This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Jana Kobzova, co-director of ECFR’s European Security programme, to discuss the mounting pressures facing Ukraine as it enters another wartime winter. Despite Ukraine’s success in disrupting Russian logistics and energy infrastructure, Russia has intensified its attacks on cities, energy networks and civilian targets, while Kyiv faces growing domestic political and economic strains.
Jana explains how shortages of air-defence interceptors, political infighting, corruption investigations and economic challenges are converging at a particularly difficult moment for Ukraine. She also examines Russia’s escalating hybrid attacks across Europe and how Europeans can strengthen their resilience—and Ukraine’s defences.
Together, Mark and Jana assess Ukraine’s ability to withstand these overlapping crises, the future of European support and the role Ukraine could play in Europe’s long-term security architecture. As Russia raises the pressure both on and off the battlefield, can Ukraine and its allies maintain the unity needed to hold the line?
This podcast episode was recorded on September 16th 2026.
Cover image: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com | Pib Handout/Press Information
Problem
The BRICS summit concluded in New Delhi on Sunday, with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi having hosted the two-day gathering as chair. As with many meetings of the group of emerging economies, this edition brought together the leaders of China, India and Russia and featured plenty of anti-Western rhetoric. This was also Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s first visit to India for more than six years, in the latest example of Sino-Indian normalisation following a sustained period of tensions.
New Delhi’s normalisation with Beijing over the last year looks like more of a tactical de-escalation than a realignment. Nevertheless, India has over that time begun to agree more measures to provide greater access to Chinese investment in manufacturing and climate technology, both areas important for India’s development. This should act as a warning for Europeans. If India cannot source technology and capital from partners in Europe, it will seek to do so from China even while remaining suspicious of Beijing from a security point of view.
Solution
New Delhi continues to view Beijing as a threat and seeks deeper security and economic ties with Brussels, as well as with Washington, despite the difficulties President Donald Trump presents. Modi has thus worked to prevent the BRICS from tipping into a purely anti-Western vehicle, since this would run against India’s interests.
Europeans also see India as an increasingly vital partner, following the EU-India trade deal agreed earlier this year, as Europeans diversify geopolitically in the face of tense transatlantic relations. But India’s bilateral agreements with China, including on the sidelines of the BRICS meeting, show that the EU must not take the mutual benefits of closer ties for granted.
Ahead of Modi’s anticipated visit to Brussels later this year, the EU should accelerate its plans further to strengthen Europe-India ties. For instance, it should enhance the existing Trade and Technology Council to drive cooperation in areas like AI, while also moving forward cooperation on defence and security, and making faster progress on India’s plans to join the Horizon Europe funding programme for research and innovation.
Context
The EU and India signed a landmark free-trade agreement in New Delhi in January, alongside a new security and defence partnership. Both sides aim to build on these with wider cooperation initiatives to encourage greater cooperation and investment in areas like semiconductors, AI and clean-tech supply chains.
India supported moves at the 2023 BRICS summit to agree on a major membership expansion. The group began as a much smaller coalition of just Brazil, Russia, India and China, and South Africa—hence “BRICS”—but has since grown to eleven members, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as a wider grouping of observer and partner countries that attend summits and align themselves loosely with the bloc’s agenda. The group is internally divided, and not just in terms of China and India. Both Iran and the UAE are members, for instance, despite longstanding regional tensions. This year’s summit produced a limited declaration including vague promises to enhance cooperation.
The Democrats could win big in the US midterm elections. This won’t matter much for constraining Trump, but it will start to establish what politics comes after him.
Our research finds three camps of Democrats, all with different diagnoses of America’s problems: the revolutionaries see the system as unjust and needing structural change; the renovators see it as corrupt and needing reform; and the revivalists blame right-wing populism for breaking a system of bipartisan cooperation.
What these camps see as broken in American domestic politics translates to how they view US foreign policy and Europe’s place in it.
No matter which camp goes on to determine the future of Democratic foreign policy, it will be a far cry from the transatlanticism of previous Democratic administrations. This year’s midterm candidates have barely mentioned Europe, Russia or Ukraine in their campaigns.
Europeans need to engage early and help shape their relationship with the party now, lest they be overlooked if and when Democrats do come to power.
What comes after Trump
This summer, the FIFA World Cup turned the world’s attention to America while America turned on much of the world. As Iran was due to play Egypt in Seattle, the US launched new strikes in its four-month war with the country. On semi-final day, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social an AI-doctored image of a map showing Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Venezuela covered with an American flag. And just days after Trump handed the World Cup trophy to the Spanish national team, his administration announced sweeping 10% baseline tariffs on 80 countries. The juxtaposition of tournament host and wartime belligerent reflects the position America now occupies in European strategic thinking: too central to ignore and too disruptive to rely on.
Europeans hoping that a midterm victory for Democrats in November will bring a reversal of this foreign policy should not hold their breath. If the party wins a majority of seats in one or both chambers of Congress—which is looking likely—they may be able to attach provisions to bills, launch investigations, issue subpoenas and lambast some of Trump’s poor foreign policy choices. But the second Trump administration has shown it will route around Congress and confront it with delays, hostility and vitriol, limiting any capacity for oversight. Having spent its first 18 months in power ignoring a friendly Republican Congress, one with a Democratic majority has even slimmer chances. In other words, little will change until the occupant of the White House does.
For now, the Democrats’ real power resides not in stopping the current administration but in shaping what comes next. Democratic candidates competing across the US—for both primaries and generals—have a wide ideological range, from “democratic socialists” to “centrists”. While they all heavily criticise Trump and his administration, they have different diagnoses for where the dysfunction began, what sustains it and what needs to be done about it. Engaged in party primaries across the country, Democratic candidates are putting forward competing answers to the two central questions Americans are asking themselves: “What went wrong?” and “How do we fix it?” Based on these answers, we have identified that Democrats tend to cluster into three camps—the “revolutionaries”, the “renovators” and the “revivalists”—each with distinct proposals for the future of America.
The revolutionaries argue that the political and economic system that drives America has always been unjust and was built to concentrate wealth at the top. Therefore, the way to fix America is to enact large, structural change. The renovators argue that the democratic system of government was largely built to benefit all Americans but has been corrupted by money and captured interests. Their proposed remedy is to root out large-scale corruption, rebalancing the economic and political systems to the benefit of middle- and working-class Americans. The revivalists argue that increased partisanship, fuelled by Trump and the MAGA-aligned right, has divided the country and undermined the collaborative bipartisanship that is necessary for the functioning of the system and its institutions. They are focused on reinvigorating those institutions, reviving the post-war international order and rebuilding political bridges, all of which they see as the path back to peace and prosperity.
The revolutionaries, renovators and revivalists are ideal types, not formal factions. They emerge from our analysis of over 50 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle. We also researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington. In doing so, we found that sorting candidates by their messages about the underlying cause of what has gone wrong in America proved to reliably predict how a candidate discusses domestic and global problems. For example, revolutionaries support Europe’s strategic autonomy but would dislike a Europe defined by militarisation and austerity; renovators see Europe as a potential partner on anti-corruption, taxation and democracy, as long as Europeans provide for their own security; and revivalists remain attached to the NATO alliance but are still unlikely to restore the old division of labour.
The ideological battles between Democrats will matter more than the arithmetic of the Senate or the House for the next two years. One of these three camps will lead the party’s ideological charge for the next presidential race, if not the next presidency. Leaders across Europe should not wait to see which will prevail. Rather, they should engage with these camps well before the presidential race gets under way. They may then be able to shape the thinking and policy proposals that Democrats put on the table between now and 2028, and beyond.
The Democratic camps
Democrats—from New York democratic socialists to staunch Iowa moderates—have more in common than not. Practically everyone in the party believes Trump is a problem and that he and the MAGA movement have fundamentally changed American democracy for the worse. Many view widespread corruption as an issue and some say corruption is encouraged by the system itself.
But while the policy views of the three Democratic camps overlap, there are a few key points of difference. To illustrate these characteristics more clearly, this paper focuses on key individuals who have gained national attention, are running in close races, or are largely representative of what other ideologically aligned candidates say. It is rare for a candidate to be a perfect “revolutionary” or “revivalist” because they must answer to constituencies with divergent interests and disparate views of American and global affairs. Some candidates will even recognise themselves across different camps. Nevertheless, these three camps represent sensitivities that are bound to clash in the primaries until one of them breaks through and is championed by the 2028 Democratic nominee for president. Understanding them helps anticipate the direction of US policy in the brouhaha of its politics.
The revolutionaries
The revolutionaries maintain that the political and economic order in the US is functioning as designed: to serve concentrated wealth rather than the American people. The enemy, in revolutionaries’ rhetoric, is not necessarily any one person or party (such as Trump or the Republicans) but the economic and political system that consistently benefits the ruling class. Only a structural transformation of the system would finally make it work for the people.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in his primary victory speech put the thesis as such: “It turns out that the reason so many of us ain’t got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. That is the thing we are taking on now”. El-Sayed, who is a former public health official in Detroit, focuses his entire campaign on big structural goals: getting corporate money out of politics, and, like Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, passing Medicare for All, a proposal for universal healthcare. Often revolutionaries’ critiques take a moral tone, such as when Senate candidate Angie Nixon of Florida talks about cruelty out of Washington, or denounces the “liars” and “cheaters” in office.
Their theory of power follows: winning office is useful, but only insofar as it can be used to structurally change power dynamics between a ruling corporate class and average working Americans. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when asked about a potential run for president in 2028, responded: “My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, house seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever.”
On foreign policy, the revolutionaries argue that the current political system led America on an inevitable path of hyper-militarisation, threat inflation, an over-extension of its financial and human resources in military adventurism, and the reproduction of domestic systemic racism into foreign policy. They view the American relationship with Israel as the seminal example of everything wrong with this approach; Palestine being “one the great moral questions of our time” as New York congressional candidate Claire Valdez puts it.
Their diagnosis abroad is largely parallel to the one at home, viewing the pitfalls of US foreign policy as a metastasis caused by the American corporate class. As Valdez asserts:
“For decades, we have been sold a lie: that the US empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights…In reality, the bipartisan war machine has delivered immense suffering around the world while doing little to improve the lives of working people here or abroad. The military-industrial complex doesn’t just enrich arms manufacturers—it has become our de facto industrial policy, sustaining enough jobs and political constituencies to make endless war challenging to stop.”
Their fixes to US foreign policy largely follow their domestic proposals: if you fix the system and its incentives for prioritising the financial gains of the wealthiest class, all else will follow.[1] This is rooted in banning corporate political action committee spending on campaigns which they believe will ultimately diminish the influence of defence contractors and foreign interest groups—namely the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)—over candidates’ races, and therefore, diminish their influence on policy. In the short term, the revolutionaries aim to cut defence spending, bolster humanitarian aid and preference diplomacy in the American foreign policy toolkit. They also believe that the Biden administration’s foreign policy officials must be held accountable for continuing to supply Israel as its war on Gaza intensified.
In these midterms, some of the revolutionary firebrands include Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, Florida senate candidate Angie Nixon, Representative Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, House candidates Melat Kiros in Colorado, and New York congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Disgraced Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner also used that same rhetoric.
The renovators
The renovators believe the system is imperfect, but largely worth keeping. In their view it has been co-opted and corrupted by money and corporate greed and upheld by a leadership class that is either corrupt themselves or out of answers. As James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, explains: “I think we’re living in an era of corruption, and I don’t just mean illegal activity… I’m talking about corruption in the deeper sense, the rotting of our systems from the inside out…” In his telling, strengthened by his moral standing as a middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, the issue with the American political system is not the institutions themselves, but the way in which they are weaponised and perverted.
While the revolutionaries name the ruling class as the enemy, the renovators see the villain as a narrower collection of groups who have captured institutions that were otherwise built to work for the American people. This distinction yields a different theory of power: with the right rules in place, the existing machinery can be trusted to function again. Therefore, instead of demolition, this group aims to renovate.
Senator Jon Ossoff spoke to this message at a campaign rally in June when he mused about what the founding fathers of America would see if they came to the US today:
“They’d see a pluralist democracy, people of all colours descended from every point on earth, stitched together from out of many nations into one. But they’d also see a nation, that at its height of wealth and power, fell into the very traps they most feared. Devouring itself in bitter conflict between warring factions, captured by special interests. And they’d see a faithless president exploiting this rot to pursue the absolute power they overthrew.”
House candidate Daniel Biss has voiced a similar critique, stating that: “While our families struggle to get ahead, politicians in Washington line their own pockets and special interests and wealthy donors flood our political system with money to protect their own power and access.”
Because renovators share the same anger towards an entrenched leadership class, the remedy they prescribe overlaps somewhat with that of the revolutionaries, including stock trading bans for Congress, term limits and campaign finance reform. However, the renovators are more likely to clean out and reform an agency—namely the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that the revolutionaries would call to abolish. The renovators also view the Democratic party as a vehicle worth trying to steer rather than run against.
On foreign policy, the renovators argue that the same corruption that is eroding domestic institutions has been exported, and that this is primarily corroding America’s credibility. Ossoff made this connection explicit when he criticised the financial gains Jared Kushner has made while carrying out US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Senator Chris Murphy, a leader in this camp, has also described Trump’s acceptance of gifts and business arrangements from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as corruption with “no precedent in American history”. Thus, the fix renovators recommend is twofold: root out the graft of those currently running foreign policy so American leadership abroad can function as intended, and then fix the political system such that future administrations cannot replicate the corrupt schemes of the current one.
Renovators are spread across the country, from candidates in conservative states and districts such as Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas, Senator Jon Ossoff from Georgia, House candidates Sam Forstag of Montana, Manny Rutinel of Colorado, and Eric Jones of California. There is also a cluster of midwestern candidates including House candidate Daniel Biss from Illinois, Senate candidate Peggy Flannagan of Minnesota, and former Senator and current candidate Sherrod Brown from Ohio.
The revivalists
The revivalists are firm believers in American exceptionalism and credit American liberalism for the peace and prosperity of the past 80 years. They see Trump and the MAGA-aligned right as the primary threat to that inheritance and to American democracy and values more broadly.
Their diagnosis is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement behind him have steeped the country in hyper-partisan vitriol and driven it into a spiral of polarisation. Revivalists argue that these divides drive dysfunction in Washington and make it impossible to worth within the political system. They often celebrate a prior era of bipartisanship and showcase their own capacity to work across the aisle.
Their theory of power follows from that diagnosis. Democrats must defeat Trump, the movement behind him and the polarisation that produced both. Then competent, experienced hands will make the system function as intended again. They believe collaborating with reasonable, non-MAGA Republicans to build bridges and pass longer-lasting legislation will show Americans how a working government can operate. In turn, they think a government that delivers will earn back trust on its own merits. Revivalist candidates centre their electoral pitches around defeating Trump, restoring institutional norms and bipartisan collaboration. Senator Chris Coons, who is running for re-election in Delaware, made an appeal to voters saying as much:
“At some point [Trump’s] chaos, corruption, and cruelty will come to an end. And a lot of work will be needed to pick up the pieces, to clean up the mess he’s made, to fix a system that’s still broken and not delivering results for the folks I serve in Delaware. I’m running for reelection because the job’s not done.”
Coons emphasises the damage that Trump has caused and his desire to restore normality to the halls of Congress. Additionally, many revivalists stand closest to the Democratic party leadership and often treat experience as a credential rather than a liability. In her unsuccessful race for Michigan’s Senate seat, Congresswoman Haley Stevens emphasised her time in the Obama administration, for example, and Roy Cooper spotlights his accomplishments as evidence of his policy chops from his time as North Carolina’s governor.
On foreign policy, the revivalists argue that American military alliances, trade relationships and institutions are integral pieces of the liberal world order. In their view, the post-war structures are worth defending, US leadership is needed and Trump’s destruction of these institutions is actively harming American global power. They mostly believe that the backlash against these institutions, whether it be NATO or the WTO, is a failure of messaging. Americans were never told what the post-war order gave them, so they have had no reason to defend it.[2]
Where revivalists identify a problem abroad, they frame it as they frame problems at home: the result of a specific bad actor’s conduct or of partisan divisions. For example, they blame Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for their countries’ strained relationships with the US. Change the leadership and you can restore the relationship, which is an argument for patience both at home and abroad. They argue too that foreign adversaries purposely widen American divisions, and that Americans should fight back by recognising those efforts and working across the aisle, a case New York representative Tom Suozzi made recently during a hearing on foreign influence:
“The biggest factor causing division in our country is our foreign adversaries…They are feeding division in our country. They cannot defeat us economically. They cannot defeat us militarily. So they want to take what they see as being our biggest weakness which is our diversity. And they fuel dissent in our country…”
Revivalists comprise the largest cross-section of the party and are represented from coast-to-coast, including Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, Senator Chuck Schumer from New York, Senator John Hickenlooper from Colorado, Representative Tom Suozzi from New York, Representative Maggie Goodlander from New Hampshire, Senate candidate Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Senate candidate Roy Cooper from North Carolina, House candidate Rebecca Cooke from Wisconsin, former Senate candidates Janet Mills from Maine and Angie Craig from Minnesota.
The five foreign policy issues
Primaries have at times led to tense disputes among Democrats. When it comes to foreign policy, our analysis shows where the camps divide on five key issues that will matter to Europeans: affordability and trade; the use of military force; China and great power competition; Israel; and Europe and European security.
1. Affordability and trade
Since Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory in November 2025, affordability has defined this election cycle’s messaging. Candidates across the board focus on policies that would help the affordability crisis and frame other issues as perpetuating it.[3] The focus is so singular that the headline messages are often interchangeable across the party: Abdul El-Sayed is running for “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all” while Roy Cooper’s prevailing message is “Make stuff cost less.”
In terms of foreign policy, trade is affordability gone global. And as all Democratic candidates see it, Trump’s tariffs raise the price for Americans while enriching himself and his allies. But this consensus is an objection to these specific tariffs, not to all tariffs.
Revolutionaries remain sceptical of the old free-trade order itself: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference called for “a recognition of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] as a failed policy for many rural and working class communities,” and Abdul El-Sayed called NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership a disaster for the American worker. Moreover, this camp sees small, strategic tariffs as legitimate tools of job protection.
Renovators, on the other hand, believe current trade agreements can be improved. Senator Jon Ossoff, for example, sent a letter to the Trump administration urging them to use the US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) review to police Mexican labour and environmental practices to ensure American growers have a chance to compete fairly on the global market.
Revivalists remain closely aligned to the old free-trade consensus. In April of this year, for example, senators in this camp asked the US trade representative to “strengthen and renew” the USMCA. They believe that trade tools like tariffs or export controls should only be used for national security issues, akin to the “small-yard, high-fence” policies of the Biden administration. Amid the Trump administration’s trade wars, they suggest focusing on a narrow trade agenda that directly serves the interests of both sides, such as deals on critical minerals, new technologies or other pieces of critical supply chains.
2. The use of military force
America’s two latest military operations—Trump’s war in Iran and the operation to remove Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—have sparked debate among Democrats over what role the US military should play in foreign policy. Nearly every Democrat criticised the Iran war and many voiced reservations about Venezuela, but the extent to which Democrats are comfortable using the military as a foreign policy tool differs.
Revolutionaries read Trump’s use of force in Iran and Venezuela as a natural continuation of an overly militarised foreign policy and advocate for that to change. El-Sayed called the Iran war “dumb and illegal”, but argued that the real issue was the cost of a war America did not need to fight. Colorado’s Melat Kiros makes this structural claim directly, “It’s time to reimagine our global role: not as a militarised empire, but as a champion of diplomacy, human rights, and peacebuilding. We need to end the blank checks for endless war and reallocate that funding towards diplomacy abroad and housing, education, and healthcare here at home.” New York candidate for congress Darializa Avila Chevalier puts it similarly.
The revolutionaries, if in office, would work to cut the military budget broadly in the name of keeping the money at home. For them, the deeper fix to a foreign policy driven mainly by military action is upstream: end the corporate and defence contractor lobbies that supports these wars in the first place.
The renovators view the most recent use of force as domestic corruption running through foreign policy. They are not necessarily opposed to using military force, but uncomfortable with the corrupt forces that push the military to be a tool of first resort. Chris Murphy’s office headlined his remarks on the money: “This president’s foreign policy, the invasion of Venezuela, the ouster of Maduro, is about making his crowd filthy rich. It has nothing to do with American national security.”
James Talarico likewise described the transaction as follows: “Trump promised the biggest oil executives in this country a ‘great deal’ if they gave him a billion dollars for his re-election campaign, and then he turned around and gave them a gift. He gave them the nation of Venezuela, home to the largest oil reserves in the world. Billionaires don’t just run our economy. They don’t just run our government. Now they run our foreign policy.” Corruption, in this telling, drives how Trump uses force. As with domestic concerns, the way to “fix” the incentives to use military force is largely the same as the revolutionaries: reign in defence contractor graft, lobbying and campaign spending.
Revivalists press hardest on legality and cost, but the argument underneath is about what these operations do to America’s standing in the world. Chris Coons admonished the administration’s decision to launch strikes on Iran in February for their method and legality: “President Trump’s military campaign against Iran and call for regime change are the beginning of a reckless new war of choice with no clear strategy and no clear endpoint. This is not how a democracy goes to war.”
