The EU has embarked on a new eastward enlargement at the time of a major breaking point in European and international order. It is obvious that Ukraine’s accession will bring about substantial changes in the EU’s policies and international clout.
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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 Kremlin has made no secret of the importance it attaches to military power as an instrument of foreign policy, most obviously in Georgia from 2008, in Ukraine from 2014, and in Syria from 2015. Below the threshold of war, Russia has frequently used military instruments to harass other states, including in the Baltic region.
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Eight years ago, Russo-Western relations took a pivotal turn for the worse when Russia resumed its gaze on Ukraine and set out on a quest to subordinate its independence to Russia’s. That quest, capitalising on the promotion of regional separatism and internal insurgency through information weapons, cyberattacks and proxy militias, found initial success with the bloodless annexation of Crimea. Implications for the place and nature of hybrid war in Russian strategy were misdrawn by Russia and the West alike.
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While a ban on Russian oil and gas is being actively discussed in the EU and US, there is no such conversation about the civil nuclear energy supply chain from Russia to Western countries. Rosatom’s supply and construction contracts in Europe have so far allowed it to avoid sanctions. Europe’s energy conversation will also need to include its dependence on Russia’s nuclear capacity.
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In the last decade, the Black Sea has become a de facto arena for competing and objectively irreconcilable strategic interests, where an opportunistic Russia has unilaterally changed the security architecture and dynamics in the region via not only conventional military means, but also highly sophisticated and hybrid means that have allowed Moscow plausible deniability.
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When Belarus suddenly began bringing migrants to Lithuania’s border this summer to create a refugee crisis on the Lithuanian side, people were surprised and aghast. They should not have been.
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Europe is under growing pressure from the East. First, the dictator of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, after a test run of weaponised waves of migrants against the Lithuanian and Latvian borders over the summer, has now sent not just hundreds but thousands of migrants to breach the borders of the European Union. Kuźnica, on the Polish border, was only the first major attempt; many more are likely to follow to coerce the EU into accepting the regime in Minsk as legitimate and lifting the sanctions.
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Since 2014, after the occupation of the Crimea and part of the territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, Ukraine has remained the object of complex operations of influence from Russia. Effective protection from such operations is possible only if the various components of national resilience are fully explored, from regional media development to the readiness and ability of citizens to resist operations of such influence.
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China has quickly become a world leader in the production, extraction and refining of rare-earth elements. With the geopolitical uncertainties stemming from China’s rise, plus the inevitable increase in the use of these elements due to the energy transition and the IT sector, the procurement of these critical materials is increasingly becoming a security issue.
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