2025-11-26 23:57:35
Delay is perhaps the defining tactic of European Union (EU) negotiations. Compromise? Yes, it does that. Talk? It does a lot of that. Meetings? More than anyone could ever want.
But delay is at the heart of the system. This may not matter too much when the subject under debate is milking machine regulations. But when it concerns Europe’s future, some say its current existence, delay has a price.
As the EU has now discovered. While it decided in November to delay a decision on handing at least €140bn ($162bn) in frozen Central Bank of Russia (CBR) assets to Ukraine, it was actually rolling the dice.
Without its knowledge, the US and Russia were negotiating a new 28-point plan for “peace” in Ukraine that included provisions for the use of the frozen funds. Any such agreement would not just take what may well be Ukraine’s financial lifeline, but would also end the current system of (smaller) loans based on those assets.
One reason why European governments and the European Commission were so electrified by the plan was just this. It threatens not just Ukraine but also the continent’s future support. Anxious European diplomats have worked hard to remove those points from the plan now being worked on by the Trump administration and Ukraine.
They may succeed. But surely even the Belgian government, which has been the main barrier to progress, now understands what is at stake?
Let’s hope so.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told EU parliamentarians this week that the Commission will finally announce the legal framework to allow the use of immobilized CBR assets to facilitate €140bn in loans to Ukraine. The Commission was reportedly accelerating this work on November 26, which may just be a polite term for panic. The UK, with about $32bn in Russian assets, will also contribute, and others, including Japan, may do so.
The Witkoff-Dimitriev 28-point plan would have allocated only $100bn of the estimated $300bn plus of immobilized CBR assets in Western jurisdictions to Ukraine. Or rather, the beneficiary would have been a joint US-Ukraine investment vehicle, with the US getting 50% of the profits.
Even more worryingly, from the European perspective, the rest of the CBR assets would return to Russia, again for use in partnership with the US. This would not only leave a huge hole in the EC’s current plans to utilize the CBR assets to cover the above Ukraine financing gap, but G7 countries would be back on the hook then for the $50bn Extraordinary Revenue Arrangement (ERA) where the future interest stream on immobilized CBR assets has been used to finance Ukraine to date. If there are no underlying assets left immobilized, there is no income stream. We have a problem, Houston (or Brussels).
The EC is still minded to go down its reparation loan (RL) approach. This does not involve the formal seizure of the CBR assets but their creative repurposing. The assets would be moved out of Euroclear and other depositories where they are held, via the European Central Bank/EU, which issues a debt contract, and then lent onwards to Ukraine via the RL.
The RL is a long-term zero-coupon instrument that implies repayment upon receipt by Ukraine of reparations by Russia. If this does not happen, and/or the immobilization is lifted either by the courts or a failure of the EU to retain unanimity on sanctions, the EU is then on the hook for the full nine yards, or €140bn-plus.
Euroclear, in Belgium, is thought to hold the bulk of these assets in the EU, likely around €190bn. And surprise, surprise, Belgium, and Euroclear have run effective campaigns over the past three and a half years to fend off efforts to utilize the underlying assets.
Belgium has complained that any such move could be deemed illegal, and hence would leave it on the hook for hundreds of billions of euros in potential claims, and other malign actions, from Russia. It has also been claimed that any such move could undermine confidence in the euro and Euroclear itself, which is systemic to global markets.
Belgium has some reason to be concerned (although it’s clear its worries can be ameliorated).
But it is hard to be that sympathetic to the Belgian position when its government is still sitting on upwards of €4bn in windfall profits from the immobilized CBR assets from 2022-2023, which has more than made up for its own aid commitments to Ukraine. Belgium is hence one of the lowest net contributors to Ukraine. And the impression sticks that Belgium is a free rider on other NATO allies, and now Ukraine, for its defense, given that it has been at the bottom of NATO defense spenders for decades.
Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart de Wever has been vocal in his opposition to using immobilized CBR assets but less vocal in providing alternatives. The realistic alternative is the European taxpayer, and particularly the German taxpayer, something understood and accepted by the Germans, who now effectively lead Europe’s hard geostrategic policy — the funding charge is led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz with his compatriot, Von der Leyen.