Revivalists levelled similar critiques at the military operation in Venezuela. Representative Maggie Goodlander responded to the capture of Maduro by asking: “What is the legal justification for such an action? The US Constitution entrusts the US Congress with war powers for very good reasons. The Trump Administration must immediately and truthfully answer questions about the motivation and legality of this unilateral military action, the potential for any further escalation, and the plan for peace.”
For this camp, how a country goes to war is a sign of its strength. Authorisation, a stated objective, and allies consulted in advance are what gives a war public support and partners willing to help in the effort. According to revivalists, a democracy that goes to war via unilateral decision is weaker afterward, because that decision erodes the constitutional system of checks and balances. So, Trump’s lack of consultation widens a divide between Republicans and Democrats, between the branches of government and diminishes the public image of the US military.
3. China and great power competition
China is generally understood by all on the left as a strategic challenge. Yet Democrats disagree on just how big the threat is, whether to commit troops to the defence of Taiwan, and just how much the US should orient its economic and security policy around the strategic competition with China.
Revolutionaries fear a full-throated strategic competition with China would subvert domestic priorities. When Ocasio-Cortez was asked at the Munich Security Conference if she would commit to sending US troops to defend Taiwan, she said: “We want to make sure we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.”
This camp’s scepticism of the use of force and relentless focus on domestic framing is clearly seen when hot-button issues in the strategic competition discussion arise. For example, this camp would rather support limits on AI development to protect jobs, workers and the environment, than to push forward on AI research in order to compete with China. Likewise, they are more likely to focus the conversation of US-China strategic competition on manufacturing gaps, lags in research and education and trade deficits, thus bringing the focus back to the working class and economic issues.
Renovators sit in the middle. Hawkish enough to want to compete but unwilling to let strategic competition swallow the agenda. They are focused on economic fairness with China and competing beyond military means alone, but also willing to place domestic guardrails on AI and the tech race. They believe competition is important, but that it should not overtake all domestic needs. For example, they would advocate for the need for data centres to be energy and water self-sufficient, or even call for moratoriums on data centres, even if that threatens frontier model development.
4. Israel
Israel is where the three camps separate most cleanly along a single question: what, if anything, should America sell or give to Israel?
This is a central issue for the revolutionaries, who maintain that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. This camp has concluded that conditioning aid to Israel, the previous progressive position, is no longer a viable measure to ensure any meaningful end to the conflict or long-term peace. Their preferred policy is a full arms embargo on Israel, including defensive systems.
This distinction has already defined a few primary elections. New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the congressional primary against Representative Adriano Espaillat, ran on “babies not bombs”, promising to vote to halt arms sales to Israel. Melat Kiros, who unseated nearly-30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado, called for a full arms embargo to Israel and closed her victory speech leading a “Free Palestine” chant. El-Sayed takes this same position: “I support an immediate arms embargo on Israel and reject the false differentiation between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons.”
The renovators often make that distinction and are primarily focused on the need for change in the US-Israel relationship. Their belief that the system must be reformed is clearly reflected in their positions towards Israel. James Talarico, for example, has said he would work to ban the sale of offensive military weapons to Israel while still supporting Israel’s defensive systems. Talarico has declined to call it a genocide but has called the destruction in Gaza a “moral disaster”. Senator Jon Ossoff similarly told constituents that he voted against sending rifles to Israel because of the “extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza”, and defended his vote for air-to-ground missiles because of Israel’s need to be able “to strike those who would launch missiles and rockets at Israeli civilians.” Senator Murphy, likewise, voted with Bernie Sanders’s resolution disapproving of the sale of offensive weapons in 2024, but has since moved even further, calling for a halt of US military aid altogether. But most in this camp have stopped short of demanding a total embargo. Instead, they try to thread the needle between respecting America’s long-standing special relationship with Israel and combatting the structure that has allowed Israel’s abuse of military force.
Revivalists support the US-Israel relationship but blame the two leaders, Trump and Netanyahu, for souring the once-mutually beneficial of defence relationship. In their view, Netanyahu and Trump’s actions have exacerbated US public opinion of the relationship, rather than the structure of the relationship itself. Chris Coons has reiterated that his “commitment to Israel remains ironclad” while directly placing the blame on Netanyahu for the declining American sentiment towards the country. Similarly, Representative Chris Pappas, running for Senate in New Hampshire, articulates support for Israel and criticism of Netanyahu’s government. Roy Cooper, meanwhile, has flatly rejected efforts to block aid to Israel.
The revivalists’ view on America’s relationship with Israel is perhaps best expressed in Chuck Schumer’s March 2024 Senate floor speech, where he called Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” who has “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” In other words, just as Trump and the rise of the MAGA right have degraded the American political system, Netanyahu and the far-right in Israel have degraded the US-Israel relationship. The solution, then, is to try to change the behaviour of Netanyahu since they cannot change that he and Trump are in power. Therefore, this camp tends to treat US-Israel arms sales on a case-by-case basis, usually agreeing to send weapons, but reserving the right to condition those arm sales based on how Israel uses them. As Governor Janet Mills, who failed to win the Democratic primary for Maine’s Senate, said while criticising Netanyahu’s conduct she would evaluate any bill to halt arms shipments “on the specifics.”
5. Europe and European security
Nearly all Democrats see the value of the transatlantic relationship beyond the Trump administration’s idea of a “shared cultural heritage”. For the president, this is often a thinly veiled way to value the continent for its whiteness and colonial past and lambast it when he sees this as changing. Democrats, on the other hand, value the relationship for its shared rules and norms—whether these are liberal internationalism or workers’ rights.
A Democratic congressional majority will certainly not have the same disdain for Europe as many in the Trump administration do, but the Democratic party is certain to present its challenges. Some in the Democratic coalition would like to see a renewed American role in NATO, for example, while others want a European partner that can stand on its own. One challenge is for certain: the US-European relationship will be on the back burner. In the midterm campaigns you would be hard pressed to find a single Democratic candidate talking about the transatlantic relationship with voters.
Ukraine
On the war in Ukraine, all camps are firmly behind Kyiv but divide over the specifics of what America should do in support. Revolutionaries are wary of a militarised US foreign policy and an economic statecraft whose costs fall to the American taxpayers. Leaders in this camp voted against seizing Russian oligarch’s assets in 2022, and signed, then retracted, a 2022 letter urging Biden to use negotiation and diplomacy. Much of the motivation to write that letter four years ago still exists within this camp today.[4]
The revolutionaries are most eager to push for peace and they remain somewhat doubtful that additional weapons for Ukraine benefit Americans, viewing an open-ended war as another entry in the long book of American over-extension. However, they are not outright against supporting Ukraine. Even Abdul El-Sayed, who was extremely vocal against sending weapons to Israel, said: “When it comes to Ukraine, I think we are involved in a righteous struggle from being invaded by their neighbour.”
Those in the renovator and revivalist camps both support Ukraine’s independence and the use of American military aid to secure it with varying intensity. Their divergence is on the use of sanctions on Russia. Renovators Chris Murphy and Jon Ossoff expressed some scepticism of the efficacy and knock-on effects of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which would authorise an increase of tariffs up to 100% for the top-five foreign purchasers of Russian energy supplies. Murphy ultimately voted for the bill, and Ossoff against. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, both revivalists, on the other hand, vocally supported the bill from the beginning. These are arguments about how much to spend and how hard to squeeze, not about whether Ukraine should survive. The sharper disparities appear when the question turns from the war to the US-European relationship itself.
US-European relationship
Revolutionaries are interested in a transatlantic relationship that is not centred around NATO or any military alliance. As revolutionaries believe in creating an American foreign policy that is not solely centred on military force, they also see that as a goal in the European context. Hence, they accept European strategic autonomy and might even welcome it. They are the camp most open to structural boldness and the least likely to campaign for returning any troops Trump withdraws from the continent. This camp has shown a proclivity for supporting a move towards burden-shifting, but are sceptical of a European relationship achieved only through rearmament.[5] Rather, they will seek an affirmative agenda as sketched by Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Jason Crow at the 2026 Munich Security Conference: a new transatlantic relationship re-centred on combatting authoritarianism on both continents and advancing labour standards, rather than one singularly obsessed with NATO and continued US security commitments.
Renovators would likely treat Europeans first and foremost as partners on the agenda they care about—corruption, taxation and democratic resilience.[6] They would also push for Europe to continue to take an increased responsibility for its own security. Murphy explained as much during a Senate foreign relations subcommittee hearing in September 2025: “I believe in that NATO treaty, I believe in Article 5, but I also think it is absolutely time for the members of NATO on the other side of the Atlantic to take more responsibility for their collective defence.” The renovators are therefore keen on the idea of increased burden-sharing within NATO since they often view foreign policy issues through the lens of “where is the money going?” Correspondingly they view European governments as natural allies in the pursuit of tax enforcements, financial transparency, AI and digital platform regulation.
Revivalists remain the most attached to the alliance and the most likely to defend NATO. Coons released a joint statement with Senator Mitch McConnell in April of 2026 reaffirming their support for the alliance: “Americans are safer when NATO is strong and united. It is in our interest for all allies to tend this unity with care…The Senate will continue to support the alliance for the peace and protection it provides America, Europe, and the world.” The revivalists also credit European allies with responding to American pressure by committing 5% of GDP to military spending, and with this they treat burden sharing as a question already answered.
Any structural change, in their eyes, is unnecessary and potentially counterproductive to continued US leadership. Rather, they see European rearmament as vindication of the alliance and reason for the US to stay committed. Even if the old division of labour and spending is not coming back, they would restore the old processes within the alliance: consultation before decisions, allies told in advance and an obligation to commitments.[7]
The uncertain road ahead
It is too early to know which of the three camps will be the most successful with voters. Democratic primaries in the spring and summer 2026 have offered mixed lessons. Quite a few revolutionary firebrands, such as Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon, have won their primaries in widely covered upset victories. Meanwhile, some renovators like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico are running particularly strong campaigns while revivalists continue to fare strongly across the board. In other words, Europeans could be facing any of the foreign policy positions described above, and should engage with all three camps long before the American public decides which should come out in front.
Recommendations for Europe
Trump’s frenzy of disruptions too often clouds European judgement on long-term evolutions. If Democrats return to power, they will not revert to “back to normal”. Instead, Europeans need to engage with them on a new agenda; whether they be a far cry from the previous Democratic administration, like the revolutionaries, or a fair bit closer, like the revivalists. To anticipate what they may be dealing with in less than three years, Europeans should engage with all Democrats—from the familiar to the uncomfortable—even when disagreements abound, and start thinking of a common agenda to help shape Democratic policy while it is still being formed.
Expect the unexpected
European governments took a long time to accept that MAGA is durable and not a deviation from the norm. To be better prepared this time around, the debates on the American left deserve early attention, especially as they too could cause surprises. The populist energy emanating from the revolutionaries may prove to be a winning electoral strategy for Democrats in the midterms, and could well be mobilised by the next presidential candidate.
One thing is for certain: the Democratic party has entered a post-Obama, post-Biden era where questions over leadership mark more than a change of personnel. They signal the passing of the generation shaped by the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the rise of ISIS and the return of great-power rivalry with Russia and China. Strategic competition with China is no longer the modus operandi as it was under Biden. International trade is no longer taken as an unqualified good. The American left is not returning to the internationalism of the 2010s. A new cohort of Democratic leaders is emerging with different political instincts and foreign-policy priorities.
Many Democrats no longer see the transatlantic relationship as an inheritance that they have a duty to preserve. If and when they return to power, their expectations of burden-sharing will have hardened, historical attachment to the Atlantic alliance will have faded and Europe will no longer occupy the central place it once did in Democratic foreign policy debates. Younger Democrats in particular approach alliances through the lens of effectiveness and narrow shared interests and values, rather than a long-standing historical solidarity. Europeans need to pay attention to the debates taking place inside the Democratic party in order to engage the party of tomorrow.
Engage with every Democrat
As Europeans navigate the new American left, the biggest hurdle they will face is that they are increasingly viewed as at best as irrelevant and at worst as complicit. Europeans are not the focus of any of the three camps’ foreign policies. In fact, throughout our analysis, Europe was hardly mentioned in any television interviews, stump speeches or posts on X. Even the war in Ukraine and Russia’s hybrid challenges have lost prevalence in foreign policy debates consumed with China, Iran, Israel and Venezuela, to name a few.
When they do pay attention to Europe, Democrats across the board are beginning to regard European leaders who have spent nearly two years currying Trump’s favour as part of the problem—whether that is because Democrats view them through the lens of upholding an oligarchy, enabling gross corruption or being pathetic in the face of a global bully. Even if European leaders are pragmatically flattering the president with paternal references or golf rounds, they should remember that there are still a lot of democrats (not the party, the philosophy) on the other side of the Atlantic who would like to see in Europeans a standard-bearer and not an enabler.
Likewise, behind closed doors European leaders espouse a disappointment in Democratic politicians for losing to Trump twice and failing to put up decent opposition so far.[8] Democrats, too, are acting pragmatically. The options they currently have to mount a significant opposition are few and ineffective.
Which is all to say, engagement and re-building bridges across the left now will be essential for building a transatlantic relationship fit for the post-Trump world. European leaders and all three camps want America to play a constructive, trusted and peaceful role in the world—they just differ on what exactly that looks like.
In particular, Europeans have to start meeting and engaging with revolutionaries, even if their positions appear furthest outside the norm. This camp, for its provocations and innovation, is feeding most of the political conversation and fires up the base. Engagement would make Europe’s concerns and assets more prevalent to their thinking, while ignoring them only guarantees tension if they come to power.
Shape the next transatlantic agenda
As Democrats are not paying any attention to Europe, the burden of revitalising the transatlantic relationship lies with Europeans. There are significant areas—like tech regulation, corruption reform, taxation, trade and security—where European leaders will find partners in the American left if they so choose. They should not be surprised, however, if they must make the first move. Indeed, if Democrats win the midterms, the next two years will see Trump weak and the Democrats not yet strong. In that time, no policy idea will come from Washington that imagines the future of collaborations with Europe. It is up to Europeans to propose them.
Europeans’ experience of the Biden administration illustrates why relying on American leadership is insufficient. Although Biden championed alliances rhetorically, several defining decisions were taken with limited European consultation. The Inflation Reduction Act prioritised domestic reindustrialisation through measures many Europeans regarded as discriminatory. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was poorly coordinated with allies. The AUKUS agreement advanced Indo-Pacific strategy but came at the expense of French interests. These episodes reflected a broader shift towards a US that increasingly pursues its strategic objectives unilaterally, even under an avowedly pro-NATO administration. Europeans’ continued acquiescence towards the Trump administration has only made unilateral foreign policy more appealing.
To avoid facing a Democratic majority which operates alone, Europeans must think through what they would like to propose to Democrats. That agenda should be capable of appealing across the Democratic coalition, from revolutionaries to renovators to revivalists.
In setting an agenda, Europeans should connect with Democrats from all three camps, but there are specific opportunities to build stronger coalitions with the camps that are naturally aligned with European interests. For example, on Israel policy and a new US role in the Middle East, the revolutionaries and the renovators could find alignment with many European governments. On a framework for competing with China and derisking, Europeans should collaborate with renovators and revivalists. All three camps will be in favour of a rebalanced NATO, but should Europeans seek more structural changes, they would find allies in the renovator and revolutionary camps. On all issues, Europeans should make the case that they can be a practical partner in solving some of the international problems around which the next Democratic coalition will organise itself. In so doing, Europeans and the US Democrats can build a new, more balanced and stable alliance.
A renewed transatlantic programme should therefore include:
A “fair trade” agenda that combines openness with stronger labour protections, coordinates responses to Chinese industrial overcapacity, establishes minimum wage requirements and climate standards. All three camps could be interested in such an agenda: revivalists for competitiveness, renovators for reestablishing ethical rules and revolutionaries for climate and labour rights progress. For Europeans, it is important to move away from the logic of indiscriminate tariffs and negotiated exemptions. Instead they should put forward a logic of fair competition and sustainable industrial development on both sides. The European Commission should start by identifying partners with whom to discuss these goals.
A joint framework for AI that strengthens consumer protections, ensures fair taxation of digital platforms, promotes open access to AI for public goods such as healthcare and education, and aligns technological innovation with climate objectives. The renovators would be most in favour of such a proposal, and elements of the revolutionaries and revivalists would be a natural coalition. France, which promotes international cooperation for responsible AI governance, as well as Britain, which will host the G7 in 2028, should reach out to Democrats interested in tackling the issue and working on a regulatory framework for AI and other technologies.
A rebalanced NATO in which European allies assume greater responsibility for force generation, command structures and regional deterrence, allowing the US to reduce its military footprint without weakening collective defence. All three camps would find favour in stronger European allies, although revivalists are probably more comfortable in the conversation. Nevertheless, Europeans should also spend time engaging with revolutionaries and renovators, who do not see the same value in alliances, and show that collective defence can be cost-effective and a guarantee of long-term security. Transatlanticist networks in staunch US allies such as Germany, the Netherlands or Poland should start suggesting concrete transformations of the alliance to be discussed with Democrats.
A substantial expansion of transatlantic educational, research and cultural exchanges, including easier access to European universities for American students, expanded researcher mobility and new funding for joint academic networks. Revivalists would applaud a greater cultural exchange and such a vision for renewed American leadership. Revolutionaries and renovators would also welcome the opportunity to centre education, research and culture in the transatlantic relationship, rather than military. The EU could help promote such a “Community of friendship for Europeans and Americans”, which a lot of Europeans may embrace, that de-emphasises trade and defence as the only pillars of the transatlantic relationship, and put democracy, innovation and human rights at the centre. Such an initiative would, above all, help cushion Europe’s fall towards irrelevance on the American left.
These proposals would resonate differently across the Democratic coalition. Revivalists would view them as a means of modernising American leadership rather than abandoning it. Renovators could see them as evidence that Europe is assuming greater responsibility for its own security while contributing to domestic American priorities on labour, industrial policy and technological governance. Revolutionaries may find opportunities to advance an ambitious climate and social agenda beyond their shores. In all cases, the objective should be the same: demonstrate that Europe can be an asset rather than a burden for the next generation of Democratic policymakers.
Methodology
The revolutionaries, renovators, and revivalists are ideal types that emerged from our analysis of 42 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle and of 63 individual Democratic candidates. We exhaustively researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington DC from April to August 2026.
The Democratic primary races and candidates studied include: Senate races in Alaksa, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; Governor races in Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin; and Congressional races in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
About the authors
Célia Belinis a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office. Her research focuses on transatlantic relations.
Chris Herrmannis the US programme coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Washington, DC. His research focuses on US domestic and foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship.
Nevada Joan Leeis a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in the Washington office. Her research focuses on European security and defence, US foreign policy, the transatlantic relationship and NATO.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the many people who helped with this paper. First and foremost, thank you to all the Democratic politicians, staffers, pollsters and pundits who met with us for our research. A big thanks to Portia Kentish, whose thoughtful and thorough editing greatly sharpened the piece. Jeremy Shapiro and Jim O’Brien provided sage wisdom and multiple rounds of considered feedback. Majda Ruge offered generous comments and advice on earlier drafts. Chris Eichberger gave this piece its visual life through his extraordinary visuals. Martin Tenev worked tirelessly to bring the paper to its final form—life on the web.
[1] ECFR conversations with current and former progressive congressional staffers, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[2] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[3] ECFR conversation with Democratic pollsters, Online, May 2026
[4] Conversations with progressive and moderate Democratic congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[5] ECFR Conversation with former and current progressive congressional staff, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[6] Authors’ conversations with politicians, March 2026, Washington DC and conversation with Tim Walz, ECFR annual council meeting, Vienna, June 2026
[7] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[8] ECFR private workshop with European officials, Berlin, February 2026
Cover image: picture alliance / AP Photo/Virginia Mayo
Despite her diminutive stature, Emma Bonino was a giant of European foreign policy. She made a critical difference on a bewildering range of causes. She was a master at operating in a diverse array of settings: protesting on the streets, mobilising NGOs, shaping the agenda of the European Commission, creating unlikely coalitions in the European Parliament and chairing the Italian Senate. She managed to make such a difference in all these places because, wherever she found herself, she was always an activist fighting for civil rights, for justice, for equality.
Emma was also a rebel. She used her charm, humour and honesty to puncture pomposity and force people into a real conversation. She embraced controversy, both in her advocacy for challenging causes like women’s rights, abortion access and drug legalisation, and in her methods such as protests and hunger strikes.
She knew how to translate lofty goals into concrete steps which had some hope of being implemented, whether it was setting up the European Commission’s humanitarian office, campaigning for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, advocating to ban female genital mutilation, or working to change Italian electoral law. She had a sense of history and understood how to use crises to shift the agenda—as she did when she moved to Cairo after 9/11, deciding to learn Arabic and to push for a better understanding between Europeans and the Muslim world. And she was willing to assemble and work with unlikely coalitions to advance her causes, from joint projects with the Egyptian former president’s wife Mrs Mubarak to campaigns with the Pope.
Emma was a founding member of ECFR and helped turn it into the organisation it has become. We assumed when she became Italian foreign minister in 2013 that she would step down as a member, but instead she wanted to stay involved and constantly drew on ECFR’s ideas, expertise and pan-European networks to shape the Italian and European agenda. When she stepped down as foreign minister she became a co-chair of the organisation, and we felt her sense of urgency, ambition and pro-Europeanism in every board meeting.
