EU doesn't force anyone to fight for them, it enables those countries that are not part of Russia, don't want to be part of Russia and are willing to fight Russian aggression to eventually be independent countries and member of EU.
May I ask from which country you are, you are talking of position that implies that Ukrainians don't have agency. It's a Russian talking point(that is "Ukrainians couldn't have chosen to join NATO and EU by themselves since they don't have agency, EU tricked them or NATO forced them to fight Russia, therefore Russia isn't the agressor but the defender here against the EU/NATO aggression").
People expect EU to do much more that EU can do by design, EU is bunch of sovereign states that coordinate and only some of those states have considerable military power but even those countries politics wouldn't allow much. AFD is pro-Russian party that is the most popular political power in Germany which means EU doesn't have the power and Germany is divided and this goes for almost all countries. Just recently in Bulgaria(which sent substential military help to Ukraine in early days of the war) the pro-Russian political power won in a landslide and today they announced that they cut all the support for Ukraine(they will keep selling though).
EU isn't the thing many people believe it is.
Why "free will" is critical, is because before Russia attacked, the Ukrainian government had the sense to not in a million years accept such a terrible deal from the EU. As to how free that will really is when constantly under fire with Europe refusing to help it (despite things like the Budapest memorandum) ... is not being discussed.
This has caused a number of EU countries, like Poland and Finland, to decide that a nuclear program to get working ICBMs is a lot cheaper than counting on EU and US goodwill when they're attacked.
Ukraine is also doing a "Chinese-style" nuclear program. The idea is to get every component of ICBMs working. Ukraine, for historical reasons, needs uranium enrichment (it's either that or rebuilding two dozen nuclear reactors). So Ukraine is getting into China's/Japan's position right before they got nukes. Ukraine also has engineers that have actually designed working nuclear bombs. Meaning they're getting to the point that they "don't have nukes, BUT ..."
With the unspoken part being that they're getting to the point where they can have 100 working ICBMs ready to launch by next month.
So we'll have the Ukrainian government, armed with nukes, and a huge involuntary and very unfair war debt to the EU.
Should be interesting negotiations.
But the free will part is critical because without the "free will under pressure" Ukraine would never make itself so incredibly indebted to the EU. And we'll get to see nuclear interest-rate negotations!