Europe may have done enough to rescue the situation and Ukraine’s financing needs in the process. But this situation came about because of the EU’s instinct for dithering. It must learn the lesson.
Because if we don’t fund Ukraine, it loses the war, and then the costs to Europe in terms of much higher defense spending — likely an extra €1 trillion a year (my fellow CEPA writer Jan Kallberg makes a similar point here, though at a somewhat lower estimate of $520bn annually).
Either figure would mean hugely bigger budget deficits, more borrowing, higher interest rates, lower growth, and a weaker euro.
Timothy Ash is a Senior Emerging Markets Sovereign Strategist at RBC BlueBay Asset Management. He is a regular contributor to CEPA’s Europe’s Edge and is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House on their Russia and Eurasian program.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-11-26 04:38:04
When Milan’s Linate Airport introduced a “Faceboarding” facial recognition system — no boarding pass required, just a quick scan and you’re through — Italy’s data protection authorities reacted with horror. They suspended the system, citing “insufficient safeguards” for passengers who had not chosen to participate.
Both European and American approaches to the technology face a common challenge: how to move fast enough to stay competitive with China and other authoritarian states while moving carefully enough to preserve civil liberties.
The technology is advancing fast, driven by artificial intelligence. The market for facial recognition could reach $18 billion (€15.4 billion) by 2030, up from $8 billion today. Scanning a face is convenient compared to collecting fingerprints or encoding an iris. And many consumers like that convenience, whether it be for unlocking a device or boarding a plane where ID was previously required. But biometric data can also be abused, and governments and companies could abuse facial recognition to conduct mass surveillance. Studies show that facial cognition algorithms can be biased and inaccurate, more likely to misidentify people of color — and in particular, women of color.
In Europe, biometric systems must meet strict privacy requirements before they can operate. The US has no comprehensive federal law on facial recognition, though states are rushing to fill the void. Eighteen states have enacted statewide facial recognition technology regulations for law enforcement or broad public use, while three states have pending legislation under consideration or scheduled to take effect. The remaining twenty-nine states have neither active statewide FRT laws nor pending statewide FRT legislation.
China, for its part, has no qualms. It operates surveillance systems at a massive scale through projects like “Skynet” and “Sharp Eyes.” Beijing deploys more than 700 million cameras. In Shanghai, authorities are tripling the number of facial recognition cameras to allow tracking of 50 million citizens. A new National Identity Authentication Law went into effect on July 15, which encourages Chinese citizens to submit their true name and a facial scan, after which they would be issued a unique ID code used for all online accounts
Both the US and Europe want to avoid such mass surveillance.
Europe is tightening regulations. The new AI Act imposes strict obligations on “high-risk” systems, including biometric identification. Data extraction from CCTV or the internet to expand biometric databases is prohibited, unless it is targeted and users consent.
Even voluntary facial recognition schemes face tough European scrutiny. Airport operators in the EU often position biometric boarding as an “optional opt-in” for EU citizens, but data protection authorities and regulators push back. Authorities require robust consent flows, data minimization, retention limits, and data protection impact assessments before these systems can operate.
Penalties are stiff. When US facial recognition company Clearview AI scraped billions of images from social media, breaching European GDPR privacy law, Dutch regulators imposed a €30.5 million fine and ordered the company to delete EU citizens’ images. Austrian privacy group noyb filed a criminal complaint in Austria last month that could subject Clearview executives to personal liability and even imprisonment.
The US approach to facial recognition technology is market first, regulation later. No comprehensive federal law governs commercial or law enforcement use of facial recognition. Regulation remains a patchwork of federal proposals and state and local statutes.
Surveillance use is increasing in the US. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reportedly employ facial recognition technology to scan motorists’ photos to identify undocumented immigrants. The FBI compares driver’s license and visa photos against the faces of suspected criminals, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Federal attention is growing. In Congress, various facial recognition bills have been introduced, including a recent proposal requiring the Transportation Security Administration to inform passengers of their right to opt out of face screenings. So far, though, all have stalled.
