first Eastern European to hold a presidency in Brussels: He jetted off to the former Soviet Union.

While other leaders engage in public hand-wringing about the purpose and fitness of their Union, such as French President Emmanuel Macron clamoring for a major conference on the Future of Europe or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán demanding a return to Christian values, Tusk has clung to his own vision of the EU as a beacon of freedom and democracy for parts of the world where it was long in short supply.

At stops this week in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and finally in Georgia on Thursday, the former Polish prime minister reveled in the EU’s continuing efforts to build closer ties with its eastern neighbors and directed some pointedly sharp words at Moscow.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was NOT the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Tusk tweeted from the Black Sea coastal city of Batumi, directly rebutting a remark once made by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Today in Georgia I want to say loud and clear: the USSR collapse was a blessing to Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. And also to Russians.”

The EU leadership package that Tusk helped shepherd into existence marks a striking consolidation of power in the hands of old, Western Europe.

If his message was slightly out of sync with the collective fretting in the Brussels bubble that EU expansion perhaps went too far too fast, and a general sense that an assertive Russia is more than holding its own in the contest for geopolitical influence, Tusk didn’t seem to care.

On Monday, after meeting Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, Tusk conceded that his passions are not shared by all of his colleagues in the corridors of EU power and spoke in very personal terms about his support for Ukraine.

“Over the years I have tried to support Ukraine in Europe and Europe in Ukraine,” Tusk said, adding: “In my eyes, you are all heroes. That is how I saw you during the Revolution of Dignity at Maidan, defending your sovereignty and integrity, building a modern state with democratic standards. Despite the poverty that still exists in many places, despite the suffering caused by the war, despite the difficult reforms — you have endured.”

"I have done my best to speed up the process of Ukraine’s integration with the rest of Europe,” Tusk said, adopting an apologetic tone. “Not everything worked out; I was not always as successful as I wanted to be. Forgive me, my friends.”

But he said he would not apologize for pushing Ukraine as a priority. “There are some in Brussels who branded me a pro‑Ukraine maniac,” Tusk said. “They often said it right to my face. To be honest, I’m very proud of that epithet.”

Given the current political winds in Brussels, Tusk’s remarks perhaps make more sense in the context of his return to Poland and a potential campaign for president after his mandate in Brussels ends on December 1. Close associates say he will not make a decision on such a bid until after Poland’s national parliamentary election this fall.

But for all his affection for democracy-building, one question that will inevitably hang over Tusk’s legacy is whether, as the first EU president from the former Communist bloc, relations between Eastern and Western Europe improved or deteriorated on his watch.

The EU leadership package that Tusk helped shepherd into existence marks a striking consolidation of power in the hands of old, Western Europe — including the nomination of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel as Tusk’s own successor at the Council.

Even more striking is the absence of any Eastern European from the EU’s top jobs after Parliament rejected the Council’s advice that it choose a social democrat from the east, and instead went with Italian MEP David Sassoli.

At the summit that approved the leadership package earlier this month, Eastern European governments, especially Poland and Hungary, acted more as spoilers, blocking candidates they found unacceptable, rather than aggressively advocating for candidates from their own regions.

Poland was also the only country to vote against Tusk’s reelection two years ago — a reflection of the deep enmity between him and the governing Law and Justice party led by Jarosław Kaczyński.

Legacy issues

Assessments of Tusk's tenure often touch on Europe's east-west divisions and on his own leadership skills.

Critics blamed his hands-off management style for the rocky decision-making process that necessitated a roughly 48-hour marathon summit that started with a dinner on a Sunday, included a sleepless night, breakfast on Monday and only ended after a late lunch Tuesday that ran into the evening. And they said German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron had to assert themselves and insist on reaching a deal after Tusk was ready to give up.

Some officials and diplomats accused Tusk and his team of insufficient preparation, starting back at an informal summit in Sibiu, Romania, where Tusk set the nearly impossible task of deciding on a leadership slate by the end of June. And they said it was a lack of faith in Tusk that led leaders to take the unusual step of appointing six prime ministers — two from each of the three major political families — as coordinators of the top jobs negotiations, a group that became known as the E6.

“Let's put it this way, there's no great admiration for his skills as dealmaker. But since we know his limits, the E6 were appointed," one diplomat said, adding that Tusk, despite his eastern origins, had not proved to be a healer of the continental rift.

"The Continent is as divided as ever, north-south, east-west," the diplomat said, while also making clear: "I'm not saying it's his fault, not at all.”

Another diplomat said the outcome — a return of the Council presidency to a Belgian (after Tusk’s predecessor, Herman von Rompuy) and the lack of any Eastern European in the leadership slate — made the results self-evident.

“His legacy speaks for itself, no Easterner in the top jobs,” the second diplomat said. “It's not by chance that [the Council] goes back to a Belgian.”

Tusk’s supporters insist that it is his success in achieving a leadership package — with not one of the 28 heads of state or government voting in opposition, and in a remarkably short amount of time — that speaks for itself.

As the convener and choreographer of the Council, they note it is not Tusk’s place to tell leaders what to do but to provide a framework for effective discussions and decision-making and they insisted he had done so.

The initial leadership slate, finalized on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, that failed to win the Council’s support was devised largely by Merkel, and had the support of Macron as well as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

According to officials, Tusk privately expressed doubts about the viability of that package, which would have installed Frans Timmermans, a Social Democrat, as Commission president. But they said he was hardly in a position to block the effort by the four influential leaders who believed it could fly. And indeed, merely the attempt of getting it through may have provided the needed spark to reach a compromise.

Some MEPs have complained bitterly that the Council’s package disregarded the Spitzenkandidat or lead candidate system for picking the European Commission president. Under that system, championed by the European Parliament, the Council should pick someone who ran as a lead candidate in the European Parliament election.

But Tusk and leaders on the Council had warned that legally they could not be obligated to follow it. And given the disagreement and disarray in Parliament after the election in late May, it’s difficult to see how they might have preserved the system.

While the surprise choice of von der Leyen has left her battling for support in the Parliament, Tusk didn’t hang around Brussels to defend the leadership slate. Instead, in a way he was back to his days as a member of the Solidarity movement in Poland, fighting for democracy in the east of the Continent.

In Ukraine, he demanded Russia end its military meddling and release political prisoners. In Armenia, he called for a political solution to the long-simmering conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and praised the country’s recent non-violent revolution.

And in Azerbaijan, where respect for human rights has come into question in recent years, he called for respect for fundamental freedoms.

After meeting President Ilham Aliyev in Baku on Tuesday, Tusk declared: “The EU believes that a truly open society is the best guarantee of long-term stability and a good life for all citizens.”

Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.