Following Russia’s successive aggressions against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, the Atlantic alliance has progressively refocused on the collective defence of Europe. This gradual yet fundamental shift for NATO back to its original mission is analysed in this article from the perspective of the politics of allied military planning, which is conceptualised along two dimensions. The politics of allied military planning has, first, a vertical dimension, underpinned by the Clausewitzian tension that comes with aligning political ends and military means. It also has a horizontal dimension, defined by the need to reconcile national positions within an intergovernmental institution such as NATO. By examining how the different facets of NATO’s return to collective defence – be it in terms of strategic outlook, conventional posture or nuclear deterrence policy – have been shaped along those two dimensions, this article sheds light on how NATO has continued to adapt at pivotal time for European security. Overall, this article finds that there is much continuity from 2014 to today in NATO’s return to collective defence. The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine nonetheless accelerated and amplified this transformation, owing to the clearer alignment between political and military imperatives that it provoked across the Atlantic alliance.

The EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by far exceeded the expectations of expert community across the world. This regards not only the EU’s wartime military and economic support to Ukraine but its political engagement, including the decision to grant Ukraine the EU candidate country status. To understand the drivers behind the EU’s wartime policies vis-à-vis Ukraine, we analyze EU actorness in the war context from the interactionist role theory perspective, as suggested by Klose (2018). Methodologically, the inquiry is based on the discourse analysis of the corpus of programmatic documents and speeches of EU officials, delivered on important occasions since February 2022 to the current time. Process tracing and media analysis will be utilized to select various categories of such occasions, ranging from events at / around the battlefield (e.g. start of the invasion the, deoccupation of Kyiv, Chernigiv and Sumy region); intra-EU occasions (e.g. the granting of a candidate country status to Ukraine) and the EU’s representation on international forums (e.g. G7). We find that in all three event contexts the EU has consistently imagined itself as both as a good, empathic and responsible power, on the one hand, and as a geopolitical power, on the other hand, thus, ending up as a ‘benevolent hegemon’. Understanding the confluence of benevolent and hegemonic aspects of EU actorness is of importance for further research on the EU’s self-imagined role in the region and its reflection in EU policies.

The outbreak of war in Ukraine on 24 February came as a shock to Europe. After 75 years of sustained peace, war has returned to the European continent in blatant violation of EU values and Europe's security. The EU has been unwavering in its support for Ukraine from the outset and has condemned Russia's brutal aggression in the strongest possible terms. Meanwhile, the EU has taken unprecedented action under its CFSP and CSDP, showing unexpected resolve and determination.

Russia's military aggression against an independent and sovereign state has prompted the EU to take a significant step forward in legal integration: the EU has updated its security strategies, broken a number of defence taboos and adopted innovative measures. However, the war in Ukraine has also highlighted the EU's setbacks in the integration process. The EU's CFSP governance system is still mainly based on intergovernmental mechanisms that undermine the EU's credibility as a security provider. This is even more evident when compared to other superpowers that have supported Ukraine.

This article aims to analyse the impact of the war in Ukraine on European integration in the field of CFSP. As this article suggests, the war in Ukraine has revealed both improvements in CFSP integration and weaknesses in the current CFSP legal framework. Against this background, this article also aims to provide a roadmap on how the EU can advance its CFSP integration process in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. In particular, it will identify the solutions offered by the EU Treaties to the dysfunctions of the current CFSP decision-making procedure and voting rules, as well as the prospects for CFSP reform in the light of, inter alia, the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has upended traditional EU assumptions about construction of a European peace project. Economic interdependence as a driver of peace lay at the foundation of the European integration process after World War II and has been progressively built upon since, whether through enlargement or through policies such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership. Also, until recently, relations with Russia were governed by a similar logic, manifested in energy interdependence, the Four Common Spaces, and the notion of an integrated economic space ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’. Supplementing the importance of economic interdependence, democratic peace theory also has underlaid EU efforts to promote liberal political values abroad. With the turn away from Russia as an energy supplier and the implementation of broad-ranging sanctions against Russia in reaction to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the nail has been put in the coffin of reliance on economic interdendence to achieve stabilization and security with Russia. At the same times, hopes for a democratic turn Russia’s domestic sphere have dimmed. Similar doubts and questions have arisen regarding the role of economic relations and political transformation in securing a positive trajectory for relations with China. This paper explores how European thinking has evolved since 2014 regarding the role of economic interdependence and democratic transformation for securing peace in broader Europe, and analyzes current perspectives on the question of what could provide a foundation for post-war security relations with Russia. Of critical interest is the evolution of thinking about how prerequisites for peace can be established without the glue of economic linkages and democratic governance in neighbouring countries.