America’s fragmented approach allows experimentation and fast deployment but creates inconsistent protections. A facial recognition system legal in one state may be banned in another. A practice permitted for private companies may be restricted for the police. This patchwork creates uncertainty for both technology developers and citizens.
Courts are giving broad leeway to roll out facial recognition. When spectators sued New York’s Madison Square Garden for using facial recognition to block entry, a 2024 federal court dismissed the case.
Major US technology companies have implemented some voluntary limitations. Microsoft’s “Responsible AI” standards and product controls include strict access requirements for biometric features and documented risk assessments. Amazon announced a one-year moratorium in 2020 on police use of its “Rekognition” facial recognition product. The company later extended those restrictions indefinitely amid public pressure.
The Milan airport case arguably shows democratic oversight working. An independent regulator reviewed a biometric system, found it lacking in safeguards, and shut it down. No one was arrested. That model — transparent rules, independent enforcement, and accountable decision-making — is slow. It is messy. It creates compliance costs. But it separates the West from China.
William Echikson is a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program and editor of the online tech policy journal Bandwidth at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Jensen Enterman spent the past year in Spain as a Fulbright scholar. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Global Affairs and interned with the Tech Policy program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-11-26 04:07:13
Yurii Dud, one of Russia’s most influential independent YouTubers in exile in Barcelona, regularly lambasts his country’s invasion of Ukraine. He exposes and decries torture and violence in Russian prisons. His film on the spread of HIV in Russia attracted 13 million viewers in its first week.
Yet despite mounting efforts to censor the Internet, the Kremlin fails to silence him. Millions of Russians back home tune in via virtual private networks (VPNs), which Dud openly advertises on his show. Dud knows that his viewers in Russia depend on them; the Kremlin does too.
Russia’s struggle to ban VPNs underlines the power of the Internet to cross borders and leap over restrictions. It’s not just authoritarian states that struggle, either. On the weekend that the UK began enforcing its Online Safety Act, requiring websites that host violent or pornographic content or unmoderated forums to implement strict age-verification measures, downloads of Proton VPN surged by 1,800%.
Russians do use VPNs. A lot. VPN downloads in Russia grew from 12.6 million in 2021 to 33.5 million in 2022 — a 167% increase, with almost 23% of the population installing a VPN that year. When Instagram and Facebook were declared “extremist” and blocked in March 2022, VPN installs spiked by more than 11,000% above the norm in a single day. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, overall VPN demand rose by nearly 2,000% in a week. By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world.
Every few months, Russian officials declare victory over circumvention tools. Roskomnadzor, the state communications watchdog, claims to have blocked hundreds of VPNs and has forced Apple and Google to remove dozens from their app stores. Parliament bans advertising them.
In practice, VPN ads still run on Telegram and Russian tech blogs. A 2023 survey of Russian influencers showed that 48% continued to earn money on Instagram despite the platform being officially blocked. Nearly one in five said they would lose their entire income unless they migrated followers to Telegram or VKontakte, the two dominant Russian messaging and social-media platforms.
Russia’s government also needs the same tools it pretends to ban. VPNs keep businesses connected to international systems and allow state agencies to reach foreign suppliers and clients. So instead of an outright prohibition, Moscow has chosen ambiguity — a strategy that suits authoritarian control. VPNs are not formally illegal, but everything around them is being criminalized. Since March 1, 2024, it has been illegal to share information about circumvention tools — including guides, reviews, or even lists of working services — and websites that do so can be blocked and fined. This year, a new law introduced fines for searching for “extremist” content and for VPN providers that refuse to connect to the state registry of blocked sites and filter traffic.
Formally, VPNs are not punishable but can be treated as an aggravating circumstance — evidence of “intent” if the state wants to build a case. The message is clear: you might not get fined for accessing Meduza, a leading independent Russian-language news outlet now operating from abroad, or BBC Russian, but you’ll think twice before sharing the link. Fear does the filtering. Political scientist Ekaterina Shulmann calls it “behavioral censorship”: the art of teaching people not to test the limits.
