This policy brief takes as its inspiration a series of three roundtables organised in 2024 by the Centre for European Reform and the University College London European Institute Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. The first, held in Brussels in February, was entitled ‘Ukraine’s European future: Prospects and possibilities’. The second, in London in April, was ‘The Russian presidential election’. The third, which took place in the British Embassy, Berlin, in September was entitled ‘The future of European security’.
- European security structures have been tottering for more than a decade, first under the impact of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and then following its full-scale attack on Ukraine. Donald Trump’s two terms as US president have provoked European worries about the reliability of NATO defence guarantees.
- There are good reasons for EU and NATO member-states on Russia’s border to be concerned about the risk of a military confrontation. But as well as the threat from Russia, Europe also faces domestic threats from political extremism and other forces that seek to divide European societies.
- Ukraine is often portrayed as a state split between Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers with different views of the country’s orientation: should it face towards Brussels or towards Moscow? In reality, divisions have rarely been as deep as Russian narratives claimed, and since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, support for integration with the EU has risen sharply in the east.
- Ukraine has made its choice, but it still has many hurdles to overcome before it can join the EU. It must not fall back into old, corrupt ways of doing things. The EU must circumvent opposition to Ukraine’s membership from some member-states and vested interests, and somehow balance the geopolitical imperative of Ukrainian membership against the need to maintain high standards of governance – something it has struggled with since the 2004 round of enlargement in Central Europe.
- Russia has historically oscillated between trying to catch up with the rest of Europe, rejecting European influences, and seeing itself as Europe’s superior. Putin started out in 2000 by looking for closer co-operation with the EU, but has become more and more Eurasianist, claiming for Russia the status of a unique civilisational power and a hegemon in the territory of the former Russian empire.
- Russian leaders have made two attempts to get the West to accept a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, first with Dmitriy Medvedev’s ‘European Security Treaty’ in 2008-2009, and then with two draft treaties put forward by Russia in December 2021, which sought to leave large parts of Central Europe defenceless and to remove US nuclear deterrent forces from Europe. Putin is now intent on creating a sphere of influence by force rather than through treaties.
- At some point, the war in Ukraine will end. But Russia’s restrictive view of Ukrainian sovereignty is likely to remain, even after Putin. It is hard to imagine Europe building security with Russia for the foreseeable future; it will have to reconcile itself to building security against Russia. It will also have to deal with the prospect of doing it without the US – an increasingly unreliable partner.
- The challenges the US poses to Europe are growing more complicated. Not only is the US likely to provide much less military support to Europe in future; people in or associated with Trump’s administration have been exacerbating Europe’s domestic divisions and giving encouragement to right-wing populists sympathetic to Russia and hostile to European integration. Trump’s most recent peace plan for Ukraine, before it was modified as a result of Ukrainian and European opposition, would not only have put Russia in a stronger position vis-à-vis Kyiv; it would have threatened the broader interests of Europe.
- Europe needs not only to strengthen its defence capabilities but to increase the resilience of its societies. Only then can it think about structures, perhaps based on the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, for managing what is likely to be a long-term stand-off with Russia. But as long as Russia seeks to dominate its Eastern European neighbours, it is hard to see how the rest of Europe can do anything other than defend them, and itself. The logic of Putin’s world-view, in which Russia is a ‘besieged fortress’, is that as each neighbour is subdued, the next country becomes a threat.
About the Author:
Ian Bond has been the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform since November 2023. He joined the CER as foreign policy director in April 2013. Prior to that, he was a member of the British diplomatic service for 28 years.