Emma helped shape the DNA of ECFR. She encouraged us to be courageous, not to be afraid of controversy and to challenge conventional wisdom. She pushed us to be as pragmatic about how to make a difference as we were principled about our goals. Always inspiring others, Emma was a friend and a role model to so many of us—but she didn’t do small talk or make time for idle fun. When the substantive discussions were finished, she would say “va bene” and move on to the next fight (or go out to smoke a cigarette). Her death leaves Europe a greyer and less vital place. We need more Emmas.
Cover image: picture alliance / NurPhoto | Daniel Gnap
On September 30th, the European Commission is expected to unveil a comprehensive document on EU enlargement, which will be used as a basis for discussion by the European Council in October. The paper is likely to confirm that Montenegro and Albania could finish negotiations soon. But it should also propose ideas on how other countries in the region without this perspective can move forward in their own EU accession journeys.
Any Western Balkan country that joins the EU after waiting over 20 years deserves to be celebrated; the two frontrunners should be commended for making best use of this opportunity and supported to make it over the finish line. But by focusing on these two countries, the EU has prioritised quick wins. Montenegro and Albania have demonstrated commitment to reform, but also have no major bilateral issues to resolve or difficult neighbours to reconcile with.
Montenegro in particular, given its small size and its lack of significant outstanding issues with neighbours, seems ideal for making the case for enlargement as a low-cost and problem-free geopolitical gain. Indeed, commission officials recently compared the annual cost of Montenegro’s entry to the EU per EU citizen to that of a cup of coffee.
However, going for low-hanging fruit must not serve as cover for the EU not achieving its core responsibility in the Western Balkans. It should use its leverage to promote reform and the resolution of bilateral issues, thereby strengthening stability in a region still struggling to overcome its difficult past. The recent funeral of convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic demonstrates how important this task remains: the presence of senior Serbian state representatives at his commemoration has caused shock and dismay across the region and within the EU, as well as among many Serbian citizens.
A regional perspective
At the end of the wars of the 1990s, the EU adopted a regional framework towards the Western Balkans. The idea was simple and appealing: improving relations between the Western Balkan countries would go hand in hand with closer ties to the EU. Two decades on, this had led to many challenges and some successes, but only Croatia has become a fully fledged EU member state. While the stagnation in the enlargement process is partly due to a lack of commitment from regional governments, it is also a result of internal EU blockages and a lack of urgency while it dealt with a series of pressing crises.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, enlargement suddenly became a priority again. The EU understood that it needed to prevent a grey area emerging between itself and Russia. Ukraine and Moldova obtaining candidate status in 2022 revived member-state interest in the dormant case of the Western Balkans enlargement process; Montenegro and Albania recognised the geopolitical opportunity, accelerated their reform efforts and have arrived at a point where EU accession is a realistic possibility.
But the main impetus for this new momentum towards enlargement is dramatically different from what originally drove Western Balkans integration. While the eventual integration of Ukraine and Moldova into the EU aims to strengthen European defences in the face of a common threat, Western Balkan enlargement was meant to foster regional stability and reconciliation among countries that had been at war with each other.
The successful accession of a Western Balkan country may signal to the rest of the region that EU membership is possible and that enlargement is truly a merit-based process, which rewards those advancing reform and making the right geopolitical choices. However, neither the EU nor the Western Balkans can ignore the fact that Kosovo is stuck due to unresolved status issues, Bosnia and Herzegovina carries the burden of a dysfunctional constitution imposed by the international community and North Macedonia is held back by bilateral issues with its EU neighbours.
Focusing on the countries facing fewest obstacles to accession might suit the geopolitical needs of the moment, but it risks losing sight of the original regional dimension of Western Balkans enlargement
Focusing on the countries facing fewest obstacles to accession might suit the geopolitical needs of the moment, but it risks losing sight of the original regional dimension of Western Balkans enlargement.
Towards a new European approach
The European Commission is aware that it needs to provide incentives for countries without an early accession perspective. It is planning to present new proposals on gradual integration in its forthcoming communication on September 30th. A more ambitious and flexible framework for gradual integration, aiming to include countries in parts of the internal market, would encourage reforms and allow the EU to develop a more intelligent and honest approach to conditionality. This is especially necessary for advancing the rule of law and democratic standards, which are all too often neglected in favour of the broader geopolitical picture. This has contributed to the diminished transformative power of the accession process and negatively impacted regional stability.
In addition to exploring options for gradual integration, the EU should revive the diplomatic processes at the heart of what its regional approach was originally meant to achieve. This requires redoubling efforts on the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, progressing state reform of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and engaging with member states to clear the blockages holding North Macedonia back. This would contribute to regional stability and advance Europe’s geopolitical agenda by reducing opportunities for Russia, China and other actors to exert influence in the region.
The generations that lived through the good and the bad of the regional past are getting older. They might not live to see the European future promised to them at the turn of the century. Many would, however, still remember a line from an old Italian comic book Alan Ford, much loved in former Yugoslavia: “It is much better to be rich and beautiful than to be poor and ugly”. If the EU does not redouble its efforts to close remaining unresolved issues, its membership criteria would effectively follow the same logic. This would be a sad case of the EU abandoning its own ambition and responsibility.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Cary Fowler, founder and president of the Food Security Leadership Council and former US global food security envoy, and Jim O’Brien, ECFR distinguished visiting fellow and former US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
As conflict, climate change and geopolitical fragmentation converge, there is a growing risk of a global food crisis. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to disrupt grain exports, the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is restricting fertiliser shipments, and a potentially severe El Niño threatens drought and falling harvests across parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
These overlapping pressures will impact hundreds of millions of people who are already food insecure. While mechanisms are in place to mitigate the impact of food insecurity—for example, in 2022, the UN, the US, the EU and regional actors worked together to keep grain flowing from Ukraine and avert a broader catastrophe—many of the conditions that enabled cooperation then are weaker today. This has created a dangerous gap in global leadership.
Together, Mark, Cary and Jim explore how a new international coalition could prevent millions more people from falling into hunger. They discuss the roles of Europe, the UN and major powers such as China, India and Russia; the case for humanitarian ceasefires covering grain exports and fertiliser shipments; and why food security should be treated as a central pillar of global security.
Can governments overcome geopolitical rivalry to address a crisis that no one wants? How severe could the impact of El Niño become in already vulnerable regions? What would a ceasefire covering grain and fertiliser look like in practice? And can Europe coordinate a global response when other leaders are absent?
This podcast episode was recorded on September 9th 2026.
Ukraine is fighting for survival against Russia while its democracy faces a second battle at home. Ukrainians show extraordinary trust in the Armed Forces, family and civic networks—but far less in politicians, government and bureaucrats. Now, high-level corruption scandals, calls for wartime elections, roadblocks to EU accession and possible peace talks with Russia are raising a hard question: can the trust that has helped Ukraine survive the war be turned into a state people believe in?
In this episode, Jessica Hendrick welcomes Roman Petrov, honourable president of the Ukrainian European Studies Association, professor of EU law at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and one of Ukraine’s leading experts on EU accession and EU-Ukraine relations working on the RE-ENGAGE project; and Svitlana Zalishchuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Sweden and former civil-society activist, member of parliament and government adviser, now working at the centre of Ukraine’s wartime defence and European security partnerships. Roman warns that major decisions on peace could be challenged later if Ukraine’s elections remain suspended. Svitlana pushes back on the picture of low public trust, arguing that the war has actually increased trust in the state—just unevenly—and that public trust itself is part of Ukraine’s national defence capability.
RE-ENGAGE conducted nearly 600 interviews with Kyiv residents last year, at times even moving them into air-raid shelters as alarms sounded across the city. Drawing on the findings, Jessica, Roman and Svitlana discuss how a society can distrust the state so deeply and still defend democracy; what recent corruption scandals reveal about whether the system actually works; and if fast-tracking EU membership risks turning reform into a superficial “copy-paste” of European laws.
How is the far-right AfD’s historic landslide in eastern Germany viewed by those working on EU accession in Kyiv? Why might Ukraine now be better described as a contributor to European defence than a recipient of military aid? And what does Ukraine need to do differently to make its post-war vision last?
Cover image: picture alliance / TASS | Sergei Bulkin
Summary
The Kremlin is promoting Ukraine war veterans and, in so doing, cultivating a proto-elite to fill future vacancies and reinforce Russia’s militarised course.
Through programmes such as “Time of Heroes”, and through elections, at least several thousand actual and nominal veterans now already hold political or government posts.
The new preference for war credentials has supplanted the earlier trend of hiring technocrats. Russian cadre policy has shifted towards “making loyal people competent”, as in other consolidated autocracies. Technocrats will remain important, but their declining influence will gradually reduce the state’s economic and administrative adaptability.
The Kremlin is dispersing veterans across institutions and deliberately mixing combatants with regular officials who have acquired veteran status. This will likely constrain the emergence of a coherent political veterans grouping.
Nevertheless, the 2026 State Duma election is likely to bring around 50 nominal and actual veterans into parliament. Their presence could become an institutional brake on foreign policy moderation after a ceasefire or even future change of the top leadership in Russia.
European governments should remain cool in the face of enhanced rhetoric from the new elite; maintain informal contact (where possible and safe) with less confrontational sections of Russia’s governing class; and keep mobility options open to young Russians, while taking necessary precautions.
Cadres in khaki
Like much else in wartime Russia, the United Russia line-up for the September 2026 State Duma election was settled only at the eleventh hour and with Vladimir Putin personally involved. The five names placed at the top of the ruling party’s nationwide list made for a revealing mix: foreign minister Sergei Lavrov; Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin; Yevgeny Poddubny, one of Russia’s best-known pro-war military correspondents; Maria Lvova-Belova, who is subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alongside Putin for her role in the deportation of Ukrainian children; and Vladislav Golovin, a young veteran who lost a leg during Russia’s assault on Mariupol.
This choice offers a snapshot of a broader shift already under way within Russia’s bureaucracy, and one that is likely to accelerate in the coming years. Lavrov represents the old guard bureaucracy; Sobyanin, the mid-2010s class of capable managers with appeal among urban Russians; the other three owe their newfound political prominence largely to the war in Ukraine. Technocrats and qualified administrators, like Sobyanin, whose presence within the elite expanded in the years preceding the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, are receding into the background. They will not disappear altogether, because their expertise remains crucial to keep the Russian economy functioning. But they are no longer a rising force. The war is producing a new elite cohort whose careers and status are inseparable from the war. Like any elite group in other post-Soviet authoritarian systems, this cohort has its own set of functions and tasks, which it performs in the interests of the ruling circle or—in the highly personalist Russian system—for the ruler himself.
Putin set out his intention to create a new group within the Russian bureaucracy most explicitly in his February 2024 annual address to senior officials. In it, he announced the launch of the “Time of Heroes” programme to retrain military personnel and prepare them for appointments to civilian posts. In particular, Putin said a “genuine elite” should be drawn from contract soldiers and mobilised servicemen who had fought in Ukraine and, after further training, take up positions “across education…, in state-owned enterprises [and] business, in state and municipal administration”. They would replace parts of the old elite, particularly those who had “lined their pockets in the 1990s”. Ultimately, he suggested, they could become the generation to which “Russia might one day be entrusted”.
Between February 2024 and July 2026, Putin returned to this idea at least 22 times based on the Kremlin.ru record of his official and public activities (calculations undertaken by the author). Some of these remarks came during dedicated meetings with officers or their wives. But Putin also raised the subject in less obvious settings, including a forum with municipal leaders and his most recent televised Direct Line, a regular event where he responds to questions from citizens and journalists. During the latter, he repeatedly gave the floor to a specially invited officer and even asked his advice; the officer was later killed at the front.
Putin’s de facto promise to “entrust” Russia to people who had fought in the war, his repeated references to a new elite and the constant emphasis on his personal oversight of the Time of Heroes programme have prompted several explanations.
The most common is that the initiative is meant to support military recruitment by showing that fighting in Ukraine can lead to substantial career opportunities after a return to civilian life. The second sees it as a means of political control: the Kremlin can identify ambitious veterans, bind their careers to the state and absorb them before they organise independently or become political rivals. The third assigns veterans a larger political role. In this reading, Putin is seeking to push aside established business and bureaucratic elites in favour of ideologically conformist loyalists, including veterans, with the supposition that Russia could turn into a closed, North Korean-style militarised autocracy over the next 6-10 years.
Without dismissing any of these three explanations, this paper shows that the Kremlin’s integration of war veterans into the government system is part of a structural, long-term project. The state is creating a new recruitment pool of people tied directly to the war. It is selecting and training them for gradual promotion into positions of power. This marks a genuine shift in Russian cadre policy, away from a “make competent people loyal” model, associated with competitive authoritarianism, to a “make loyal people competent” logic, which is more typical for consolidated dictatorships. In his forthcoming book, “Autocratic Intelligence: How Modern Dictatorships are Getting Smarter”, George Washington University political scientist David Szakonyi identifies a broader tendency across regimes. Despite a steady trend between 2000 and 2020 towards increasing the share of technocrats in government, in more recent years dictators have found it less expensive to build up the competence of those already considered loyal (largely because securing the loyalty of competent officials has become more costly).
The paper maps this new recruitment pool by using a dataset including a named roster of federal Time of Heroes participants, their biographies, actual combat participation and post-programme appointments. These data were supplemented by three interviews with programme lecturers undertaken by the author and by publicly available information on applications and enrolment in regional equivalents of the Time of Heroes programme. The paper also draws on a named roster of 2026 Russian State Duma candidates who identified themselves as war participants, including their biographies and actual combat participation. This is supplemented by aggregate data on serving deputies with military experience elected to all regional and selected municipal legislatures between 2022 and 2025.
The data allow us to test whether two forms of loyalty appear to be rewarded via these programmes. It is assumed, first, that most veterans promoted through the system will owe their careers to Putin personally. The second assumption is that they will have an ideological coherence and loyalty intimately bound up with Putin’s decision to wage war against Ukraine and to a broader clash with NATO.
The findings of the paper confirm that the Russian regime is placing veterans in the middle and upper-middle ranks of the bureaucracy and state-linked structures. It seems to be integrating them into existing elite structures without fully displacing the other main elite groups, including siloviki (individuals with a background in the security services), technocrats and state company managers. The paper further suggests that veterans’ presence will place pressure on bureaucratic and business elites to demonstrate their loyalty to the military by extending tangible support for the war. Over time, these developments have the potential to create a vocal, embedded constituency for a militarised foreign policy orientated towards preparing society and the bureaucratic system for wider confrontation with the West; or protecting Putin’s wartime legacy if the regime weakens or pursues a partial rapprochement with Europe and America.
Putin’s need for new recruitment pools
In democracies, governing elites are renewed through channels such as competitive elections, party turnover and entry from business or civil society. In contrast, autocracies close these channels off. Personnel appointments are thus instrumental to helping the winning coalition in authoritarian regimes reward allies, co-opt rivals and remove potential challengers. Yet regime survival also depends on having competent officials to do the work of running things. This creates what political economists Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin (drawing in part on evidence from Russia) call the “loyalty-competence trade-off”: capable subordinates improve state performance but may gain the networks and authority to threaten the ruler; yet safer loyalists may lack the skills to govern.
The practical challenge for leaders like Putin is to build recruitment pools that provide competence without allowing rivals to emerge. Party-based autocracies can manage this risk through internal career ladders and controlled competition. The ruling party screens, trains and monitors candidates. This gives the leadership a broad pool of officials whose performance it can observe and whose careers it can control. In more personalistic regimes like Russia, capable outsiders have little incentive to build a career in politics or state service and are unlikely to make their abilities more widely known. So the ruler must draw on groups already within reach—or create new recruitment pools by establishing dedicated programmes.
During his first two presidential terms, Putin drew senior personnel from two main recruitment pools. One consisted of his childhood friends, former KGB colleagues and associates from St Petersburg city hall; the other was siloviki. Personal acquaintance was enough to advance members of the first group. Siloviki could gain posts without a direct connection to Putin because they came from a professional and ideological milieu he knew and trusted. The model worked partly because some longtime associates brought genuine economic or administrative expertise along with their loyalty.
By around 2016, the first pool was running dry: most available figures had already received positions while others had fallen out of favour. Although people with a silovik background held around 20% of key posts by 2008, their progression into senior civilian roles later slowed. Instead, the security agencies gained broader powers as the regime grew more repressive.
At the same time, the Kremlin’s need for capable managers increased. The return of gubernatorial elections in 2012 created particular demand for candidates who were loyal, independent of regional elites and able to manage an administration and run a public campaign. Such people were difficult to find, especially as by that time governors in Russia had lost autonomy and faced a growing risk of prosecution.
Putin initially responded by recycling personnel. His third and fourth terms brought frequent rotations of the same figures between senior posts in the bureaucracy and state-owned companies, while some officials remained in place for decades. This produced a personnel bottleneck and left mid-ranking officials with few routes to the top.
A more successful approach emerged after the current supervisor of domestic politics, Sergei Kiriyenko, joined the presidential administration in 2016. He turned previously marginal personnel reserves into an important source of appointments. Kiriyenko created the “School of Governors”, “Leaders of Russia” and other specific cadre programmes, combining competitive selection and training with visible presidential sponsorship. Participants met Putin and were presented as young, effective technocrats. This gave the Kremlin candidates who appeared competent but remained dependent on the regime for advancement. The technocratic turn peaked with Mikhail Mishustin’s appointment as prime minister in 2020 and the subsequent reshaping of the government.
These programmes, together with recruitment into Mishustin’s government, formed a new technocratic pool for mid-to-senior level federal officials (ministers, deputy ministers and departmental directors), as well as senior regional officials. As a result, between 2017 and 2024, almost 400 people were trained through the School of Governors, and 52 graduates went on to become heads of regions. The Leaders of Russia programme produced similar results, with more focus on the federal level. Szakonyi’s biographical database of 1,578 senior Russian officials shows that roughly one in six top officials serving in 2024 was a technocrat, nearly three times the share in 2000.
Yet the prolonged war in Ukraine may have eroded the confidence of Putin and his circle in the technocratic recruitment pool. Technocrats appeared insufficiently committed to the war, while some failed on tasks central to it, including the construction of fortifications in the frontline Kursk region. Russia’s technocratic turn is now losing momentum, and Putin’s relationship even with key figures in this group, such as central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina, appears to be changing. This has made the creation and expansion of a new, more reliably loyal recruitment pool increasingly urgent.
Federal “heroes”: Filling the bureaucracy’s middle ranks
The Time of Heroes programme announced by Putin in February 2024 is the main vehicle for building the recruitment pool needed for his new “elite”. It is run by the Higher School of Public Administration of RANEPA (the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). The programme follows the model of earlier cadre initiatives, combining lectures and team building with practical placements. In 2025, it effectively supplanted the technocrat-orientated School of Governors, whose next intake was postponed. (The next section in this paper discusses the regional Time of Heroes variants, which were set up later.)
Time of Heroes is open only to participants in Russia’s war against Ukraine, including contract soldiers and mobilised servicemen with a university degree. Official figures show more than 65,000 people applied online and underwent initial testing for the programme’s two federal cohorts in 2024 and 2025. Just under 170 progressed to in-person training.
Both in-person cohorts began the programme with a two-week voyage aboard a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk to the North Pole and back. The journey was symbolically important, given the place of the Arctic in the worldview of Russia’s ruling elite. But it also served a political purpose: two weeks of isolation from the outside world provided an intensive opening exercise in cohort-building for participants.
Overall, however, Time of Heroes devotes relatively little time to such activities. Instead, it focuses on honing participants’ hard skills and giving them practical administrative experience. In contrast, School of Governors puts the trainee technocrats through numerous team building, patriotic and sometimes extreme exercises, including jumping into water from a 7-metre-high cliff and lying beneath a moving tank. Hard skills and practical administrative work account for 68% of Time of Heroes compared with 34% of the School of Governors. Team building and activities intended to foster horizontal ties make up just 11% against 35%. For all these differences, the programmes devote a similar share of 11-13% to “political information”: talks by senior stateofficials and propagandists on national priorities and patriotism.
The contrast between the two programmes suggests a shift from the “make competent people loyal” cadre model to “make loyal people competent”. School of Governors appears to have selected recruits for their administrative ability and then worked to bind them more closely to the regime. By contrast, Time of Heroes treats participation in the war as proof of ideological loyalty and concentrates on turning those already trusted by the Kremlin into capable administrators.
Early expert and media commentary questioned whether the Time of Heroes programme was genuine. It suggested that serving officials and politicians might simply use it to advance their careers without experiencing real combat. But the author’s research of all 169 participants in the two Time of Heroes cohorts (see detailed methodology of data collection and analysis in the appendix) suggests it does provide a genuine route into civilian career for military personnel who have fought in Ukraine.
Of the participants, 84% have exclusively military backgrounds. Another 9% moved between military and civilian work, either joining the armed forces after a brief civilian career or returning to them following the full-scale invasion. Junior officers—from lieutenant to captain—and senior officers—from major to colonel—together account for around 90%; only a handful are generals. Participants’ average age is 40. The programme includes 159 men and 10 women, most of the latter medical officers who worked as critical-care specialists or surgeons, likely close to the frontline.
