Strategy&Future

This report presents a strategic simulation of a future crisis centered on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad/Królewiec and explores whether an informal regional coalition — the “Baltic Axis” of Poland, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, working closely with Ukraine and in strategic partnership with Turkey — could functionally isolate the oblast through a political-military “quarantine"...

The Eternal Return and Eastern Europe. The Geopolitical Tragedy that Never Ends. Part 4 of 4

The Times of the Troubles has one additional feature: the erection of an enormous and sophisticated system of fortifications and military bases along the entire geopolitical zone of contact, that stretched hundreds of kilometres. The concentration of defence lines and fortifications was maybe the greatest in Europe.

The high intensity of geopolitical dynamics requires states to have a sophisticated toolkit of military instruments, including developing paramilitary and proxy military units to conduct a multilayered war. The proxies in Eastern Europe were perfect asymmetric instruments for achieving political and geopolitical goals. Still, often, they were symbols of the crisis of statehood in the countries where they operated or they caused existential threats, as in the case of Poland and Russia.

The Eternal Return of Eastern Europe, or the tidal fluctuations of turmoil and wartime (Times of Trouble), can be outlined through five fundamental principles.

The main take-away points from the events in Belarus from the summer of 2020 (the unrest of the pro-Western factions of Belarusian civil society) until the current refugee crisis on the Belarusian border with the EU are the following: