While NATO remains the primary alliance for collective defense in Europe, security guarantees have multiplied at the bilateral or minilateral level across the continent in recent years. In 2019, France and Germany signed the Treaty of Aachen, and in 2021, France and Greece formed a strategic partnership, both documents including a mutual defense clause between their respective parties. After Russia's aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, the US, UK, and other Western countries offered unilateral security guarantees, in various forms, to Finland and Sweden before their accession to NATO. Finally, Western countries have begun to provide security guarantees to Ukraine not only to help it during the current conflict but also to ensure peace afterwards, until Kyiv's eventual Euro-Atlantic integration. While some of these recent developments have already been analysed individually in the literature, they have not yet been considered as a whole, either empirically or theoretically. This article maps these developments and proposes four different sources for them, each contributing to varying degrees: symbolising political solidarity, hedging against US abandonment, offsetting deficiencies in existing security arrangements, and bridging the interim period before integration in an existing security framework. This article thus contributes to the literature on alliance formation, adding certain theoretical nuances to it, as well as to the analysis of a changing European security architecture.

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 EU's policy in the Post-Soviet Eurasia (the region which includes Eastern Europe, South Caucuses and Central Asia) has undergone some profound changes since February 2022. The transformation has been described as decolonisation; it mostly meant that these countries are now treated by their own merits rather than through the EU's Russia policy. While this strategy has brough some changes, the countries (with the exception of Ukraine and Moldova) remained peripheral for the EU. In fact, a new structuration is emerging, which is based not only on how like-minded these countries are but also on the extent to which they support the EU's sanctions (or alternatively help Russia to bypass Western sanctions). The paper explores this new structuration, based on the respect for the EU's values and sanctions, assesses the relative importance of these two components in the structuration, and the response that the leadership of the region has so far provided to the changes in the EU's external policy. The success of this decolonisation of the EU's policy in the region is challenged.

The paper assesses the resilience of local state institutions to hybrid threats on the example of the Donbas frontline communities in 2014-2022. It is crucial for the state facing hybrid threats to ensure its institutional resilience and legitimacy since it becomes one of the primary targets during a hybrid war. Therefore, the research relies on a case study looking at four frontline towns in Donbas in 2014-2022. It examines how local governments adapted their legislative institutions to the challenges of hybrid war to preserve and strengthen their legitimacy. It uses a mixed method of quantitative content analysis to examine the legislative priorities for local institutions during hybrid warfare and frame analysis to look at the legislation implemented at the central and local levels of the Ukrainian government that aims to strengthen local institutional resilience to hybrid threats. The research is conducted within the theoretical framework of sociological institutionalism and uses the concepts of political legitimacy and hybrid warfare to assess their impact on institutional adaptability based on a case study.

The paper contributes to the literature on institutionalism in the hybrid conflict context by presenting a longitudinal case study that empirically assesses the interplay between legitimacy and hybrid warfare. It argues that the local legislatures prioritise strengthening the coherence of the national identity of the local population and the efficiency of social institutions to deter hybrid threats. At the same time, the Ukrainian government partially limits access to frontline political institutions to resist external attempts to undermine their legitimacy but balances it with preserving a democratic system. The case study provides an analysis of lessons learned from an eight-year hybrid war struggle of the Ukrainian frontline communities, which is valuable for strengthening European security against hybrid threats and building up the resilience of the local communities that might become the targets of hybrid attacks.

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.