Drawing on official Russian sources, independent media investigations and Ukrainian projects, we found strong evidence of actual combat participation for 94% of the 156 participants whose records we could assess (out of the 169 in total). Moreover, almost 40% of the recruits have been awarded major combat decorations, with recipients concentrated in the second cohort of the programme. In addition, at least 13 have been accused of war crimes, including involvement in some of the most notorious crimes committed in the Kyiv region in spring 2022. Public records or participants’ interviews indicate that almost half were seriously wounded. Some, including participants later appointed to senior government posts, applied to the programme directly from hospital after sustaining severe injuries.
One lecturer on the programme summed up the participants as “very simple, well-drilled Russian blokes”. Another said that after a trial class on a very specific economic topic, he had to simplify an already adapted syllabus even further to accommodate participants who “could not focus for even half an hour”, which he thought might be a consequence of their injuries.
Progression
Nevertheless, by July 2026, 108 of the 169 participants in the two Time of Heroes cohorts had been appointed to posts at different levels of government or in state-owned companies. Another four had continued working in the government posts they held before entering the programme, although one was later killed in an explosion after returning from the front. Yet none of the biographical or service-related characteristics described above is a statistically significant predictor of receiving an appointment. This confirms thatthe programme appears to genuinely serve as a route for upward mobility and starting point into a civilian career for participants.
Although Time of Heroes is a federal programme, only just over half entered federal-level bodies. The remainder secured appointments on the regional or municipal level.
For this analysis, all appointments were grouped by their primary function into four categories. “Management” covers posts carrying substantive responsibility for running a particular sector, organisation or segment of the economy, mostly in the form of heading a ministry department or state-company division. “Ideology” includes youth policy, patriotic education and state messaging, including posts in Yunarmiya, Znanie and Movement of the First—state-sponsored organisations for patriotic education, revived from its Soviet predecessors. “Veteran liaison” covers non-security roles supporting veterans and their families. “Security liaison” refers to civilian posts coordinating with the security services in regional government or at strategically important enterprises.
Management is the largest category at both federal and regional levels, accounting for 47-54% of appointments. These posts frequently place veterans in sectors in which they have no relevant education or training. Such mismatches are not unprecedented in the Russian bureaucracy, but they had become less common at federal level as technocratic recruitment gained ground from the mid-2010s. Veteran appointments therefore represent a partial departure from that recent trend.
For roughly the other half of appointees, the Kremlin has found three more clearly defined uses: of ideology, veteran liaison and security liaison, as outlined above. These narrower remits better fit veterans’ profiles, require less general administrative expertise and serve the Kremlin’s immediate and medium-term needs.
Ideological roles are concentrated at the federal level, where they make up 35% of appointments. They turn veterans into public advocates for the war and use them as an additional tool for the ideologisation of primary and secondary education. Golovin, mentioned earlier as the fifth-placed candidate on United Russia’s election list, now heads Yunarmiya’s Main Staff; the youth movement operates through schools and cadet classes. Meanwhile, the federal education ministry department responsible for pupils’ moral and patriotic upbringing is headed by Igor Yurgin, who previously commanded an assault unit of convicts and mobilised soldiers notorious for high-casualty “meat assaults”.
The smaller security liaison category supports security coordination in the regions and at strategically important industrial facilities. Typically, a veteran becomes the civilian institution’s interlocutor with the military and siloviki. Their background is expected to help them understand security requirements while negotiating how these are applied, so that civilian administration or operations are not unduly disrupted. Examples include a deputy governor overseeing public safety and relations with the police and security agencies, or an adviser to the head of the federal civil aviation agency handling relations with the defence ministry.
Veterans’ career trajectories suggest that appointments usually build on existing connections. In 88% of cases in which a veteran received a regional post, it was in their home region (defined as a place of birth, education or extended previous military service). In around 45% of cases, the appointment also matched the institution or region of the participant’s first or second internship in Time of Heroes.
Together with the division of appointments among the four categories, these patterns point to a practical approach adopted by the programme’s supervisors in the presidential administration. On the one hand, their objective is to find managerial posts for as many participants as possible across a wide range of sectors and regions. This gives the Kremlin a pool of loyal candidates who have acquired relevant experience, available for when Putin later calls for a veteran to fill a particular and more high-ranking vacancy. On the other hand, it seems that the supervisors are also using veterans to address medium-term political aims for the regime. This is producing a group that promotes militarised values in education and youth policy, a second group that mediates between the state and dissatisfied servicemen and their families, and a third that connects civilian institutions with the security apparatus.
At this stage, veterans’ longer-term prospects do not appear to differ substantially according to the function of their first appointment. The exception is with the municipal posts, which carry the least status and appear unlikely to provide a route to significant promotion. Across federal and regional appointments, subsequent advancement may depend more on performance and the appointee’s relationship with their senior supervisor than on the initial brief.
The timing and sequencing of appointments support this interpretation. Initial batches follow Russia’s electoral calendar, peaking around the annual voting day in September. Veterans who perform well in their posts can then be fast-tracked from regional to federal ministry; from deputy director to director of a state organisation; from deputy governor to governor; or some receive a symbolic but higher-status seat on a presidential commission alongside more managerial appointments. For at least 10 veterans, the September 2026 State Duma election is likely to be the next step, giving them a second or third appointment.
One programme lecturer described a similar logic with reference to the project’s length and multiple stages: all the “capable” and “more or less healthy” veterans had already received government posts. Meanwhile, those “in good standing” with their current senior supervisors were being lined up for promotion.
Yet Time of Heroes also serves a third, more immediate political function. When the programme was launched, analysts ofteninterpreted it chiefly as a publicity instrument: by showcasing veterans entering prestigious civilian careers, the Kremlin could present wartime service as a route to social mobility, encourage contract enlistment and reassure servicemen that their participation in the war would be rewarded after their return to civilian life. How far the appointments perform this function becomes clearer when the substantive authority they confer is considered alongside the recipients’ previous careers.
By July 2026, no war veteran had reached the highest state offices, such as federal minister, head of a federal agency or deputy prime minister. Only four of the 108 appointees had reached the next tier down in the nomenklatura hierarchy, which includes governors and presidential envoys.
Of these, only Alexander Shuvaev, appointed governor of Belgorod region in spring 2026, had pursued an exclusively military career before 2022. His promotion illustrates the career ladder envisaged by the programme: after gaining short civilian experience as deputy governor in another region, he was selected when Putin called for a veteran to fill the more senior vacancy, becoming governor of a region bordering Ukraine where his frontline background seems more relevant.
However, the remaining three senior appointees entered the programme with prior political or bureaucratic experience. Artyom Zhoga, among the programme’s first appointees, went straight into the post of presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District. He had fought in Ukraine since 2014 but began building a political career in the occupied territories from 2023. The other two, Yevgeny Pervyshov and Maria Kostyuk, already had bureaucratic careers before 2022; the war and the programme accelerated their advancement into governorships. Kostyuk offers the clearest example of this political function. Formally the programme’s head rather than a participant, she nevertheless appeared on the participant lists supplied to us. The programme’s official website also regularlypresents her governorship as one of the promotions produced by Time of Heroes. Kostyuk has not seen combat, but after her son was killed in 2022, she developed a nationally prominent pro-war media project and moved into veteran policy roles, helping her advance from a senior regional administrative post to governor.
These four senior appointments provide the Kremlin with highly visible examples of the social mobility promised by the programme. But they remain exceptions within its broader record. Ninety-two of the 108 appointments (85%) have settled in the middle and upper-middle ranks. Career military personnel hold most of these posts, which carry real but bounded authority, from heads of departments, units and public organisations to deputy ministers and senior managers in state-linked companies. Another 12 received positions such as advisers and project officers; nine of these came from military backgrounds and the remaining three had held only junior civilian roles before 2022.
Taken together, the appointments reveal a managed career pipeline. Time of Heroes supplies visible success stories for the Kremlin’s recruitment campaign, deploys veterans to meet immediate wartime needs and endows a broader cohort with the civilian experience needed for possible promotion. Advancement remains selective and dependent on existing patrons. This allows the presidential administration to build a reserve of war-linked officials while retaining control over when and how far they rise.
Regional “heroes”: Managing the return from war
In December 2024, Putin again invoked the idea of a new elite and ordered Russia’s regions to set up their own versions of Time of Heroes. Their purpose, he said, was to bring into “regional teams” people for whom “a sense of duty and service to society and the country come first”. Five months later, the Kremlin issued a requirement for Russia’s regions to train up 30-60 veterans each year. (This requirement joined metrics including poverty levels, access to healthcare and demographic trends.) In effect, the shift in federal cadre policy was extended to the regions, to be led largely by technocratic governors appointed under the previous recruitment model.
During 2025, every Russian region except Moscow launched its own equivalent; the capital apparently treated hosting the federal programme as sufficient. Regional programmes largely replicate the federal scheme: they recruit locally rooted combat veterans for posts in their home administrations, combine classroom instruction with practical placements and mentoring by serving officials, and are often delivered through regional RANEPA campuses. Federal Time of Heroes graduates serve as mentors or sit on their public councils.
The authoritarian dynamic in Russian centre-region relations rewards governors for demonstrating zealous, often excessive, compliance with Moscow’s demands. This existing dynamic is now also shaped by the Kremlin’s wartime priorities and thus produced the usual bureaucratic competition among regions over meeting the new veteran-training target. This saw governors attempt to give their own programmes maximum publicity, devise inventivenames such as “The Call of Stalingrad” and “Valour of the Mountains”, and try to exceed the targets set by Moscow. By September 2026, one region had already run three separate, consecutive cohorts, more than the federal analogue; 31 (out of more than 80 regions) had formally enrolled more than 60 participants in a single cohort.
According to official regional figures, almost 44,000 people have applied to these programmes since 2024, with nearly 4,500 admitted. This puts the acceptance rate at around 10%, well above the 0.26% acceptance rate for the federal programme. But around 1,200 of those formally admitted to regional programmes remained in a deferred pool because they were still deployed. Both the use and size of this pool grew after the Kremlin introduced a rule preventing programmes from taking personnel away from the front.
In absolute terms, large regions with major military garrisons lead the number of enrolled veterans on their programmes. Moscow oblast received 2,400 applications, followed by Bashkortostan with 2,026 and Krasnodar region with 2,000. Formal enrolment followed a different pattern. Among regions with more than one million residents, Tula recorded the highest rate, with 130 admissions, or 8.93 per 100,000 residents, followed by Kursk (8.19) and Kaliningrad (6.78).
There is no statistically significant relationship between enrolment and either basic regional socioeconomic indicators or confirmed military deaths. Among regions with more than one million residents, the 10 with the highest per capita enrolment together recorded 8.2 confirmed military deaths per 10,000 residents, below the national rate of 9.05. Higher wartime losses therefore did not systematically translate into larger regional training cohorts.
Instead, the scale of regional programmes highly likely depends on an administrative and political choice by governors. The outliers are often regions whose governors have personal reasons to overperform. The Jewish Autonomous Region received almost 11 times the median number of applications, while Tambov enrolled as many participants as Moscow region despite having one-ninth of its population. As noted, governors Kostyuk and Pervyshov took part in the federal Time of Heroes programme and have a personal stake in making the model work. The Republic of Altai accepted 28% of applicants, more than twice the median, and has among the largest number of participants appointed to government posts. Following his demotion from senior federal politics to head of the poor, remote region of Altai, governor Andrei Turchak has strong incentives to regain Moscow’s trust. In Samara region, 93% of the first cohort found posts, while the second intake doubled to 90 participants, exceeding the KPI by 50%. This likely reflects governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev’s conservative, outspokenly pro-war populism.
The architecture and public image of the regional Time of Heroes reproduce the federal political demand of elite building. However, the programme supervisors in the presidential administration have reportedly also insisted on prioritising short-term administrative function for the veterans in regions. They expect to see them serving as credible intermediaries with other returnees, who might dismiss an ordinary official who had not fought, but would be more willing to engage with a fellow veteran.
This search for intermediaries appears to reflect concern that regions have started to feel the pressure of the ever-growing population of returnees. An estimated 170,000–400,000 people have already come back from the war. Many are struggling to find work and are facing social deprivation, fuelled partly by crimes committed by returnees, with some with previous criminal records and PTSD.
The regions are already feeling this burden, but the pattern of how Russia’s central-regional relations are structured overall is also evident in the context of work with veterans. As recent studies by political scientist András Tóth-Czifra show, federal measures for the integration of veterans are inadequate, and overall the Kremlin is reverting to a familiar tactic: delegating responsibility for returning servicemen without providing regions with additional resources.
The intermediary function envisaged by the Kremlin, together with this shortage of resources, helps explain why regional appointments differ from those produced by the federal programme. Although information on appointments from regional programmes remains fragmentary, veteran-liaison roles appear to account for 44% of regional appointments. This compares with 18% among graduates of the federal programme, while only 22% enter general management, against 50% federally. Ideological posts are also slightly more common, at 30% compared with 26%.
Regions are not simply filling vacancies, as was largely the case under the federal programme: 31% of all appointments went to newly created or repurposed veteran support posts, including units in regional ministries, agencies and advisers to governors. Six per cent of ideology-related appointments have the samelogic. This is a regional strategy for adapting the federal elite-building model to scarce resources: create a limited administrative infrastructure around the new cohort and use its members to manage the much larger veteran population and social discontent regarding the war.
The shift in cadre policy is thus generating a new regional personnel pool of politically approved veterans, even if most are unlikely to reach senior office. With Moscow demanding their integration but leaving regions to manage the social costs, governors have little choice but to use this cohort to draw a visible line between “good” veterans who serve the state and “bad” returnees associated with crime and disorder, while buffering the tensions that mass demobilisation could bring.
Elected veterans: Blurring the boundaries of veteran status
Elections have become the third and final main route for integrating veterans into elite structures. This was not a significant feature in the first years of the war but became more common following Putin’s 2024 call for a “new elite”.
Russia’s 2026 State Duma election will be the first federal parliamentary contest since the full-scale invasion. The data suggest that a trend of promoting veterans into regional and municipal legislatures is set to continue at the federal level. That being said, (semi-official) ambitions in this regard appear to have tempered over time. In 2025, Kremlin-aligned experts predicted that veterans could take 40% of the Duma’s 450 seats. The estimate later fell to 20%, or 100 seats, and with the final confirmed number of candidates we now know this is yet lower. This retreat may reflectconcerns within the presidential administration that a large veteran bloc would be harder to manage than the existing parliamentary factions.
The main route into the Duma mirrors the pattern seen in regional elections. All parliamentary parties are fielding veterans in this election, but the overwhelming majority of those set to win represent United Russia. Analysis of the 2025 regional election results suggests that United Russia veteran candidates enjoyed an electoral premium, aided by stronger administrative mobilisation as regional officials sought to meet a Kremlin priority. Veterans standing for other parties faced an electoral penalty, reflecting broader public unease and suspicion towards those returning from the war.
Of the 546 veterans who entered United Russia’s 2026 primaries for the State Duma election, the party ultimately registered 83 as candidates, or 15% of the total. Twenty-eight individuals had completed the federal Time of Heroes programme, 17 of whom secured a job following the programme. For 11 participants, election would be their first public post. The remaining 55 presented themselves as war participants but had not taken part in the federal or regional Time of Heroes programme. One federal Time of Heroes lecturer said that programme organisers explained the absence of a third cohort by describing the Duma election as “the real third cohort”.
Unlike the federal Time of Heroes programme, whose participants and appointees were mostly career military personnel with actual combat experience, United Russia’s veteran candidates for the State Duma have a markedly different profile. Analysis of their biographies found that at least 31 of the 83 are unlikely to have seen combat, despite presenting themselves as “SVO participants” (“special military operation” candidates) on the party’s primary website and during the election campaign. Twenty of these candidates were already politicians or officials before 2022, including serving Dumadeputies, regionallegislators, sectoral lobbyists and former Ukrainianofficials who sided with Russia. Most of the 31 claim war participant status through special “volunteer battalions” set up by officials, which independent mediainvestigations have found generally operate far from the frontline.
The filtering out of combat veterans began at the primary stage. Our calculations suggest that 427 of the 463 war-linked contenders excluded from United Russia’s final slate had probably seen combat; even a 25% bonus added to veterans’ results could not overcome the party’s tightly managed selection process. In one single-member district, the bonus produced an apparently unplanned victory for a combat veteran over a three-term Duma deputy. The veteran withdrew two weeks later, allowing party managers to return the nomination to the incumbent.
Based on list positions and the dynamics in single-member districts, our projection suggests 47 likely veteran winners, 25 of whom are career military personnel, with 19 already officials or politicians before 2022, and three from civilian careers without prior public office (who were drafted and participated in the war). Enrolment in Time of Heroes is the clearest marker of favourable electoral prospects: 19 of the programme’s 28 candidates are projected to win—68%, against 51% for the remainder of the list. With only four of the 48 veteran candidates fielded by other parliamentary parties in potentially winnable positions, the next Russian State Duma is likely to contain no more than 50 self-declared war veterans, making up around 11% of its 450 deputies.
The same pattern appears in regional legislatures: veterans remain a limited presence, and confirmed combatants sit alongside politicians who have acquired the label. Although officials claim that hundreds or even thousands of war participants became deputies in elections in 2024 and 2025, most hold unpaid seats on municipal councils. According to our data, by July 2026 in more consequential legislative bodies, such as regional parliaments and the city councils of regional capitals, veterans generally occupy only 6-10% of seats. Beyond the least populous regions, higher veteran representation is found mainly in territories with high confirmed military losses, such as Republic of Tuva, where veterans hold five of 32 seats (16%), and Komi, with five of 30 (17%), as well as annexed territories: in occupied Sevastopol, veterans hold five of 24 seats (21%).
Across the Duma contest and recent regional elections, the evidence points to the same logic as Time of Heroes. The “new elite” is not replacing established groups, although the project is clearly more than a mere publicity exercise. The Kremlin is building a recruitment pool through controlled routes, testing entrants for discipline, competence and political reliability, and reserving higher-status posts for those who are confirmed as loyal and having performed well.
This strategy also has room for nominal veterans. Recent media reports suggest that short, carefully managed trips to the war zone, followed by a return to the same job or a modest promotion, account for a significant share of officials now presented as war participants. Some experts believe that this path to the elite is coordinated and even overseen by the presidential administration, which is also responsible for integrating actual military personnel into government structures.
The profile of the Duma candidates and the wider use of nominal military service demonstrate how the bureaucracy is adapting to a new political fashion. Where officials once joined Leaders of Russia or the School of Governors to present themselves as technocrats, some now acquire a military credential through nominal service. Mixing officials who have briefly donned khaki with career soldiers in executive bodies and legislatures would dilute any “combat brotherhood”, making it harder for veterans to coalesce into a coherent political bloc and allowing the system to absorb them gradually.
The Kremlin has reason for such caution: over the past 30 years, even military figures and combat veterans once regarded as entirely loyal have repeatedly unsettled Russia’s central authorities. Lev Rokhlin tried to mobilise officers against Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s; Igor Strelkov went from a leading figure in Russia’s 2014 war against Ukraine to an imprisoned Kremlin critic after the full-scale invasion started; and Wagner’s 2023 mutiny exposed the risks posed by an armed network with its own leadership and loyalties.
What Europe should expect and how it should prepare
The routes into the wartime recruitment pool examined in this paper—federal and regional cadre programmes, elections at different levels and officials’ short deployments with “volunteer battalions”—do not capture every group whose influence has grown through Russia’s war against Ukraine. Nearly five years of war have also elevated previously marginal ultraconservative actors such as Konstantin Malofeev, an Orthodox nationalist financier; propagandists and Z-war correspondents, including Poddubny, now placed third on United Russia’s federal list; and officials who have served in Russian occupation administrations in Ukraine.
Two very recent publications help establish both the scale and the institutional significance of this wider wartime reshaping of Russia’s political class. The latest journalistic count, from summer 2026, puts the lower-bound estimated at more than 1,300 formally recognised veterans in government bodies, with their number continuing to rise rapidly year by year. What could still be dismissed in 2024 as Kremlin PR strategy aimed mainly at supporting military recruitment is now harder to treat as merely symbolic. Recent research by Joris Van Bladel interprets this expansion as part of a deeper institutional transformation: Russia is redistributing war experience through political, educational, patriotic and coercive institutions, with veterans becoming the human infrastructure of a state reorganising itself around permanent mobilisation for the war.
The present paper adds an empirical cadre-policy dimension to Van Bladel’s broader argument. Drawing on original data on participants’ backgrounds and subsequent appointments, it shows the Kremlin is embedding both actual and nominal veterans across the state through federal and regional programmes and elections. The previous preference for technocrats is giving way to people whose political credentials derive from the war. Their gradual entry into government at different levels, and into Putin’s personal recruitment pool, suggests that Moscow is staffing the state for a prolonged period of active conflict.
This cadre shift forms part of the wider normalisation of war within the regime’s operation. There is little to suggest Putin is likely to end the war. If anything, increasingly damaging Ukrainian strikes during 2026 appear to have strengthened his resolve to continue, provoking anger and retaliation rather than greater willingness to compromise.
The promotion of veterans, of course, should not be read as evidence that Russia is moving inevitably towards a military regime resembling the classic dictatorships of Latin America or Africa. The system may remain highly personalist even as veterans acquire a larger place within it. Still, their incorporation into the bureaucracy, including in the form of a mixture of actual and nominal veterans and the veterans’ varied presence across different regions, will have medium-term consequences for Russia’s internal evolution. European policymakers should bear this evolution in mind as it considers the possibility of further escalation.