Technically, Russia’s censorship machine has grown far more capable. The 2019 “sovereign internet” law forced telecom operators to install deep packet inspection equipment and laid the foundations for an autonomous Runet. Since then, authorities have repeatedly used this infrastructure to slow, block, and reroute traffic. Over the past two years, Roskomnadzor has throttled YouTube, blocking thousands of websites using Cloudflare’s Encrypted Client Hello. From January to April 2025 alone, Roskomnadzor restricted access to 12,600 materials “promoting VPN services,” twice as many as in all of 2024. TOR has been blocked, unblocked, and re-blocked. Specific VPN protocols like OpenVPN, IKEv2, and WireGuard have been targeted directly, forcing providers to rely on obfuscation and constant technical improvisation.
At the same time, Russia is experimenting with something more radical than classic website blocking: turning the internet into a patchwork of “approved” islands. Since May 2025, mobile internet shutdowns have rolled across more than half of Russia’s regions — from border areas to places far from the front — often lasting days or weeks. During these outages, users are pushed onto narrow “whitelists” of allowed resources: Gosuslugi (the government’s online portal for public services), state banks, Yandex, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, a few marketplaces, and loyal media. Everything else simply disappears. In some regions, officials openly admit that mobile internet may not return “until the end of the special military operation.”
The Kremlin is also building its own communications stack on top of this infrastructure. After blocking or throttling WhatsApp and Telegram in 2025, authorities rolled out Max, a national messenger tightly integrated with state systems. Teachers, civil servants, and students are being pushed to adopt it, with installation increasingly treated as a condition for keeping one’s job or place in school.
Putin’s system thrives in this gray zone. It does not need total obedience; it only needs people to live cautiously. That is why the Kremlin rarely arrests someone just for using a VPN. Instead, it prefers to make them feel watched, guilty, and uncertain. As long as citizens police themselves, repression works without force.
Under this pressure, the internet Russia built in the 2000s — lively, argumentative, and creative — is fading. Start-ups and IT professionals have left for Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Berlin. The best engineers now design censorship filters instead of software. Even those who stay see the absurdity of it all: the same officials preaching “sovereign internet” check their own blocked Instagram accounts through VPNs.
Russia’s internet will not collapse overnight into a Chinese-style firewall. It will erode slowly, one restriction, one shutdown, and one moment of hesitation at a time. And that, for the Kremlin, may be victory enough.
Dr. Anda Bologa is a senior researcher in the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-11-26 03:58:04
What could be better than peace to end a long-running war? An end to suffering and destruction, a time to take stock and repair the shattered landscape, a time to grieve for the fallen but also to find new hope.
It’s an easy sale. Unless that is, it’s a bad peace and delivers on none of its promises because one of the combatants has no intention of stopping.
As my CEPA colleagues Irina Borodan and Andrei Soldatov point out, Putin’s aggression is not merely about Ukraine. It never was. It is about the remaking of Europe in a Russia-friendly image.
A quick “peace” between Russia and Ukraine will not address Russia’s escalating shadow war against Europe’s democracies. And this murky but societal-level conflict will come at a price (think of major European airports repeatedly closed by drones). This cost has been underestimated if it has been assessed at all.
Lose Ukraine, and Western Europe loses its protection against renewed and more targeted Russian aggression. That is why support for Ukraine leading to a Russian defeat is not only a moral obligation, but also a sound financial path forward.
A Russian-Ukrainian “peace” deal would not bring peace, but it would leave NATO with decades of elevated defense costs at a level of 4%–5% of GDP, and that would have significant long-term economic implications.
Putin will not last forever, but without regime change, he will pick a successor who will continue his historical mission of imperialist conquest and oppression.
This would not be a return to a Cold War, which would be relatively predictable and well-ordered, but would instead be a lukewarm war. Today’s conflict with drones, social media, sabotage attacks, and outsourcing to criminal networks, migration streams, and other means is a profoundly different threat.
The Cold War created a hard barrier, the Iron Curtain, between NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact, and the situation was far more controlled than a new direct sub-threshold war with Russia. Even if the USSR then aided terrorism, such as Baader-Meinhof in West Germany and the IRA in Northern Ireland, it had a limited and regional impact. Modern shadow warfare reaches much more deeply into complex societies reliant on vulnerable infrastructure.
