Conference on Russia Papers

This chapter argues that Russia has systematically treated the European Union as a latent strategic actor while simultaneously working to degrade its agency. Through targeted information campaigns, elite capture, espionage, and sabotage, Moscow has exploited the Union’s structural and decisional constraints – vetoes, unanimity, and consensus-driven paralysis – rendering it rhetorically assertive but materially impotent. At the same time, the EU possesses dormant instruments capable of strategic effect: TEU 31(1), TEU 44, crisis procedures, reverse qualified-majority voting, and financial levers that could enforce compliance and coordination. Framed within the paradigm of next-generation warfare, these mechanisms could enable the Union to act collectively without radical treaty change. By mapping Russian interventions against EU institutional weaknesses, the chapter also demonstrates a conscious yet immobilised Europe, performing weakness while nonetheless remaining capable of mobilisation. It concludes that deliberate, audacious activation of existing tools, including coalitions of willing member states, conditional funding, and operationalised crisis powers could awaken the Union as a coherent strategic actor, one that can defend its interests, counter external subversion, and translate its normative authority into tangible geopolitical influence, creating the conditions for a more confident and self-directed European strategic posture.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, both the region and the period following this collapse have been widely characterised as post-Soviet. While there have been some liminal problematisation of the paradigm, it has been generally accepted both popularly and academically as some sort of qualifier for historiographical periodisation and study of this region in both scholarship and for policy-making. This chapter will argue that the post-Soviet is no more for two main reasons. First, Russia no longer wields soft power within the so-called post-Soviet space, and second, Russia is no longer incontestably viewed as the regional hegemon even within the region itself. Such a paradigm shift will have lasting implications for both regional studies and policy-making, but these changes can be guided and informed by the current processes that are playing out both societally and geopolitically in the former region.

Introduction to the Collection, by editor George Spencer Terry