Stay cool in the face of sharpening rhetoric
The Kremlin’s shift in its cadre policy means the number of pro-war voices emanating from within the Russian elite will continue to grow. This will heighten the anti-Western—and especially anti-European—rhetoric. The regime’s controlled recruitment system will usher in the more regular articulating of hardline positions once associated mainly with siloviki and radical conservatives. For instance, career officers with real combat experience have publicly rejected a ceasefire along the current frontline. Nominal veterans, whose political capital depends even more directly on issuing pro-war rhetoric, have campaigned on promises to continue “destroying the enemy’s manpower”.
Up to 50 war veterans may enter the State Duma in September. Even if the current Duma—which mixes federal powerbrokers, sidelined regional leaders, and industry (including military-industrial complex) lobbyists and scattered celebrities—already provides reliable support for aggressive Kremlin initiatives. The veterans cohort in the new assembly will matter chiefly as a source of further self-orientated militarist, repressive and anti-Western proposals and as a parliamentary amplifier of the most aggressive positions.
However, European governments should not read too much into the bombast likely to follow September’s election. Instead, they should take care to monitor the more gradual consequences as veterans ascend the broader power vertical: the Kremlin-centred top-down chain of federal, regional and state-linked institutions, held together by presidential control over appointments, resources and political advancement. These will emerge over the next 4-6 years as today’s mid-ranking appointees move upward and form a constituency whose careers depend on preserving the war as an affirmative political myth. Such a cohort could narrow the scope for normalisation after a ceasefire, during elite turnover or with a future change of leadership.
Still, the bark of elite rhetoric is likely to remain worse than its bite.
Throughout the full-scale war, hawks within the Russian elite have steadily escalated their rhetoric, using increasingly extreme threats and predictions to command attention abroad. Dmitry Medvedev’s recurrentwarnings of nuclear escalation, Nikolai Patrushev’sprediction that Ukraine might cease to exist in 2025 and repeated claims by the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence service) of imminent Westernfalse-flag operations illustrate the pattern. Such statements attract international headlines and seek to intimidate policymakers and shape wider public debate, although the dramatic events they threaten or predict have rarely materialised.
European planning should therefore assume considerable continuity in Moscow’s (already highly) confrontational course. Governments should weigh any new railings against observable changes in force posture and operational preparations. They should avoid amplifying them in ways that allow Moscow to set the European public debate.
Prepare for a more polarised post-Putin elite
For now, veterans’ prospects for further advancement depend on their performance in their current (usually first) appointment and on the relationship they build with their immediate superior, whether a senior federal official or regional governor, and with the programme’s curators in the presidential administration. They are dispersed across institutions, placed under the mentorship of incumbent officials and mixed with nominal veterans. This will dilute any shared identity based on combat experience. Most owe their new careers to presidential programmes or individual officials. They have stronger incentives to cultivate these relationships than to organise among themselves.
The September election could weaken this system of controlled distribution. Bringing up to 50 veterans into the State Duma—most with real combat experience—means they will soon be rubbing shoulders with one another day to day. They will also have parliamentary staff whose work can amplify their profile, as can their committee work. It is not too hard to see how a shared agenda around veterans’ benefits, appointments and the commemoration and legacy of the war could bring them together (and help them forge ties with veterans and other supporters outside the Duma).
A formal veterans caucus would not be necessary for them to nevertheless gain in importance. Joint legislation, coordinated public campaigns and informal support for one another’s appointments could gradually turn a shared political credential into an organised interest. Such a network will remain loyal to the Kremlin while its members bargain collectively for budgets, positions, legal privileges and political protection. The opportunity exists to acquire influence within the governing coalition without becoming an autonomous challenger to it.
European governments should not expect the impact of this network to emerge only over time. Its political weight is likely to become apparent during an eventual transformation, when an organised veteran fraction could polarise the post-Putin elite and raise the domestic cost of normalising ties with the West. Such a more organised fraction would strengthen the position of those committed to confrontation with the West against comparatively pragmatic technocrats such as Mishustin or business tycoons cautiously loyal to the Kremlin, such as Andrey Melnichenko.
European leaders, working with other Western governments, should preserve (where possible and safe) informal channels to less confrontational parts of the Russian elite, for whose members the prospect of restoring external ties could become an important source of leverage during a future transition. The point is not to naively hope that these groups can overthrow the current leadership, but to understand and identify those whose positions might be strengthened if a verifiable de-escalation in Ukraine and with the West takes place. This is as opposed to the more hawkish elites, now reinforced by the organised veteran voice.
Expect strains on the regional level
The fashion for technocrats in the Russian government has now given way to a tendency towards khaki. At the federal level, the controlled integration of veterans will leave much of the technocratic group in place because its expertise remains essential to the system. Even so, its influence and share of senior posts will continue to decline. As war credentials and loyalty acquire greater weight in appointments, the economy and bureaucracy will gradually lose some of their capacity to manage the mounting pressures created by the war.
The effects will be more pronounced in the regions, where veteran appointments are expanding faster and Moscow has delegated reintegration without providing adequate resources. The early replacement of technocrat regional governors by veterans alreadypoints to declining managerial standards. Other veteran officials on the regional and local levels have also proved poorly equipped to handle social discontent. In some instances, they have met complaints with military habits of command or open aggression.
Overall, regional systems for employment, rehabilitation and social support for veterans are unlikely to cope with a larger wave of demobilisation. Many returnees will remain marginalised, while public attitudes towards them will continue to be shaped by news of violent crimes perpetrated by veterans and other highly publicised incidents. This will deepen local polarisation and leave some veterans with a strong sense of grievance.
The Kremlin’s response to this is likely to preserve the distinction between small numbers of “good” veterans, rewarded with training, positions and public recognition, and the bulk of the rest: “bad” veterans, whose complaints or political activity are met with repression. This social group may direct its discontent against the authorities while remaining nationalist, militarist and revanchist. They could outlast Putin and create political problems for future Russian governments.
European policymakers should expect disputes over employment and unpaid benefits, crimes involving returnees and local protests to become early signs of strain. These pressures are more likely to produce a prolonged pattern of local violence, repression and administrative failure than any immediate challenge to the federal regime. Scenarios for how to deal with post-war Russia should therefore account for an uneven and potentially violent demobilisation whose destabilising effects will accumulate gradually, without necessarily encouraging liberalisation or opposition to the war.
Keep routes open to younger Russians
As this paper shows, a substantial share of veterans entering government structures are being placed in youth policy and patriotic education. These appointments add a new cadre of wartime loyalists to the ideological infrastructure already embedded in schools and universities. Their importance lies mainly in the institutional authority they acquire. But there are reasons to doubt that veterans will prove persuasive public speakers, especially when addressing younger audiences.
The broader ideological campaign developed in Russia since 2022 has struggled to win over younger Russians. Efforts to recruit university and college students into the new drone forces have increasingly relied on large payments and pressure from university administrations. These exposed the limits of patriotic appeals, and eventually failed. The removal of Yabloko, the only party campaigning for peace, from the 2026 election prompted an unusually young wave of online support, protests and detentions outside the Supreme Court. These episodes do not necessarily mean that younger Russians are broadly anti-war. But they show the state has failed to secure their automatic support, particularly in larger cities where alternative sources of information remain accessible.
Nevertheless, veteran appointments can still reshape the institutions in which this contest takes place. Officials controlling curriculums, grants, promotions and youth organisations can pressure teachers and university administrators to pursue more militarised priorities, while marginalising those who resist. Their careers also present military service and public association with the war as routes to status and advancement. A possible outcome of all this is a growing divide between an educational system imposing wartime values from above and young people who remain sceptical of them.
European governments should make use of this by widening educational and professional mobility for Russians who remain inside the country, without compromising on their own security. This year the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) suspended selection inside Russia after being designated an “undesirable organisation” by the Kremlin. However, some European mobility programmes should remain open to Russian-based students and researchers. Security risks for both students and recipient institutions and countries may be addressed by providing remote or third-country selection, individual vetting, secure communications and tailored protection protocols. European governments should also continue funding independent Russian-language media, accredited online education and tools that provide ways to circumvent censorship.
Maintaining these routes would give younger Russians alternatives to state institutions, draw students, teachers and researchers away from an increasingly militarised system, and preserve an educated community with experience outside Kremlin control.
Methodology for data collection and analysis
This paper draws on three linked datasets covering the federal Time of Heroes programme, its regional equivalents and war veteran candidates in the 2026 State Duma election. The coding rules developed for the federal dataset were reused where relevant in the other two; the collection, verification and analysis of each dataset are described separately below.
The analysis of the federal Time of Heroes programme in this paper draws on a participant-level dataset covering the biographies, military service, previous and/or subsequent careers of all participants in its first two in-person cohorts. Built incrementally through OSINT collection, it combines official programme materials with media reports, specialist databases and investigative lookup tools, as detailed below:
Since Time of Heroes publishes no participant roster, complete lists for its two in-person cohorts were initially obtained from a programme lecturer interviewed for this research. The public figures relating to cohorts’ enrolment are 83 and 85 participants. But the first cohort list, which we obtained, also included programme head Maria Kostyuk as an attendee. Although she did not participate in actual combat, after her son was killed in the war in 2022 she developed a nationally prominent pro-war media project and later became head of the programme and the governor of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The programme’s official website cites her governorship in typicalpublications about appointments received by participants. She was therefore included, bringing the dataset to 169 people.
Collecting information on each participant started with a complete scrape of the programme’swebsite andTelegram channel, using the Telegram API and web-scraping tools. It was then expanded through manual search of participants in Russian news agencies and outlets; participants’ own interviews with programme organisers or with regional media; Russian governors’ Telegram channels,earlier investigations by Russian independent media and specific war-related Russian websites and Ukrainian databases.
For a narrow set of indicators that public sources rarely report (participants’ year of birth, military rank and unit and so on), we supplemented this with lookup tools common in Russian-language investigative practice, including caller-ID aggregators such as GetContact and commercial search services indexing leaked and aggregated personal records, such as Himera Search.
Collected biographical, career and service information was cross-checked across multiple sources and converted into standardised analytical variables. Pre-war careers were coded into four categories: career military personnel, security-service commanders, junior civilian employees and senior political or managerial figures. Combat experience was confirmed only where evidence identified a unit and area of operations, provided a first-person account of frontline service, or linked a decoration to a specific episode. Participants documented solely in staff or rear roles, or as volunteers or mobilised servicemen without an identifiable unit or area of deployment, were coded as non-combat. Wounds required direct evidence, such as hospitalisation, amputation, an explicit biographical statement or admission through the programme’s medical track. Where evidence pointed in none of these directions, the relevant indicator was coded as unknown rather than zero.
Participants’ internship and appointment were verified through an official announcement, a news report or the appointing institution’s personnel page. Posts were coded by institutional level, primary function, a five-tier seniority scale and sequence, allowing repeated appointments to be traced as career trajectories. Four participants had already held their posts before entering the programme; these cases were excluded from counts of programme outcomes.
Statistical analysis of this dataset was used to test whether participants’ observable characteristics affected their likelihood of receiving an appointment. Appointees and non-appointees were compared using a two-sample t-test for age and chi-squared tests for categorical variables, including career background, civilian experience, rank tier and so on. A multivariate logistic regression then tested all factors jointly. Wound status approached significance in the bivariate analysis (p≈0.05), but because it was known for around half of participants, no conclusion was drawn from this result.
To supplement the OSINT dataset, the author conducted three semi-structured, in-depth interviews with lecturers who delivered courses or individual modules to one or both federal cohorts of Time of Heroes. The interviews took place online between January and April 2026. To allow the respondents to speak freely, their identities have been withheld.
The analysis of regional Time of Heroes programmes draws on a dataset covering 83 Russian regions, excluding the occupied Ukrainian territories. All data are current to September 1st 2026. A programme was identified in every region except Moscow. As no federal register exists and no region publishes a complete participant roster, the dataset was assembled from open sources through automated collection followed by manual verification:
An initial inventory of websites, Telegram channels and other resources associated with regional programmes was compiled using an LLM-based agent with web-search and browsing tools, which queried Russian-language search engines and followed references from regional government portals. Every link the agent returned was checked by hand for validity, correct regional attribution and actual relevance to the programme.
All accessible material was scraped from the relevant sections of these websites: news feeds, official documents, descriptions of the selection stages and eligibility criteria, and the composition of programme public councils. From this corpus, an LLM-generated set of regular expressions extracted messages containing the numerical parameters, such as number of applications, candidates passing selection, enrolment, reserve enrolment, graduates, appointments and cohort dates. Every extracted figure was then checked manually against its primary link, and corrected where the automated extraction had misattributed a value. In 14 programmes, some of the individual participants were also named on these websites; that information was extracted as well.
Using the Telegram API, the channels of regional governors were downloaded in full, together with a set of further official channels in which mentions of the programmes had surfaced during initial collection. An LLM applying regular expressions identified and extracted messages referring to participants in regional programmes, and from these the fact of a post-programme appointment and any available biographical information. The results were verified manually, and biographical data were supplemented through the same OSINT procedures used for participants in the federal programme. This yielded 436 documented appointments across 79 of the 83 regions.
Enrolment and application counts were normalised per 100,000 residents and tested against basic regional socioeconomic indicators using Spearman rank correlation, followed by partial correlation controlling for population. Each test was recomputed with the smallest-population regions excluded, as their per capita rates are unstable. Raw counts correlate with casualties (ρ = +0.49 for enrolment, +0.62 for applications), but this reflects region size: once population is controlled for, the association between casualties and the number of participants selected falls to near zero and reverses direction relative to the raw correlation (ρ = −0.08 to −0.15), while the association with the number of applications remains weakly positive throughout (ρ = +0.17 to +0.20). The same pattern was found between the number of selected participants and the regional socioeconomic indicators tested.
The analysis of war veterans contesting the September 2026 State Duma election draws on a candidate-level dataset covering nominees whom parties or candidates publicly presented as war participants, with more detailed biographical coding for candidates from the ruling United Russia party. It was assembled through automated collection from party platforms followed by manual verification:
Official sources give different numbers of United Russia candidates with war experience. The United Russia leadership spoke of 76 war participants; the head of the Central Election Commission put the figure at 52. Neither body publishes the criteria behind its figure. By our count, the certified United Russia lists contain 83 such candidates. Our figure comes from a complete download of United Russia’s primary election website, which offered all candidate profiles in machine-readable form. We collected all regional lists, totalling 18,976 people, and filtered them with the “svo”: true (special military operation) field, United Russia’s own marker for war participants. That yielded 1,273 candidates, 546 of whom were running for the State Duma. Each was then matched by full name against the United Russia’s certified list (613 entries: 388 on the federal list and 225 in single-mandate districts). This produced 83 matches.
Individual primary profiles were collected for all candidates carrying United Russia’s war-participant marker. Where available, these provided date and place of birth, education, current employment and position, and a free-text biography. Information on the 83 registered Duma candidates was supplemented through the same OSINT procedures used for the federal Time of Heroes dataset. Cross-matching identified 28 programme participants, whose previously verified biographical records were carried over.
The information was converted into standardised variables using the federal programme’s coding rules. Combat experience required evidence identifying a unit and area of operations, a first-person account of frontline service or a decoration linked to a specific episode. Candidates documented solely in rear, staff or medical-support roles, or in officially sponsored short-deployment formations within the BARS system, such as Kaskad, were coded as non-combat unless separate evidence placed them at the front. Cases with insufficient evidence were coded as unknown rather than zero.
Pre-war careers were divided into five tracks: career military personnel without public office; career military personnel appointed to public office after 2022; civilians without public office; civilians entering public office after 2022; and candidates who already held political or administrative office before 2022. The final category took precedence over all others, while elected and civil service positions were treated equivalently.
For nominees from other parliamentary parties, published candidate lists and biographies were reviewed manually to identify those presented as war participants. This produced 48 additional veteran candidates from the other parliamentary parties.
Likely outcomes were modelled under the most recent reported assumed United Russia party-list result of approximately 45% at around 50% turnout. Projections for single-member districts incorporated the 2021 State Duma election results in the same constituencies and documented cases of informally negotiated districts left by United Russia to candidates from other parties. This allocation placed 47 of United Russia’s 83 veteran candidates in winning positions. Applying the same criteria to the other parliamentary parties placed only four of their 48 war veteran candidates in potentially winnable positions.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank ECFR’s editorial and programme teams, especially Jana Kobzova, Adam Harrison and Jeremy Cliffe, above all for the patience that working with him on this policy brief required. Their substantive comments and careful editing greatly improved how the research and its findings are presented.
He is also grateful to political scientists András Tóth-Czifra, Ekaterina Shulmann, Nikolai Petrov and David Szakonyi, as well as journalists Andrey Pertsev, Olesya Shmagun and Tatiana K., for thoughtful discussions of the early findings of this research in settings both formal and less so. Several former Russian officials, who understandably prefer to remain anonymous, also helped the author test his hypothesis that technocrats are gradually going out of fashion in Russia’s wartime bureaucracy.
The author’s deepest thanks go to the (also anonymous) respondents who taught on the federal Time of Heroes programme and generously shared their knowledge and materials.
The author would especially like to thank his wife, Dr Viktoria P., and his friend Mr Churchill the Dog, for their patience, support and very different but equally effective forms of encouragement throughout the project.
All opinions and any remaining errors are the author’s alone.
About the author
Mikhail Komin was a visiting fellow with the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations and now is a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. His analyses and commentaries have featured in international and Russian independent outlets, including The Economist, the New York Times, Politico, EUobserver, El Mundo, Meduza, TVRain and others. Komin is listed as a foreign agent by the so-called Russian Ministry of Justice.
BEIJING, CHINA - AUGUST 19, 2026 - A humanoid robot plays table tennis with an audience at the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, China on August 19, 2026. | picture alliance / CFOTO | CFOTO
For much of the 20th century, the US represented not just a place on the map. It was also a point in time. When Western Europeans looked at images of America after the second world war—depictions of Hollywood’s glamour, American cars and newfangled labour-saving devices—they thought they were looking into the future.
The American Dream had an especially irresistible draw for Eastern Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, and for tens of millions of Chinese during the opening and reform era that began after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. China’s great economic reinvention was inspired, in part, by Deng Xiaoping’s awe at American modernity, which he witnessed firsthand during an official visit in 1979.
But fast-forward to 2026, and the positions have been reversed. For most people in most countries, the future can now be seen in China. Just as Hollywood once showed the world what modern life looked like, China is showing African, Latin American and even American young people what an economy built on green energy, mobile payments and other services, and advanced robotics looks like. For Cobus van Staden of the China-Global South Project, the West is “increasingly being framed as backward-looking [and] associated with the past”, a phenomenon presumably accelerated by Trumpism, with its rejection of renewable energy, diversity and its social conservatism.
In the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences
In many parts of the West, disillusionment has given rise to Chinamaxxing on social media, with American and European influencers performatively embracing Chinese mannerisms and aesthetics. And in the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences.
This signals a genuine historical rupture. For generations, most countries defined themselves in relation to the West. Some sought (or were convinced) to emulate Western development models like the Washington Consensus, and many were keen to acquire Western technology and aid, or simply to get the West’s approval. Other countries did push back against the West’s influence and attack Western hypocrisy, but their counter-models were themselves defined by opposition to the West.
Either way, West-centrism was the prism through which geopolitics was conducted and interpreted. When countries in the Sahel invited Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries to help them deal with insurgencies, it was seen as a reaction against France and its traditional role in the region. When Angola invited Sinopec to exploit its oil fields, it was seen as a snub to Portugal and Britain. And then there are the many challenges to US hegemony in the Middle East, Latin America and South-East Asia. Around the world, memories of bloody Western interventions or financial crises still linger.
Yet younger generations around the world are not even pro- or anti-Western so much as they are post-Western. For them, China, not the US, is at the centre of their conceptual universe and envisaged future.
What happened? One of the big differences between countries in the global south and the global north is their demographic profile. In the US and Europe, the median age is 40–50, compared to 19 in Nigeria, and 29 in South Africa, India and Lebanon. That means some 70% of Nigerians aren’t even old enough to have registered the 2003 US invasion of Iraq or the 2008 global financial crisis. As Cobus points out, young West Africans “never knew anything more than the US as we know it now”. The era of Donald Trump encompasses their entire political memory, and they presumably are not very impressed.
This shift in perceptions is not just an African story, of course. In Vietnam, which has long had a fraught relationship with China, young people are becoming less reflexively Sinophobic than their elders. Chelsea Nguyen, a researcher at the London School of Economics, credits the covid-19 pandemic for catalysing this change. The West’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic undermined its status as a model worthy of emulation. Many Vietnamese turned to exploring their own history and that of their Asian neighbours, including China. As in much of Africa, growing exposure to China’s rapid technological progress and Chinese consumer goods transformed the country’s global brand.
Meanwhile, Loubna El Amine, a China scholar at King’s College London, notes that in regions riven by instability—such as the Middle East, where the US itself is a big part of the problem— “a lot of the attraction of China is its absence rather than presence”. The latest Arab Opinion Index bears this out, showing that 77% of respondents view US policies as a threat to the region’s security and stability, compared with just 25% for China—and that was well before Trump launched his catastrophic war against Iran. And, of course, China carries none of the colonial baggage that complicates European interventions (or even peacebuilding efforts) in the region.
