Security & Resilience

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The Staying Power of Ukrainian Lights. Lessons of Wartime Resilience of the Electricity Sector

Ukraine continues its struggle to maintain the supply of electricity across the country, as Russia ramps up its aerial campaign, shifting the focus towards the destruction of power generation facilities. Ukraine’s remarkable energy sector resilience is attributed to multiple factors: redundancies in and adaptiveness of the power system, pre-invasion preparedness measures, and the capacity to restore damaged or destroyed facilities.

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Distance is Not a Shield. Russia’s Transnational Repression in Wartime

The transnational repression toolkit that the Kremlin employs to target its citizens abroad is wide, and the international connections exploited are many. The latent threat of repression even while abroad means that distance is no barrier against the Kremlin. While cases of assassination remain controversial, cases of Russian transnational coercion, delegitimisation, blacklisting, coerced returns, and surveillance are routinely documented by human rights organisations and the press.

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Japan, NATO, and the Diversification of Security Partnerships

The US-led military alliances remain an integral part of the defence and deterrence strategies of countries in the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions. Whereas the European security architecture is centred on a multilateral alliance, that is, NATO, the Asian security order is rooted in the hub-and-spokes system – the network of US-led bilateral alliances with key partners in Asia, such as Japan.

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Mapping Media Literacy

In 2022, the BCME in cooperation with the International Centre for Defence and Security (Estonia) and individual experts from Latvia and Lithuania carried out a research project titled “Media Literacy Sector Mapping in Estonia.” Similar mapping reports, which applied the same methodology but studied Georgia, Latvia, Moldova, and Ukraine, were produced in 2021.

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China and Rare Earths: Risks to Supply Chain Resilience in Europe

This analysis argues that the EU and NATO’s efforts to strengthen supply chain resilience in critical raw materials are vulnerable to the People’s Republic of China’s leverage on key industry actors. It studies the case of the planned expansion of Silmet, Europe’s only rare earths processing plant, as well as the entities that control the plant and their current and historical ties to the Chinese market, the PRC party-state, the People’s Liberation Army, and China’s defence sector.

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War and Energy Security: Lessons for The Future

Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced multiple shifts in the geopolitical landscape of Europe. Various EU member states and EU institutions broke through entire decades of dogmatic principles and established practices in security and defence policies to respond to Russia’s aggression and protect the continent. The energy domain is at the forefront of this confrontation, as Russia used its dominant market position in European energy supply in the run-up to – as well as during – the war to weaken Europe’s responses, divide the EU, and deter it from increasing its support to Ukraine.

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The Stolen Children: How Russia Attempts to Kidnap Ukraine’s Future

In the first weeks into the full-scale invasion, Ukraine alerted the international community that the Moscow authorities were deporting children from the occupied territories under the plan to put them up for adoption in Russia. Since then, the U.N., the OSCE, the European Parliament, and the U.S. State Department have thrown their weight behind the accusations. The number of confirmed victims is growing by the day, whereas hundreds of thousands of children are suspected to have already been deported. Yet little has been – and can be – done to stop this crime.

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