Project: Foresight on Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The developments in Ukraine have been outliers of a new security environment for the rest of Europe and especially for Ukraine’s immediate neighbours.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine Report

We started thinking about what Russia’s threat to Ukraine means for Central Europe in summer 2021 following the amassing of Russian troops on Ukrainian borders in March and April 2021. Then, after a couple of months of posturing, their troops returned to their barracks. But by the end of 2021, they were back only larger in number and more threatening in posture.

As we conclude the work on this report, the concentration of Russian troops continues, and according to American intelligence, Russia is more likely to invade this time around. Whether a Russian invasion will materialise or not seems impossible to predict at this point in time, not least because this decision belongs to one man only: Vladimir Putin.

The future of Ukraine’s relations with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) does not solely depend on all parties involved. An essential external variable in this relationship is Russia. Depending on Russia’s future course of action and reactions to it from Central Europe we estimate that this relationship can develop on one of the three trajectories outlined in the Report. The Report outlines the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian as well as concrete policy recommendations on how Central and Eastern Europe can move ahead through the crisis such as that the CEE needs the strong involvement of the USA to prompt cooperation with Ukraine and to increase NATO at the Eastern flank and other parts of Central Europe, such as Slovakia and Czechia.

The report’s contributors are: Ireneusz Bil, Wojciech Przybylski, Marcin Zaborowski, Kaarel Kullamaa, Imants Liegis, Dovilė Jakniūnaitė, Michał Potocki, Pavel Havlicek, Juraj Kuruc, András Rácz, Radu Albu-Comanescu and Spasimir Domaradzki.

Click here to download and read the report.

This report was made possible thanks to the cooperation of Visegrad Insight, Res Publica Foundation and Energy Gate Europe.

The featured photo is by Anton Holoborodko (Антон Голобородько), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons and was free for reuse and adaption on 3.2.2022.