Still, China has been known to be aggressive in pursuing its economic agenda in the developing world, whether through predatory loans, acquiring critical national infrastructure or deliberately exporting its domestic overcapacity. Such behaviour ruffles feathers as much in Thailand, Mexico and Nigeria as it does in the US and Europe. Moreover, young people’s widespread distrust of their governments can easily bleed into unhappiness with China when political leaders are seen to be giving it undue privileges.
Since the pivot to China as an exemplar of modernity is in many ways pragmatic and non-ideological, its hold on the popular imagination is still tenuous. Lots of leaders in the West want to compete with China for “soft power”. But the key is not to counter Chinese “propaganda” or improve Western PR. The winners in the battle for hearts and minds will be those who offer real solutions to people’s problems and create more opportunities for prosperity than are currently available.
This article was first published by Project Syndicate on August 18th 2026
Saxony-Anhalt has returned 43.8% of the vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in its state election. The result puts the party within reach of forming what would be the first state government run by the far-right in the history of the German federal republic.
The AfD has no executive experience and its Saxony-Anhalt branch is riven with tensions and splits. A chaotic state government could deter voters elsewhere from backing such parties. But if the AfD manages to govern halfway coherently, it will have the chance to pick fights with authorities in both Berlin and Brussels, and significant leeway to try out policies that could later be applied elsewhere. This might then embolden the radical right elsewhere in Europe.
Meanwhile the result increases the pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centrist federal coalition. Already before the Saxony-Anhalt election, splits were widening between eastern and western branches of his Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), and between him and his conservative party base. The result exacerbates these and, in turn, increases the chance that Merz will be too distracted and constrained by domestic politics to provide European leadership.
With France, Italy, Poland and Spain all entering election seasons, a Germany riven by internal drama cannot be the anchor that Europe needs.
Solution
Bold action is needed both in Berlin and beyond Germany. Talk of a party ban is too late and would anyway be unlikely to quell the underlying discontent felt by AfD voters. Action by the federal authorities against stand-out extremists in the party, and its funding streams, is both more realistic and more likely to keep its voters open to persuasion.
Meanwhile the CDU/CSU needs to make a strategic decision about what sort of party it wants to be; including where it will and will not cooperate with parties outside the traditional mainstream. Germany’s other pro-European parties also need to marshal a better answer to the radical right: substantive policies proving that they are on the side of ordinary people rather than powerful interests (Piotr Buras, Jeremy Cliffe and Susi Dennison have made concrete suggestions along these lines where climate policy is concerned.)
Other European capitals should curb their expectations of German leadership and nurture broader sources of impetus, including the new E6 group of major EU economies and the “coalition of the willing” on Ukraine. Merz, for example, is now even less likely to achieve a breakthrough on the EU’s 2028-2034 budget negotiations or on EU accession talks. Other European leaders, including European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, will need to depend less on him to advance ambitious proposals. European diplomats in Berlin should think hard about how to sell their ideas into a more distracted and inward-looking government.
Context
Saxony-Anhalt is a small and demographically unrepresentative German state, with an atypically old and homogeneous population of 2.1m out of a national total of 83.5m. Nevertheless, its election result has reverberated through European capitals.
The vote on September 6th gives the AfD 39 seats, three short of a majority, requiring the party to seek support either from the left-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) or the right flank of the CDU in order to govern. The only alternative would be a government supported (at least passively) by all five of the other parties, including the socialist Left party, cooperation with which is anathema to the CDU. The development comes as Merz’s fragile “grand coalition” is struggling to pass reforms aimed at reviving Germany’s stagnant economy.
Two upcoming state elections on September 20th—in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in Berlin—could further dent his authority. It is possible, though not currently probable, that he will be forced out as chancellor in the coming months. The obvious frontrunner to replace Merz is Hendrik Wüst, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, but his moderate politics may not fit the polarised mood.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Jana Puglierin, senior policy fellow and head of ECFR’s Berlin office, in a World in 30 Minutes Emergency Room episode to discuss the latest in German politics.
The AfD’s win in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt was widely expected, but the scale of the result and the collapse of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) have still shocked Berlin. For the first time since the second world war, a far-right party is within reach of governing a German Bundesland. Jana unpacks the AfD’s possible paths to power, the pressure on Merz and his grand coalition, and what the result says about the far right’s continued rise in Europe.
Why does an election in a state of two million people matter so much for a country of 84 million? Can the AfD govern without a formal coalition partner, and would CDU lawmakers break the historic “firewall” to make that possible? Why is the party still treated as beyond the pale, even as it leads national polls? And should Europe prepare for a Germany too absorbed in its own crisis to lead?
Cover image: picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Jae C. Hong
Three features of today’s unordered world are converging to create a devastating food crisis. Russia’s war in Ukraine is disrupting agricultural exports from both countries. The enduring blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is restricting fertiliser shipments. And this year’s El Niño (a sporadic warming of the Pacific Ocean generating widespread knock-on effects elsewhere) could be the most drastic on record, causing widespread droughts. As this year’s United Nations general assembly (UNGA) draws near, global food affordability and availability are at risk, and with them millions of lives and global security.
This looming catastrophe coincides with an absence of political leadership, including in multilateral institutions. As recently as 2022 a coalition of leaders convened by the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, managed to curb a food crisis. Today even that convening power is missing, with potentially more dire consequences. Political leaders face a test: amid war, climate crisis and diplomatic turmoil, is it still possible for groups of states and institutions to confront the direst humanitarian urgencies?
This note argues that a solution could still be found, requiring a comprehensive global effort on several fronts: drought, support for farmers, the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and access to fertiliser. In all of this, Europe should lead.
The emerging calamity
Global food prices are already almost 75% higher than their 1999 lows. Almost 2.2 billion people face food insecurity. The coming trio of threats to food supplies will make that worse.
A “super El Niño” will likely bring heat and drought to southern Africa and significantly reduce food production in south and south-east Asia. It may reduce already falling rates of wheat production—which is expected to fall by 3% globally in 2026-27 (8% in the EU, 12% in Australia and 19% in Argentina)—and drive up rice prices.
Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. It is the largest single conduit for the nitrogen fertilisers most directly linked to yield and is the export route of about half the global supply of sulphur, a vital component of phosphate fertilisers. Thus, about one third of global seaborne fertilisers cannot reach fields, especially afflicting smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (where fertiliser prices are highest) and south Asia.
All this may well generate wider ripple effects lasting years. Rising prices and exhausted government subsidies in states like Malawi are deterring fertiliser use, which could depress future production. Historically, El Niño events are associated with protectionism (India has imposed export restrictions hitting countries in south-east Asia), which in turn raises prices, lowers margins and curbs investment in future output.
There are two bright spots among the big global agricultural producers: Ukraine and Russia, which together generate 30% of the world’s wheat exports, 20% of its corn, 60% of its sunflower oil and, from Russia alone, 20% of its fertiliser. But there too war has brought disruption. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s highly exposed grain and port infrastructure cut the latter’s exports by 75%, and more damage has already been done in August. Ukraine has been striking Russian port facilities and ships in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, taking over 90% of Russia’s grain export capacity offline.
In 2022, a UN- and Turkey-facilitated arrangement mitigated a similar crisis and kept Russian and Ukrainian grain and fertiliser supplies flowing through alternative routes. US and EU agricultural aid in sub-Saharan Africa also helped. In 2026, by contrast, multiple challenges stand in the way of a similar solution. Logistically, war damage to infrastructure and low water levels in the Danube make it harder to get grain out of the region. Diplomatically, the UN is approaching a leadership transition, the US has turned against the organisation, and there is no global focal point for action.
Preventing the worst
European leaders, including those of the UK and Ukraine if it wants, should move fast to convene a coalition of states influential among the combatants in the Iran and Ukraine conflicts (India, China and Turkey especially) and of states especially exposed to this nutritional crisis (states in sub-Saharan Africa and south and south-east Asia). This coalition could draw on arrangements from the 2022 deal, as well as new links between UN agencies and initiatives like the CGIAR agricultural innovation network. It should seek to transcend political and diplomatic tensions, bringing leaders or at least ministers together on the margins of UNGA in the week of September 21st.
The joint initiative should have the following core elements:
A programme to distribute food relief and technical assistance on drought-resistant agriculture and soil fertility, headed by an adviser to the UN secretary-general and supported by UN agencies. Such assistance works: one led by the CGIAR reached almost 6m African farmers in 2023-5 and, to cite just one example, in Malawi delivered maize yields 64% higher than the national average.
This will need to be funded. The World Food Programme’s conservative pre-El Niño budget needs for 2026 should be covered (only 34% met so far). But the initiative should also marshal resources for the medium-term response to the “super El Niño” and its geopolitical intensifiers. This would include a financial mechanism to subsidise efforts by states to mitigate higher input costs and shift agriculture to drought-resistant strains. A CGIAR-led sustainable productivity growth push should have a budget of $500m over three years, with the first portion delivered fast enough to support the upcoming planting season.
Coalition members should strive for a partial ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, to include an end to attacks both on ships carrying grain and on ports and infrastructure identified as central to grain, fertilisers and inputs. Its European participants especially could undergird this with support for Ukraine’s farms, including mobile storage units, fertilisers, seed and repairs to infrastructure. Some of this work is already underway.
The programme should also involve an agreement with Iran that fertiliser shipments be allowed to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Several attempts have been made in this direction already, with no results to date. Two elements should be added to make it more attractive. First, Iran’s own fertiliser and urea exports, and fertiliser shipments from other states, should be exempted from the US blockade and Iran’s imports of wheat and rice should be secured. Second, an expert-level group—akin to that used in the 2022 Black Sea arrangement—would oversee implementation and resolve disputes quickly and locally. Part-time negotiators must also secure practical arrangements to ensure results, not just agree on principles.
Unpalatable—but necessary
This effort would still face a series of obstacles. It would require multiple states to cross their red lines—or at least revisit established policies. There is a good chance that the two wars driving up food prices, in Ukraine and Iran, will escalate in the near future. Russia especially would likely be reluctant. The states most affected are a disparate and often antagonistic group. There is no single capital or organisation capable of appealing to all the decision-makers needed for a comprehensive solution.
But within this adversity dwells a constructive role for European governments. Along with the UN secretary-general, and a core group of middle powers including Brazil, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Turkey, they can bring together the states most exposed to the crisis as the core of this new group. Along with partners from across the UN system, such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, they can amplify those countries’ voices and help marshal the resources needed to make the programme outlined above meaningful.
Besides winning over the most affected states, the next step would be to bring on board those states with influence on combatants in the Ukraine and Iran conflicts. This means especially China and India. The UN secretary-general can play a particularly vital role there. Europeans can also help by appealing to Chinese and Indian claims to speak for developing countries in general. In turn, Brazil, India and South Africa can invoke Russia’s claims to share that mantle, as fellow members of the BRICS formation.
Europeans can also play a crucial role in recruiting Ukraine into the programme—even if the latter’s commitment to any ceasefire would depend on Russia’s position. They could see this anti-hunger coalition also as a way to help rally support for Ukraine in the global south, as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, did in 2022 with his Grain from Ukraine initiative.
In the Strait of Hormuz, meanwhile, the coalition could present free passage for fertiliser exports as a means of trying out the Omani-Iranian technical plans for opening sea routes. It would present this as a win-win proposition: Iran would get some of its exports to global markets; the US would be supporting its Gulf allies; and both parties and their European interlocutors might see the long-term geopolitical benefits of a stabilising anti-hunger act along these lines (for example, curbing mass migration).
This initiative is intended to be a “no regrets” effort. Even if it takes time for the combatants to join—and it will—supporting farmers and global trade will improve the food situation. Progress in addressing hunger should provide an opportunity to highlight the further contribution that progress in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz could bring. This sense of momentum may bring some or all combatants closer to agreement.
It will take leadership from both the most affected states and from wealthier countries to achieve this defiantly cooperative act in a world of unorder. But its very defiance, its assertion that common action is still possible, makes it all the more valuable.
Instructor at the training ground of the Unmanned Systems Troops (UAVS). | picture alliance / Picvario Media | Sergey Elagin
Europe is rearming. Defence budgets are rising, factories are expanding, and new EU instruments are pouring money into ammunition production and joint procurement. But money is only part of Europe’s defence problems. The main constraint is that its systems remain slow, fragmented and poorly suited to an age when military technology can change in months rather than decades.
Three transformations are hitting the continent at once. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back large-scale war to European soil. Washington’s growing focus on the Indo-Pacific, its renewed interest in Greenland and its push to move NATO from “burden sharing” towards what might be called “burden shifting” mean that Europe will have to provide not only more money for the alliance but also a larger share of its combat power. At the same time, technology is changing warfare faster than traditional procurement systems can keep up.
At present, procurement systems work as follows: a military identifies a requirement; officials draw up specifications; companies compete for a contract and, years later, a system enters service. The problem is that, by then, the technologies shaping the battlefield may have changed dramatically. Promising technologies can become obsolete or fall by the wayside before they ever reach soldiers.
Ukraine has demonstrated a different model. Operational problems generate ideas; engineers turn them into prototypes; soldiers test them; manufacturers improve and scale them; battlefield experience feeds into the next iteration. Technology can also work in the other direction: new capabilities, such as cheap drones, can create tactics that planners had not previously considered.
The real measure of defence-industrial success should not be how many platforms roll off the line, but how fast capability can be imagined, built, tested, industrialised, fielded and adapted again
Europe needs to make this cycle permanent. I propose a model called Adaptive Defence Industrial Ecosystem Management, or ADIEM. The principle is for governments to move from being regulators and buyers to orchestrators of a defence ecosystem that links governments, armed forces, defence and tech companies, start-ups, universities and investors in a continuous loop. The real measure of defence-industrial success should not be how many platforms roll off the line, but how fast capability can be imagined, built, tested, industrialised, fielded and adapted again.
Industrial resilience and human capital are central to this model. Ukraine has shown that sustained operations depend on raw materials, reliable energy, resilient logistics and skilled labour quite as much as on the platforms themselves. And because digital capability now depends as much on software and data engineering as on heavy manufacturing, Europe’s defence sector competes directly with the commercial tech industry for the same scarce talent. This makes the appeal of a defence career a strategic question.
How to make ADIEM work
Reform defence governance. Create permanent structures that bring together military planning, industrial policy, innovation and procurement around shared capability goals. Give them room to depart from standard rules where those rules are the obstacle.
Start with battlefield problems. Build capabilities around what armed forces need to achieve. It works in reverse too: a new system needs a concept of operations written for it before it is bought at scale. Treat these as living documents that evolve with experimentation and real-world lessons.
Make procurement faster and more flexible. Use a hybrid procurement method. While central procurement agencies buy major systems, individual units are allowed to meet certain urgent combat needs. Alongside that, break large procurements into smaller contracts with incremental delivery, allow continuous software updates, use open architecture and speed up certification.
Build a genuine innovation ecosystem. Give start-ups, universities and public labs clear routes to deployment. Reward experimentation and operational relevance over novelty for its own sake.
Achieve affordable mass. Create dedicated programmes for weapon systems that are effective enough, cheap enough to buy in large numbers and simple enough to replace quickly. These include drones, autonomous vehicles, loitering munitions, low-cost intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and electronic warfare.
Invest in human capital. Build a long-term pipeline of software engineers, AI specialists, systems engineers and skilled production workers, and change how the sector is perceived—presenting it as a high-technology field, not just a traditional military one.
Institutionalise experimentation. Set up permanent centres where soldiers, engineers, researchers and industry jointly evaluate new operational concepts and technologies. Test continuously rather than only in the run-up to a procurement decision.
Develop digital defence infrastructure. Invest in a sovereign defence cloud, secure data architecture, digital twins and common digital standards.
Governments also need to reform the institutions through which capability is developed, not just the funding lines that feed them. And while Europe has much of what it needs—sophisticated armed forces, world-class manufacturers, strong universities and a growing defence-tech sector—it still lacks a system capable of connecting them quickly enough. That is the purpose of ADIEM: to connect these actors in a continuously adapting ecosystem, with governments acting as orchestrators rather than simply regulators and buyers.
What happens if your economy is suddenly in crisis, Brussels offers help with strings attached—and Turkey, China or Russia can move faster? What if your country delivers every reform the EU asks for, only for a member state to block the next step anyway? And after years of waiting, would voters still choose to join?
In this special bonus episode, The Neighbourhood goes live from Lisbon for an EU enlargement game. Jessica Hendrick brings together RE-ENGAGE experts representing six EU candidate countries and throws a series of fictional—but very plausible—political and economic shocks at them inspired by real headlines: Russia’s intensified attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Ireland’s EU presidency push on enlargement, Iceland’s referendum, Germany’s regional elections and the upcoming 2026 Enlargement Package. Drawing on three years of surveys, interviews and crisis simulations, each expert has to answer for their country.
Playing for each country:
Albania:Morten Bøås, research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), representing RE-ENGAGE’s Albanian partners at the European University of Tirana
Bosnia and Herzegovina:Damir Kapidžić, director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Sarajevo
Georgia:Ketevan Bolkvadze, senior lecturer in the department of political science at Lund University, originally from Georgia
Moldova:Mathilde T. E. Giske, research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), representing RE-ENGAGE’s Moldovan partners at Moldova State University
Serbia:Luka Filipović, research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History in Serbia
Ukraine:Roman Petrov, president of the Ukrainian European Studies Association
The result is part enlargement simulation, part policy conversation and part game night. The experts bargain over a fictional €100 million EU cheque, decide whether the EU can compete with faster offers from other powers, test how easily disinformation could exploit frustration with enlargement, and imagine what would happen if EU membership was finally put to a public vote. Along the way, Serbia proposes keeping its relationship with Brussels “casual”, Bosnia finds a creative use for €100 million, and Ukraine calls for Hungarian “Varangians” when backsliding strikes.
When a crisis hits, does speed matter more than values? Can “Europe never wanted you anyway” become a winning political message? And if a country finally joins the EU, what stops democracy from sliding backwards once the prize of membership is secured?
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy director of ECFR’s Middle East and North Africa programme, to unpack a volatile new chapter in the confrontation between the United States and Iran. After months of managed escalation, military strikes have resumed and President Donald Trump has launched an ambitious new sanctions package, dubbed an economic “D-Day”, aimed at squeezing Tehran into submission.
Ellie argues that Washington has returned to a familiar strategy of maximum pressure, betting that unprecedented economic isolation and a blockade of Iranian exports will either force the regime to make major concessions or trigger domestic unrest. But Tehran appears determined to hold out, relying on sanctions-evasion networks, regional diplomacy and the belief that the US will struggle to sustain its campaign over the long term. As both sides continue limited military operations while keeping channels for negotiation open, the prospect of a comprehensive deal remains elusive.
The conversation also explores the domestic pressures facing Iran’s leadership, from a shrinking economy and growing public dissatisfaction to the threat of renewed nationwide protests. Mark and Ellie examine whether economic hardship could destabilise the regime, why Iranian leaders remain sceptical of American commitments and how internal politics in both Washington and Tehran are shaping the path ahead.
Finally, they discuss the wider regional and European implications of the conflict. How are Gulf states positioning themselves between the US and Iran? What risks does the confrontation pose to global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz? And can European governments still play a meaningful diplomatic role as tensions rise and fears grow that the Iran conflict could become increasingly entangled with the war in Ukraine?
This podcast episode was recorded on September 3rd 2026.
VISBY, SVERIGE 20260625 Socialdemokraternas partiledare Magdalena Andersson (S) håller sitt tal under Almedalsveckan. Foto: Henrik Montgomery / TT / Kod 10060 | picture alliance / TT NYHETSBYRÅN | Henrik Montgomery/TT
The Gripen fighter jet came in low over the medieval rooftops of Visby, stood on its tail and climbed vertically out of sight. Hundreds of hands went up holding phones. Every late June, all Swedish party leaders gather for Almedalen Week in this town on Gotland, the Baltic Sea’s most strategic island. This year, the military display drew the only unanimous reaction of the week.
Sweden holds a general election on September 13th, but defence has barely featured in the campaign. All parties take the Russia threat seriously, and all want to face it as one. The election is being fought instead over welfare, migration, crime, climate and the economy—and on many of those, the government parties are losing.
Ulf Kristersson’s centre-right Moderates have held the prime minister’s office for four years, after an agreement in 2022 secured them the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats in exchange for a hard line on migration and crime. The so-called Tidö agreement—named after the castle where it was negotiated—broke a taboo: for the first time the Sweden Democrats had formal influence over a government, though it stopped short of joining the cabinet. Now the four parties supporting Kristersson’s government are trailing the opposition in the polls. The Liberal Party, currently in government, has suffered the most from the cooperation with the Sweden Democrats and is now polling below the 4% threshold to get into parliament.
Many analysts therefore expect Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democratic Party to return as prime minister. Her party governed Sweden for most of the 20th century and again between 2014 and 2022, when the country abandoned centuries of military non-alignment to join NATO. What would an Andersson government mean for Sweden’s foreign policy and its role in the EU? Based on several conversations with key people in the opposition parties, in Almedalen and elsewhere: not a dramatic change. But look closer and the differences start to show.
The maths
The political course will partly depend on the majority Andersson can assemble. A deal with the formerly communist Left Party, which is still formally committed to leaving NATO, would create a different government from one built with the market-liberal Centre Party and perhaps the Christian Democrats—and getting all them into the same majority would require political magic. The Green Party is likely to be part of the coalition either way, although senior figures say the case for being in government is still hotly debated internally.
