Conference Agenda

For three decades since the end of the Cold War it had been a common place for many Western mainstream politicians to say that European security had to be built with Russia rather than against it. While sceptical voices among Russia-watchers grew in strength, the adage remained intact until the 2022 full-scale invasion in Ukraine. The war pushed a number of European countries to reconsider their defence planning and security policies, including their attitude to NATO. The first Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Lord Ismay, famously formulated the purpose of the organisation as “keeping the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. The first part of the formula is now being revived after a break and applied to Russia, which the NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept unequivocally names “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area”.

A policy that guided the U.S. and its allies through the Cold War was the one of containment, famously formulated by George F. Kennan. The calls for a new containment vis-à-vis Russia proliferate in the contemporary political discussion [1,2,3,4,5]. In the meantime, the strategic environment is not identical to Europe and the world of almost 80 years ago. The growing role of China, Russia’s more limited power projection abilities in comparison to the Soviet’s, the rich and politically organised European Union are just some of the factors that have to be taken into account.

In my paper I analyse similarities and differences in the ways the original containment took shape, and the new policies develop in the Euro-Atlantic to face the current Russia challenge. Through the prism of securitisation approach, I try to figure out whether the re-use of the ‘containment’ paradigm is justified and what elements constitute the newly emerging strategy.

1. Daalder, Ivo H. (2022) The Return of Containment: How the West Can Prevail Against the Kremlin. Foreign Affairs, 1 March.
2. Fix, Liana, Kimmage, Michael (2023) A Containment Strategy for Ukraine: How the West Can Help Kyiv Endure a Long War. Foreign Affairs, 28 November.
3. Goldgeier, James (2023) No Choice but Containment. Carnegie Endowment, 30 November.
4. Matlak, Michal (2023) Towards a European Russia-Containment Doctrine. Visegrad Insight, 12 April.
5. Vershbow, Aleksander (2023) Russia policy after the war: A new strategy of containment. Atlantic Council, 22 February.

The CSDP “traditional method” of decision-making – i.e., based on long consultations with stakeholders, a long process of mediation and balance between positions of a consistent number of actors to achieve solutions based on consensus and long-term policies – is values-oriented (cfr. art. 21 TEU) but in the contests of “hard crises”, such as that of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this type of political process can be challenged. The operationalization of values in policies can change due to the narratives of urgency driven by dynamics of securitization (or crisisification) and the same role of values in the CSDP can be questioned. Driven by the need to defend its eastern partner (Ukraine) from military aggression and by the need to (finally) build the much-mentioned “strategic autonomy”, the EU could move from a security policy based essentially on the balance between “values and butter”, to a tripartite balance between “values, butter and guns”.

Considering the scenario of the Euromaidan crisis of 2014 and the Russian invasion of 2022, analyzing EU official documents and through semi-structured interviews with civilian and military personnel from the EU (institutions and member states), this paper aims to study what role values play in mobilizing EU policies to deal with the Ukrainian crisis, how CSDP is designed/operationalized around values even during this major crisis and how narratives related to CSDP values are mobilized by EU decision-makers to legitimize these policies.

Aside from the military aid provided to Ukraine by the EU and its member states, the imposition of ever stronger sanctions against the Russian Federation and Belarus has been the EU’s main political reaction to Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. While the severity and breadth of the EU’s sanctions policy are unprecedented in the case at hand, the internal diplomacy surrounding their imposition has not been without controversy. While the conflict at hand has helped overcome many long-standing blockades in the EU’s sanctions policy, the underlying decision-making rules have made this increasingly difficult given diverging positions of individual EU member states. This paper considers the EU’s sanctions since February 2022 from three distinct contexts, and thus aims to further our understanding of EU sanctions policy. Firstly, it places the recent imposition of sanctions in the context of the EU’s prior policy towards Russia and Belarus. Secondly, it considers these specific sanctions against the backdrop of the EU’s overall sanctions regime. Thirdly, it discusses the domestic dynamics underpinning the EU’s sanctions regime. In so doing, both the potential and limits of the EU’s sanctions policy in the context of major international security crises are explored.