The most likely outcome is that Andersson will lead a red-green coalition, assembled over months of difficult negotiations. The Greens and the Left would push for a less restrictive migration policy than the Social Democrats are ready to accept, having themselves tightened asylum rules when they were in power. For its part, the Centre Party would press for deregulation and other market liberal reforms Swedish business wants—against the trade unions as well as the Greens and the Left.
If Andersson struggles to hold a red-green government together, a grand coalition between the Social Democrats and the Moderates also cannot be ruled out. But that would require a serious external crisis and a significant change within the Moderates.
Names circulating for foreign ministers or “sherpa” for the prime minister are Paula Carvalho, Morgan Johansson, Ylva Johansson, Ann Linde, Kerstin Lundgren, and Oscar Stenström. Peter Hultqvist is likely to return as defence minister.
What will not change
On many key issues, a government led by the Social Democrats would continue Sweden’s current course, regardless of coalition partners. Support for Ukraine is strong across the Riksdag. NATO membership will not be reopened: the security situation and strong public support for NATO membership discourage the Left Party from pushing its formal position, and the Social Democrats would refuse if it tried.
Sweden rejected the euro in a referendum in 2003 and will not revisit it in the coming four years unless there is a deep economic crisis, although the Centre Party may extract a report on the topic. The country’s dependence on exports keeps every party in favour of open trade. Sweden will also remain one of the EU’s most frugal members in negotiations of the next Multiannual Financial Framework.
‘Magda will be Magda’
Elsewhere, the change will be real. A centre-left government will focus more on relations with the global south and gradually increase aid spending. The Social Democrats have a long tradition of cooperating with countries such as South Africa and Brazil and have deepened those ties while in opposition. If Lula da Silva is re-elected, Andersson will be well-placed to strengthen EU-Brazil engagement. The Social Democrats also want closer relations with African states and OECD countries such as Canada, where Andersson has built a strong rapport with Mark Carney.
This agenda includes climate politics—all red-green parties want greater ambition at home and in Europe. For the Social Democrats, green industrial policy is the way to keep workers on side in the green transition, a view shared by trade unions and many industrial leaders. The Green Party might get the development and environment portfolios back, but they would have to fight with the Centre Party for climate and energy.
Middle East policy would also shift. In 2014, a Social Democratic-led government recognised Palestine, the first EU member state in Western Europe to do so, to loud criticism by the centre-right. An Andersson-led government is more likely to criticise Israel’s actions while also condemning terrorism. The complication is Ebba Busch: her Christian Democrats are strongly pro-Israel, and if they join the coalition, Middle East policy will become more complicated.
Andersson would champion a strong UN and revive the “feminist foreign policy” of Margot Wallström and Ann Linde. But in an EU dominated by the European People’s Party, she would find few allies for traditional social democratic causes. The Nordic and Baltic countries are her natural bloc. Beyond them, only a re-elected Pedro Sánchez in Spain—a big if—would give the Party of European Socialists a large member state. However, leading Social Democrats are keen to avoid comparisons with Sánchez or Denmark’s Mette Fredriksen. “Magda will be Magda”, says one. On other topics, such as support to Ukraine, Sweden will continue to be part of coalitions of the willing.
A rapid increase of defence spending would continue with either Kristersson or Andersson as prime minister, with the Social Democrats also advocating additional resources for civil defence.
The consensus on security policy runs deep. In the all-party Defence Commission’s report this summer, the Social Democrats fully agreed with the government’s assessment of the security situation. A rapid increase in defence spending would continue with either Kristersson or Andersson as prime minister, with the Social Democrats also advocating additional resources for civil defence.
However, a centre-left coalition could face internal conflicts over the envisaged rotating presence of French nuclear-capable aircraft in Sweden or cooperation with Turkey on intelligence and anti-terrorism, both of which the Left Party would resist. Rather than fight it, the coalition might just pay them off. “Magda will buy them out,” says a prominent Social Democrat, comparing to how Fredriksen made a deal with the left-ish Enhedslisten in Denmark, giving them social reforms in exchange for staying out of her cabinet.
And while the Social Democrats accept the role of nuclear weapons in NATO strategy, they press harder than the Moderates on global non-proliferation.
Biting their tongue on Trump
Although senior Social Democrats are highly critical of US president Donald Trump in private, and Andersson expressed solidarity with Denmark when he threatened Greenland, the party will not pick a public fight. It agreed with the conclusions of the Defence Commission, such as the importance of the American security partnership, and even in background talks Social Democrats decline to discuss alternatives to NATO command structures for large military operations. “We presume that SACEUR is responsible”, says one senior figure, referring to NATO’s commander in Europe, who has always been an American. Sweden’s reliance on American aircraft, interceptors and satellites in the sensitive Baltic Sea area leaves Andersson far less room than Sánchez has in Madrid.
If Kristersson survives
None of this is settled. ECFR’s New Politics research shows how volatile European electorates have become, and a late swing could leave Kristersson in office—this time with Sweden Democrats in ministerial posts, as the Moderates have promised.
That would hand the far-right party real power this time. Given its size, it will likely take influential portfolios, such as representing Sweden in EU negotiations on migration policy and home affairs, and perhaps finance and competitiveness too, like the Finns Party in Finland.
Even more importantly, the Sweden Democrats would fully participate in foreign and security policy decisions. In Sweden, ministers make government decisions collectively and are briefed on sensitive intelligence matters at cabinet meetings. While the party has been vocal in criticising Vladimir Putin since its links to Moscow were exposed, the opposition still sees them as a security risk.
***
A new government will bring more of a tilt than a dramatic change in Sweden’s foreign and European policy. This will be important in the decisive year of 2029, when a new president of the European Commission will be chosen—and in a political landscape that might include far-right leadership in France, Italy and Poland. The Gripen will keep flying over Visby whoever wins in September. What changes is Sweden’s place in an EPP-dominated Europe.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at ECFR, to unpack a turbulent summer in Israel and the Palestinian territories. While Palestinian factions in Gaza have agreed in principle to decommission their weapons , the proposal faces significant obstacles, not least opposition from the Israeli government. Meanwhile settler violence is surging and settlement construction is spreading, redrawing the map faster than any negotiation could.
Hugh explains why a sustainable ceasefire cannot rely on disarmament alone but requires a broader political process that addresses the future governance of Gaza and creates a pathway towards a two-state solution. He also explores why developments in the West Bank could prove just as decisive as those in Gaza, and what role Europe can play in responding to settlement expansion and growing instability.
Against this backdrop, Israelis are preparing to head to the polls on October 27th . Mark and Hugh examine the state of the race, the challenge facing Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and whether a new government would bring meaningful policy change, or simply a different style of leadership. How much do Gaza and the West Bank matter to Israeli voters? Could an opposition victory create space for greater pragmatism? And what would that mean for Europe’s approach to the conflict?
This podcast episode was recorded on August 24th 2026.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Janka Oertel, director of ECFR’s DARE* initiative, and Andrew Small, head of ECFR’s Asia programme, to examine the growing impact of the “China shock 2.0” on Germany and Europe.
A new wave of Chinese competition, driven by overcapacity and state-backed industrial strength, is hitting sectors such as car manufacturing, chemicals and machine tools. Germany is at the epicentre, with mounting job losses raising questions about Europe’s long-term economic resilience and competitiveness. The crisis is reshaping German politics, exposing government divisions and putting pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of September’s potentially divisive regional elections.
Together, Mark, Janka and Andrew discuss the policy options being considered in Brussels and in European capitals—from emergency trade measures to new industrial strategies. Can Europe protect its industrial base without triggering a damaging escalation with China? Is Germany able to lead a coherent European response amid its own political turbulence?
The disputed 2020 presidential election and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine accelerated Belarus’s integration into Moscow’s military strategy, with the country becoming a rear-operating base.
Since 2023, Russian deployments have increasingly positioned Belarus as a potential forward-operating base. Nuclear-capable systems, missile forces and military infrastructure on Belarusian territory mean that the Russian threat extends further along the EU’s eastern border.
Europe wants to preserve Belarus as a strategic buffer, yet sanctions and diplomatic isolation have not slowed Russian military entrenchment. Its continued path risks further binding Minsk to Moscow. Belarus has quietly become a major frontline security challenge for Europe.
The EU should move away from relying mostly on sanctions and economic pressure, and instead pursue a pragmatic strategy which aims to increase Minsk’s autonomy from Moscow. In the meantime, Europe must remain supportive of Belarusian exiles and its diaspora community.
The EU also needs to complement existing NATO deterrence with stronger support for countries on its eastern border, namely Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. This would reduce opportunities for Russian coercion and support Europe’s long-term plan for Belarus.
A satellite state
Take a map of Europe and find Belarus. Trace a finger clockwise, from the country’s northern borders and around to the east, where Russia is followed by Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Belarus’s capital, Minsk, is itself almost at the exact geographic heart of the country, surrounded by hills, with vast forests sprawled out like capillaries beyond.
It is from here that Belarus’s longtime leader, Alexander Lukashenko, looks out from his “Palace of Independence” on Minsk’s Pieramozcau Avenue. To the east, in Russia, his fellow authoritarian Vladimir Putin continues to decimate Ukraine from its eastern borders and scheme to undermine European political interests. To the west, stretching hundreds of kilometres past Belarus’s western border with Poland and across Germany, lies Brussels. Faced with instability across the continent, the EU’s capital is increasingly unsure about what to do with its problematic Belarusian neighbour.
The EU downgraded its diplomatic relations with Belarus in 2020 after the latter’s disputed presidential election, which saw Lukashenko’s government violently repress protestors who took to the streets to oppose the president seizing victory by undemocratic means. Although bilateral trade between the EU and Belarus was largely undamaged in the subsequent years, the fall in trade with the bloc after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created an economic gap which Russia has exploited. For example, it has stepped up its own trading relationship with Belarus and become a key market for exports of Belarusian goods such as dairy products and petrochemicals—also allowing Moscow to evade EU sanctions. In doing so, Russia filled a vacuum for Belarus; Lukashenko, facing limited alternatives, deepened his dependence on Moscow.
Although Belarus did not formally commit troops to Russia’s war of aggression, it did allow the latter to house missiles, tanks, artillery, helicopters, aeroplanes and other military equipment in its territory prior to the invasion. It also provided military and civil infrastructure for Russia’s use, including airfields, hospitals and railway lines. This year alone, Russia has transferred more missiles—including dual-capable, hypersonic missiles—to Belarusian territory and conducted joint exercises encompassing the Belarusian Armed Forces. This, combined with a breakdown in dialogue between the EU and Belarus, gives Putin yet more sway in his quest to entrench Russia further into Belarusian structures.
Now that Belarus is apparently firmly committed to the supranational union of Belarus and Russia, known as the Union State, it has become a structural security concern for Europe. Russian deployment of nuclear-capable weapons on Belarusian territory makes Europe’s eastern flank more vulnerable, while Belarus’s already tense relations with neighbouring border states Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are at risk of deteriorating further. At the same time, Belarus has 879 political prisoners languishing, with Lukashenko’s regime having essentially outlawed any political or civic activity which the authorities see as a threat.
All this has compounded the breakdown in relations between Belarus and Europe. Russia is further emboldened to entrench its military deeper into Belarusian territory, tighten its economic dependencies and integrate the country further into its nuclear strategy.
This paper examines Belarus’s transformation from a problematic but stable buffer state between western Europe and Russia to a country which poses an increasing military and security threat to the EU. It argues that the EU should move away from relying solely on economic leverage and the blanket application of sanctions—which are pushing Belarus to rely more heavily on Russia—and develop a more targeted approach. Europeans need to actively contain the growing military and nuclear threat by finding new avenues of diplomatic negotiation, and by incorporating NATO-inspired approaches into its defence policy for its vulnerable eastern states.
Perhaps most importantly, Europeans need to assess to what extent they can treat Minsk as an autonomous actor capable of making decisions independently from Moscow. Europeans should take recent developments, such as Ukraine’s discovery of four signal relay stations in two Belarusian oblasts and their subsequent removal, as proof that Lukashenko retains the authority to make territorial-based decisions—especially under pressure from Russia.
However, for as long as Lukashenko remains in power, Belarus will never be entirely free of Moscow: he is an authoritarian, and Minsk remains sanctioned due to its breach of human rights clauses and mistreatment of its population. Belarus’s geopolitical position is also at least partly down to early decisions that Lukashenko made when he turned towards Moscow in the mid-1990s—a time when most other former Soviet nations chose real independence. Long before 2020, this posture led to missed opportunities with the EU, reinforced Lukashenko’s propensity to commit human rights violations and kickstarted Belarus’s deepening economic and military integration with Russia.
In its pursuit of a new strategy, the EU needs to recognise that—even if Belarus remains a stable, contained buffer zone—the country will not undergo a full democratic transformation. Europeans are thus searching for a Belarus which no longer presents an urgent security threat on its eastern border. They should aim to help shape a country whose stability reduces geopolitical risk without abandoning the EU’s long-standing commitment to democracy, human rights and the well-being of Belarusian society.
Belarus as a security actor
Belarus declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. But, with what Russia perceived as the NATO and European sphere of influence shifting eastwards, Belarus became increasingly valuable to Moscow—especially because of the Suwalki Gap, which lies between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarusian territory. The Russia-Belarus relationship became more entrenched once Lukashenko and Putin came to power in 1994 and 1999, respectively. The two leaders are hardly close personal friends—but they have nonetheless developed strong cultural and economic ties based on the similarity of their two anti-Western and authoritarian regimes, and their notion of a shared history.
Over the past 30 years, Belarus has moved closer to Russia in economy, trade and idea sharing. But it has gone beyond simply sharing a similar geopolitical outlook; now it is a militarised actor on the EU’s eastern flank. The first tipping point came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At this point, Lukashenko was already politically entangled with Moscow due to its support for Belarus’s trade network and economic sector after Minsk’s break with Europe in 2020. But the invasion meant that Belarus also became entrenched in the Russian military machine: in the early phase of Russia’s invasion, it became a launchpad for Russian ground offensives towards Kyiv and Chernihiv, and for missile strikes and combat aviation operations.
Since this period, Russia has attempted to consolidate its control even further. Now it has approximately 2,000 troops concentrated around air-defence systems, training facilities, logistics hubs and long-standing Russian military installations. Between 2022 and 2023, ammunition transfers from Belarus to Russia exceeded 130,000 tonnes. Since then, joint training centres, storage bases and transport corridors (many inherited from the Soviet period) have been repurposed and modernised under Belarus-Russia Union State programmes to support Russian operational needs. Rail-linked depots, armament storage facilities and training grounds now serve as key infrastructure for Russian forces on its western flank.
The second tipping point came with the two countries regularly staging recurring joint military exercises that institutionalise operational integration, such as the Zapad military drills which have been taking place since before 2022. Now Russia is eyeing up Belarus as a key component of its nuclear ambitions and has also deployed Oreshnik intermediate-range missile systems in Belarus. In April this year, Belarus confirmed it would no longer allow Russian conscripts who desert the military to leave via its border. Belarus is also a staging post for Russian nuclear missiles and joint military exercises.
The country has thus become Russia’s territorial, militaristic and logistical resource, achieved through durability, military routinisation and institutional embedding. The military aspect of this entrenchment is also compounded through hybrid attacks. For example, as early as November 2021 the EU condemned Belarus for facilitating the weaponisation of migrants—predominantly from conflict areas such as Iraq and Syria—who it had apparently encouraged to breach the borders of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
This form of hybrid warfare has continued into 2026: recent reports say that Lithuanian authorities have discovered a cross-border tunnel from Belarus to Lithuania, which they suspect is to continue to facilitate the potential movement of migrants through European territories. Now, with the Union State increasingly functioning as a homogeneous force, there is a threat that Belarus will become more emboldened to facilitate further dangerous hybrid manoeuvring. It intends to check Europe’s readiness and destabilise it from the inside.
Belarus as a threat to Europe
The difference in the threat which Belarus now poses to Europe lies in its shift—which has taken place over the past six years—from being Russia’s “rear-operating base” to Russia’s “forward-operating base”.
As Russia’s rear-operating base, Belarus functioned as a non-combat zone for logistics and maintenance. While it supported Russian military activity and provided strategic depth by shifting military infrastructure and combat flashpoints away from Russian territory, as a rear-operating base Belarus avoided deploying its own forces into Ukraine and directly engaging in combat operations. This allowed Lukashenko to avoid many of the challenges that Putin is experiencing, including politically sensitive military mobilisation, high personnel casualties and mounting internal economic pressure. This approach had previously provided Lukashenko with the degree of political deniability and diplomatic leverage necessary to continue negotiating with Western economies on economic sanctions and market access. He was able to point to Belarus’s arm’s-length approach to the war in Ukraine as proof that he was willing to engage with Europeans at a diplomatic and economic level.
However, Belarus’s position has changed since 2022. Evidence collected by the author demonstrates that Russia is increasingly establishing the country as a forward-operating base. Moscow is building on its routinisation and institutional embedding of military infrastructure to deploy personnel on Belarusian territory and undertake recurring joint military exercises, lately including nuclear forces preparation. Minsk’s rhetoric is changing to match these actions. In 2022, Belarus changed its constitution to allow Russia to store nuclear missiles on its territory; in a “Militarization of Europe” meeting held in June 2026, Belarus’s deputy minister of foreign affairs Igor Sekreta said he was “deeply concerned by… military exercises on NATO’s eastern flank” and “the EU and NATO… systematically promoting a militarist agenda at all levels.”
The Belarusian government is simultaneously becoming a component of Russian forward-military position and aligning ideologically with Russia’s view that Europe (and the West in general) constitutes an existential threat. Lukashenko himself reiterated this in May 2026, when he declared that “… [Belarus is] ready in every possible way to defend our common fatherland from Brest to Vladivostok.” The change is especially worrying for Ukraine, which is already fighting a war against Russia on several fronts. Its brow-beaten army could soon be required to deploy yet more resources to another defensive line on its northern border. Belarusian state media have suggested that Putin desires to open a “second front” against Ukraine, using Belarus as a launchpad for further attacks.
Indeed, evidence suggests that Russia is already using Belarusian infrastructure to gain an advantage in its drone warfare against Ukraine: in June 2026, Ukrainian intelligence services discovered four signal relay stations in the Belarusian oblasts of Homiel and Brest. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appealed directly to Belarus to dismantle the sites or face potential Ukrainian consequences. The Belarusian president apparently acquiesced—although no public statement or confirmation has been made.
Belarus’s transformation into a forward-operating base was further bolstered in 2023, when Russia deposited tactical Iskander nuclear-capable warheads on its territory. Then, in early 2025, Russia moved Oreshnik hypersonic missiles to a location which experts estimate to be around 60km south of Minsk. This has changed the calculus for the rest of Europe. Europeans must contend with an additional nuclear threat right on its border (aside from Kaliningrad) and consider how this could compromise security along its eastern flank.
Meanwhile, as noted above, Belarus is mixing concrete actions with rhetoric that suggests it sees Europe as a threat to its own sovereignty. In the same speech, Sekreta commented that Poland, Latvia and Lithuania have a combined defence expenditure of €52bn, which is apparently “25 times more than Belarus allocates for defence”. This suggests that Belarus increasingly views European and NATO defence investments through the lens of Russian military planning. If left unchecked, Russian influence will leave EU member states more vulnerable to further hybrid attacks from Union State forces.
For Europeans, there is also potential for escalation in how these border countries respond, and uncertainty about where escalation could lead. For example, the Zapad-2025 military drills, which took place on September 12th 2025, prompted Poland to close its border with Belarus due to “heightened security concerns”. Prior to this, on September 9th and 10th, Russia had flown several drones into Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine. Lithuania also closed its border with Belarus for a whole month in October 2025 (and refused to enter negotiations to reopen it) after meteorological balloons travelled into its airspace from Belarus. The latter responded by accusing Lithuania of “pursuing an anti-Belarus policy”. Latvia, for its part, is struggling to deal with Belarus’s tactic of sending illegal migrants over its border. As of July 21st 2026, the Latvian government had recorded 8,413 instances of migrants attempting to cross into its territory this calendar year, stirring discontent prior to the parliamentary election in October. The country has also uncovered several sabotage operations that have appear to have been carried out by Belarusian and Russian spies.
European leaders heating up their confrontations in such critical areas is further adding to NATO’s headache. Belarus’s degradation as a buffer zone between western Europe and Russia means the potential for these flashpoints to drift further west is growing, not helped by a continually deteriorating diplomatic relationship between the Lukashenko government and the governments of neighbouring EU states. The proximity of Russian missiles and personnel to European territory could compromise NATO warning systems; it also suggests that the Union State is becoming increasingly willing to test European responses to its increasingly integrated deterrent.
Now the EU needs to reconfigure its strategy towards Belarus. The goal should be to ensure that Lukashenko does not limit his room for manoeuvre so much that he has no choice but to descend into a fully armoured satellite state; and that he has no choice but to react to any order Putin gives.
What Europe is doing…
On sanctions
Since Belarus’s flagrantly undemocratic 2020 presidential election, which sparked the country’s largest political crisis since independence, the EU and Belarus have downgraded their diplomatic relations. This is a cycle which Europe and Belarus have found themselves in since at least 2006: repression conducted by the regime triggers sanctions and isolation from Europe, which are followed by limited thaws and diplomatic re-engagement, which are then interrupted by renewed crackdowns—and so on. This time, however, the diplomatic downgrading was mutual: Lukashenko made Poland and Lithuania’s ambassadors leave Minsk in October 2020, and requested the EU ambassador return to Brussels.
In 2021, following Lukashenko’s contested re-election, Europe’s approach became more actively political. Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya lobbied European governments to move beyond broad economic measures, such as existing targeted sanctions, to adopt harsher and broader sectoral sanctions. These were directed at, for example, specific officials, judges, prosecutors and police officers responsible for repression of Belarusian citizens. Belarus, for its part, suspended participation in the Eastern Partnership, an initiative which aims to strengthen political and economic relations between the EU, its member states and the partner countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
Europe’s response remains to take a blanket approach to sanctions towards Belarus. It reinforced its sanctions cycle even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the EU’s approach to Belarus is embedded within its anti-Russia packages. This means that the EU not only targets individuals involved in conflict operations, but also bundles Minsk in together with the trade restrictions, export controls and financial measures which it aims at Moscow. Europeans have fallen into the trap of treating their Belarus policy as an extension of their Russia policy, although some politicians—including French president Emmanuel Macron and, back in 2021, former German chancellor Angela Merkel—have also pursued limited efforts to test whether targeted incentives could shape Minsk’s behaviour.
However, some EU sources say that Minsk is an unwilling negotiating partner. It remains to be seen whether it will be explicit about the desire to reshape engagement with Europe. As of 2026, EU–Belarus relations remain largely frozen. They have seen only minimal diplomatic engagement and sustained sanctions, and only limited, transactional contact has emerged—for example, in negotiations over political prisoners and technical discussions over border management. In its latest sanctions announcement, the European Council extended its sanctions regime against Belarus until 2027.
The EU is thus in a difficult position when it comes to pursuing normalisation with Minsk. Since Europe’s Belarus policy is considerably shaped by Belarus’s neighbours, Lithuania and Poland—and Vilnius is especially reluctant to open any dialogue with Minsk—other member states are less emboldened to force through normalisation policies which are at risk of simply being blocked. What is clear is that, unless Belarus makes clear improvements in its human rights conditions and clearly distances itself from Russia’s war in Ukraine, European policy will remain structured around three aspects: progressive sanctions targeting regime elites and key economic sectors; political non-recognition of the legitimacy of Lukashenko’s rule; and support for Belarusian civil society and exiles.
Another problem for Europe is that continuing to heavily limit industrial trade and the transfer of dual-use goods and military equipment to Belarus could see Lukashenko rely more heavily on Putin’s open markets. But, if Europeans do not pursue sanctions, they indirectly aid Russia: Lukashenko supports Russia’s war against Ukraine by selling military and dual-use goods to Russia, thus helping it circumvent sanctions. This, in turn, creates a cycle of obligation whereby Minsk acquiesces to future military requests from Moscow and Russia further entrenches along Europe’s eastern flank.
The EU approach broadly treats Belarus as a subsidiary of Russia and narrows Europeans’ ability to develop a tailored security policy which directly targets Belarus as a forward-operating base. As things stand, sanctions on the economy and trade are not adequately addressing the developing threat that Belarus poses to European security. And they do not help alleviate the suffering of the ordinary Belarusians at home and in exile.
On the diaspora
Since 2020, Lukashenko has stepped up his repression and exile of Belarusian civil society actors opposed to his regime. Evidence collected by the author through focus groups carried out for ECFR suggests that, for Belarusians, exile is no longer perceived as a temporary or marginal condition. Rather, it has become a structural feature of Lukashenko’s authoritarian governance. Participants consistently described forced migration as a way for the Lukashenko regime to externalise dissent to maintain internal stability. The government pushes out political activists, journalists, researchers and civic organisers to reduce domestic pressure, while the regime projects an external image of control and normalisation.
This means that Belarus has shifted much of its political contestation into European societies. As a result, the EU has faced myriad challenges related to diaspora governance, transnational repression (including surveillance, intimidation, pressure on relatives and legal harassment across borders) and social cohesion. The EU has, particularly after 2020, provided unprecedented political recognition and support to Belarus’s democratic forces, including security guarantees and sustained funding. For Lukashenko, exile therefore functions as a strategic arena.
How Europeans govern this space—through legal regimes, funding structures or protection mechanisms—directly shapes whether repression through exile succeeds as a long-term strategy.
On its foreign policy approach
The EU’s treatment of Belarus as having limited sovereignty over its foreign policy is also at odds with the US approach. Washington’s current relationship with Minsk is based on President Donald Trump recognising Lukashenko as legitimate, and the US agreeing to negotiate sanctions relief in exchange for the release of political prisoners. America still casts Belarus as a strategic adversary; but it nonetheless accepts that the country needs careful handling to safeguard American and NATO interests in Europe. EU member states, which eye Washington’s approaches to Minsk with caution, have ramped up their scepticism further since Lukashenko joined Trump’s questionable “Board of Peace” (despite the Belarusian leader lending credence to Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine).
Overall, America is searching for “visible deals” whereby it can secure humanitarian wins via economic channels. The clearest example of this is its pursuit of calibrated sanctions relief: in 2025, Belarus released 123 political prisoners in return for the US easing sanctions on the Belarusian potash industry. And it could be argued that this has paid some dividends: lifting sanctions on Belarus helps ease the domestic economic pressure on Lukashenko, which leaves him less dependent on support from Russia for trade.
However, the thaw in America’s approach does nothing to address Belarus’s increasingly entrenched role as a Russian military staging post. Indeed, no approach taken by any American president ever has. And while former president Joe Biden synchronised Washington’s policy towards Belarus with that of Brussels, under his successor, Trump, the two approaches are disparate. Of course, the US does not have the major consideration of the security challenges which Belarus poses to Europe’s borders. But this divergence between America’s prioritisation of transactionalism and the EU’s prioritisation of security will only grow in the absence of a coordinated transatlantic framework towards Belarus.
There also exists the possibility that Lukashenko could exploit the gap between America’s leverage-based approach and Europe’s risk-based approach, to play each side against the other. From the US, Lukashenko has already achieved incremental sanctions relief and diplomatic rehabilitation while continuing to align Belarusian security with Russian territorial involvement and pursuing domestic repression. As it stands, all signs point to US bargaining having no impact on Belarus’s strategic alignment or its military cooperation with Russia. Human rights abuses remain.
What Europe can do next
Europe’s continued policy of isolating Belarus and imposing sanctions is turning the country towards Russia as a more attractive option for trade and investment. However, Europeans cannot simply restore diplomatic relations, even to their pre-2020 iteration: they need to hold Lukashenko accountable for his disregard of democratic norms and civilian abuse, and accountable militarily for his assistance to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
This requires developing an alternative approach which goes beyond the current binary choice of engagement or isolation and identifies as a priority exactly the type of Belarus that Europeans want to—or are willing to—work with. Europeans need to examine existing EU and US approaches to Belarus, and discover where Lukashenko could exploit gaps in their divergence—and where room for leverage and leeway exists.
This also requires Europeans to understand the type of pressure that Russia is exerting on Belarus. It is true that Russia continues to provide loans to Belarus, open its market to sanctioned Belarusian goods and give Belarus access to infrastructure through which it can continue exporting goods to Brazil, China and India. But this is illusory: Russia exerting “real” pressure would amount to trade wars, blockades of Belarusian goods, cutting off financial aid and propaganda attacking Lukashenko. Putin has exercised similar measures before, when Moscow was unhappy with Minsk. Now, in 2026, their actions might be well coordinated, but Russia has not established any real economic, financial, military, informational or political coercion against Lukashenko and his government.
Europeans could use this distinction to consider the type of Belarus they want to shape. This should be a Belarus which has secure, meaningful economic alternatives to Russia; a Belarus which sees the geopolitical and economic sense of having a choice of trading partners; a Belarus which has functioning communication channels. Overall, Europeans should expect that their future relationship with Belarus will go beyond mere transactionalism and value the voices of those who Lukashenko continues to silence. Europeans should seek a Belarus which retains a degree of political room for manoeuvre away from Putin’s military and political influence. The following recommendations set out how it can achieve this.
Support eastern border states
The EU has already made progress in strengthening its defence security arrangements for its eastern flank. For example, the 2022 Strategic Compass aimed to prevent crises in states most vulnerable to Russian (or indeed Belarusian) encroachment, and the EU has developed a targeted “Communication on the EU’s Eastern Regions Bordering Russia, Belarus and Ukraine” (or “Strong regions for a safer Europe”) programme. This includes the five priority areas of security and resilience; growth and regional prosperity; building on local strengths; connectivity; and empowering its people. The bloc is also channelling funds into shoring up transit routes and financing, including the customs infrastructure along its eastern border which is a target for Russian and Belarusian interference.
However, the EU should more deeply incorporate its support for states that border Belarus—which are facing hybrid pressure, border incidents and spillover risks—into a defence strategy which builds on the NATO model, particularly in its approach to deconfliction. This would mean better aligning military preparedness with diplomatic signalling and crisis-management channels.
For example, NATO maintains a partnership with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe which promotes risk-reduction frameworks and transparency measures among signatory states—including the Vienna Document, which has been signed by the US, all European nations and Russia. Europeans could establish a similar partnership with selected states which builds on Lukashenko’s willingness—up to now—to notify his Western counterparts about activities such as Zapad military drills, where in some instances he has even invited them as observers.
Strengthen connections inside Belarus
To go one step further, however, Europeans—and especially EU border states—should maintain established working-level diplomatic contacts in Belarus, especially those located at EU member-state embassies in Minsk. These could also be third-party intermediaries or use technical-level communication formats, such as hotlines, to relay information about military movements or developments.
This could also rely on trusting selected contacts inside the country itself: for example, there are several initiatives which hold meetings which bring speakers and thinkers together to share both Western and non-Western perspectives, including from inside Belarus and Russia. By acting as a conduit for open communication—and by remaining open and depoliticised—protecting such channels encourages a more open dialogue. This, in turn, mitigates the risk of miscalculation and helps develop a diplomatic environment in Belarus which is less dependent on the relations created through the Union State. The aim for Europeans should be to build a pro-EU constituency inside Belarus through democratic initiatives—not with the intention of overthrowing the regime tomorrow, but rather to embolden those who see it in their interest for Belarus to have normal working relations with the EU.
Europeans could also continue to financially support or work with Belarus’s small- and medium-sized businesses, both inside and outside the country. Directing economic support and capacity building to enterprises within its borders would strengthen the country’s independent economic capacity by allowing it to gradually decouple from other trade relationships. At the external level, in 2022 the EU and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development pledged €4bn for SMEs which had relocated their businesses abroad. The EU should explore ways in which it can strengthen Belarus’s SMEs inside the country, to help build a constituency which sees partnership with the West, not just Russia, as an advantage.
Opportunities exist for cooperation at the non-profit level, too. While not directly related to European security policy, concerted work by the EU to fund Belarusian NGOs and support apolitical initiatives can help strengthen the country’s national identity and foster conditions for a more fruitful working relationship. Europeans can connect with Belarusian youth and help shape a more democratic future of Belarusian leaders through the funding of communal projects such as Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps for Belarusian students.
The European Commission is funding ArtPower Belarus, in collaboration with the Belarusian Council for Culture and Danish Cultural Institute, from 2022-2028. This demonstrates how outreach in Belarus—with willing internal institutions—can forge a common sense of purpose and prevent the “othering” of either side. The EU should continue to strive for flexible support for civic and political activism, especially at the grassroots level, through institutions such as the European Endowment for Democracy.
Engage with the Belarusian diaspora
Europeans should treat the Belarusian diaspora as a “strategic constituency” and help secure their participation in national and international civil life. For example, despite Belarus’s exit from the Eastern Partnership, the country’s civil society remains active in the initiative. This political knowledge and organisational capacity are vital for educating Europeans and ensuring that Lukashenko’s approach does not condemn the country and its people for any longer than it already has. Indeed, the EU needs to ensure that the Belarusian diaspora remains at the forefront of its policies regarding safe migration and access; it must avoid inadvertently reinforcing the regime’s strategy of repression through exile, lest any temporary or fragmented protections undermine diaspora members’ political and institutional capacity.
The EU should prioritise legal stability and predictability for Belarusian exiles. Where possible, longer-term residence pathways, access to labour markets and recognition of professional qualifications should be expanded and harmonised across member states. Indeed, Europeans need to take transnational repression seriously as a security issue, not only a human rights concern. Surveillance, digital harassment, pressure on family members remaining in Belarus and alleged monitoring activities in EU states challenge European sovereignty and social cohesion. To counter this, the EU should keep pursuing democratic initiatives such as the project “Towards a Local Democracy Agency (LDA) Belarus in Exile”. Its establishment has helped reinforce the notion that exile is not a temporary condition and encourages the need for “sustainable democratic infrastructure” which supports communities in exile. Addressing these practices strengthens both diaspora resilience and internal EU security norms.
In the long term, the EU should introduce more permanent diverse and sustainable funding streams, and move away from reliance on emergency or externally volatile sources. While several exile-based civil society institutions have benefited from multi-year EU funding frameworks—and the EU has committed €200m since 2020 in supporting the Belarusian people—recent reductions in US assistance have exposed structural vulnerabilities. The EU needs to use such funding streams to support independent media, research organisations and civic initiatives in exile, since they are repositories of political memory and organisational capacity.
Europeans should also continue to engage with Belarus’s political opposition on a more formal level, rather than treating it as a protest movement. For example, they generally treat Tsikhanouskaya as the de facto leader of Belarus from her base in Warsaw. This gives Europeans access to a political figure with different views and priorities, and could see the two sides shape future engagement with Belarus via insights from the country’s more civic-minded, democratic channels. The EU should be wary of treating her as the sole alternative to Lukashenko, especially because it is unlikely that Tsikhanouskaya will be installed as his successor—but openness to her influence will bolster trust between Europeans and Belarusian exiled civic society. It will also provide EU member states with an understanding of how the Belarusian state works.
Link diplomacy with action
EU engagement should focus on areas where European interests are directly implicated and where limited leverage still exists. Recent developments, including prisoner releases secured through negotiations with the US and Lukashenko inviting Western officials to observe military drills, suggest that Minsk remains open to selective forms of engagement.
But while targeted incentives can produce limited concessions, the EU should avoid simply replicating the American model. Instead, the bloc must approach conditional engagement as a security instrument rather than simply a human rights policy. Unlike Washington, it has long-term security interests in Belarus—regional stability, border security, migration management, securing its eastern frontier—and needs engagement to be more strategic than transactional.
Europeans should therefore try to couch any diplomatic, economic or symbolic concessions (such as forming high-level diplomatic contacts, limited sanctions relief or participation in dialogue formats) in measurable and verifiable actions. These could include independent verification of the release and treatment of named political prisoners, a sustained halt to politically motivated detentions and access for international humanitarian organisations.
This could build on Lukashenko’s demands for sanctions relief in exchange for Belarus releasing political prisoners and ceasing its aggravation towards Europe’s eastern borders by making such concessions with the conditionality just described. Such engagement with Belarus could help generate durable behavioural change and address underlying sources of regional insecurity.
Untangle Minsk from Moscow
Europeans can also adapt their approach to Minsk based on how America treats it: as a viable, autonomous actor, not an extension of Moscow. The fact that negotiations between Trump and Lukashenko led to the release of prisoners—albeit with hundreds still being held—suggests that the Belarusian leader remains sensitive to economic pressure and to the optics of his own international legitimacy. Trump’s recognition of Lukashenko as Belarus’s legitimate president has only served to reinforce the latter’s willingness to reestablish closer contacts between Minsk and Washington. The US can use this thaw to its advantage to leverage selective sanctions adjustments (for example, easing restrictions on Belarusian potash exports in response to global fertiliser market pressures) and further widen Lukashenko’s limited transactional opening.
Europeans should consider whether closer coordination with Washington, whereby both camps identify common red lines and incentives for better diplomatic ties with Minsk, would deter potential coercion by Lukashenko and prevent him playing the US and Europe against each other. Indeed, the two erstwhile allies finding common ground in their strategy towards Belarus could secure further progress on humanitarian issues and demonstrate to Lukashenko that the US remains key in the protection of Europe’s eastern frontier. It is worth noting that, in this event, the EU should strongly articulate its own priorities—particularly regarding border security and societal agency—and pursue pragmatic coordination at the level of officials, agencies and technical experts.
A practical example of Belarus demonstrating more autonomy is the recent ultimatum proposed to Belarus by Ukraine. Zelensky’s bold statement over the four signal relay stations in Belarus led to their quiet removal (or they were at least turned off), suggesting that Lukashenko can roll back certain decisions—even on military issues. And, even if reports that it was in fact Ukraine which destroyed them are true, Lukashenko has accepted this development without retaliation. His response suggests that he fears the consequences of escalation from Ukraine and other Western allies. But it also supposes that Putin is not yet able to dictate Lukashenko’s every move, not even in zones which Union State forces could view as fundamental to ensuring their continued sovereignty. This episode shows that Lukashenko still retains meaningful room for manoeuvre even in matters of security, and that calibrated pressure from neighbouring states can shape his decisions.
Europeans should exploit this hint of residual agency to discover in which other areas Lukashenko retains an interest in limiting escalation or preserving his room for manoeuvre. They should determine in which other areas calibrated diplomatic and economic pressure could shape Belarusian behaviour and complicate Russian military planning. This could help decouple Belarusian decision-making from Russian power structures and isolate Lukashenko into a more favourable position for further negotiations.
Shaping stabilisation on European terms
By reducing the opportunities for Russian coercion and Belarusian-enabled hybrid pressure on the eastern flank, Europeans can better counter the impact of Russian entrenchment on their neighbour. But Europeans should not frame the recommendations as a part of a rehabilitation for the Belarusian regime. Rather, these policy suggestions should function to safeguard against further deterioration of the stable buffer zone that Belarus once provided for western Europe. Most importantly, they need to address the Belarus that has been created since 2020 and seek to prevent its further entrenchment as a Russian satellite state.
To achieve this, the most important thing Europeans can do is move beyond the false dichotomy between isolation and engagement. Europe can still rebuke Belarus as an externally managed satellite state, for example by disavowing the Lukashenko regime, while providing incentives which help it shape the conditions under which stabilisation unfolds. Europe cannot force rapid change in Minsk’s strategic alignment, but it could help prevent the complete consolidation of a security order in which Europe has no voice.
Europeans should also focus on how their approach to Belarus differs in the short and the long term. In the short term, Europeans need to prioritise preventing Russia’s military configuration in Belarus from becoming permanent and irreversible, and work to limit the extent to which Russia has entrenched itself into Belarusian military institutions. They should aim to separate Belarus from Russia as much as possible by ensuring that Moscow ceases stationing its weapons (conventional or otherwise) on Belarusian territory. At the same time, Europeans need to be aware of continued escalation, such as further military deployments on Belarus’s territory, applying hybrid pressure on member states or facilitating cross-border incidents.
In the long term, Europeans should not aim for Belarus to be aligned with the West; nor should they expect that their intervention will transform Belarus into a democratic state. But the EU should work towards Belarus becoming a country that is sovereign enough to resist becoming a permanent forward base for Russian power, and open enough to maintain a managed relationship with both Europe and Russia. Ideally, Belarus should become sovereign enough that it can make rational decisions—based on the best interests of its country and its people—regarding with which power it wants to be aligned.
As it stands, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine shows no signs of abating. America, for its part, is increasingly reluctant to fund deterrence in EU countries, including those which border Belarus. It is, under Trump, using economic and political posturing to exert pressure on the Lukashenko regime. But Europeans can still find the avenues of cooperation which still exist in the allies’ fractured relationship. Most importantly, the EU needs to grant a degree of agency to its most problematic neighbour.
About the author
Vasil Navumau is a former visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He now works as a researcher at the University of Siegen, where he focuses on civic activism in eastern European countries, particularly Ukraine and Belarus, and its transformation via information and communication technologies.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Pavel Slunkin and the ECFR editorial team (in particular Amy Sandys and Portia Kentish) for their valuable input and suggestions, as well as Nastassia Zenovich for her graphics.
This work was produced as part of the project “Portrait of Exiled Belarusians and the Role of Belarus in Russia’s War on Ukraine”, financed by the European Union under the EU4Belarus – Support to Advanced Learning and Training (SALT II) programme.
This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Jörg Lau, international correspondent at Die Zeitand Jana Puglierin, head of ECFR’s Berlin office, to explore the political turmoil in Germany ahead of an electoral autumn. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government is becoming increasingly unpopular: it faces collapsing approval ratings, growing tension within the governing coalition and mounting pressure from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
As regional elections approach, Jana argues that Germany’s traditional parties face difficult choices that could reshape the country’s political landscape, while Jörg discusses what the AfD’s rise means for Germany. A “firewall” has kept mainstream parties from cooperating with the far right in the post-war period—but Jörg reflects on the strain this is under, and whether the AfD’s first taste of regional power could transform German politics.
Together, Mark, Jörg and Jana assess the prospects for Merz’s leadership, the future of the CDU and whether Germany’s political centre can withstand such pressure. Are established parties capable of renewing themselves? What happens if the AfD makes gains at the regional level? And what would prolonged instability in Berlin mean for Europe?
This podcast episode was recorded on August 12th 2026.
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