If NATO members are to prepare, they must anticipate the huge cost and decades of struggle with a well-resourced enemy whose primary purpose now appears to be self-preservation at home and the export of chaos abroad.
If the Putin regime still stands 25 years from now, the cost to NATO would at least be an additional 2% of national wealth annually to meet the threat.
This is what economists term an opportunity cost — NATO states forced to pay for (mostly unproductive) defense outlays are forgoing the chance to make other choices. The money could instead have been used for tax relief, education, investments, or other worthy causes.
NATO’s members currently account for more than 40% of the world’s GDP. The additional 2% spent on defense would be in the ballpark of at least $520bn annually, or more than $13 trillion over 25 years.
To give a sense of scale, global corporate investment in artificial intelligence (AI) was about $250bn last year.
NATO and its members are meanwhile in economic, technological, and research-driven competition with China. The level of direct competition with China may vary across NATO countries, but the $13 trillion poured into resisting Russia would be money diverted away from keeping up with China. It would be money removed from member states’ economies and represents a waste of capital rather than an investment for the future.
Underestimating the long-term consequences of 20, 30, or 40 years of heightened defense spending at 5% of GDP is a significant misstep and puts the current rate of expenditure in context (all Western aid to Ukraine so far totals around $450bn — that’s less than one year of additional NATO-wide expenditure for a lukewarm war).
The upfront cost to ensure that Russia is defeated in Ukraine, with a potential regime change in Russia, is marginal in comparison.
The alternative would leave China the winner by allowing it to grow its forces, influence, and technological superiority. Even as NATO burns trillions of dollars upholding deterrence along a conflict line from Kirkenes to the Caucasus against a Kremlin regime that was saved by the bell as it was close to down and out.
Jan Kallberg, Ph.D., LL.M., is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a George Washington University faculty member. Follow him at cyberdefense.com and @Cyberdefensecom.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-11-25 23:56:24
Civil society groups will warn that Europe’s simplification plan represents a dangerous rollback in privacy protections. Industry complains that simplification doesn’t go far enough. Both will be right. Brussels will split the difference with a carefully calibrated compromise. In a few years, we risk discovering that we have no idea if we achieved anything, because we never defined what a “successful result” means.
Companies and citizens expect measurable results, and Ukraine demonstrates how regulators should obtain these measurements. When your infrastructure is under active bombardment and you’re trying to maintain citizen services while missiles are falling, you cannot afford processes that aren’t measurable.
Ukraine’s digital team — and agencies such as the National Agency on Corruption Prevention — have introduced Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology not as a management trend but as a survival mechanism. They use OKRs to discipline, measure progress, and adjust quickly if results do not support the objectives.
After six months of OKR implementation, Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation achieved about 70% of its objectives and revised roughly a third of its goals during execution based on real-time data. The point isn’t perfection; it’s having the metrics to know when to adjust.
The UK’s GOV.UK platform adopted OKRs in 2023 to align teams around their growth strategy, demonstrating that the methodology works in public service delivery outside crisis conditions. Each team now works on objectives and key results aligned to measurable outcomes like traffic growth, user satisfaction, and service findability. The difference: accountability is built into how teams organize and prioritize, not just into post-implementation reports that arrive too late to adjust.
What would OKR discipline mean for the European Union and its Digital Omnibus? It means every policy declaration gets tied to specific and measurable results. The exact metrics will vary by domain — data protection, cybersecurity, AI development, market competitiveness — but the principle is the same: you must measure whether you’re achieving your stated goal.
Consider data protection versus AI innovation. The Omnibus declares it wants to “enable AI development while protecting fundamental rights.” With OKR discipline, that declaration becomes: What does “enable” mean in measurable terms? What does “protecting” mean we can track? If lawful data use for AI doesn’t increase, or if unauthorized processing incidents spike, the policy failed — regardless of how balanced the compromise looked on paper.
Or cybersecurity reporting. The Omnibus promises to “reduce administrative burden while maintaining security.” But what’s the measurable reduction? What is the measurable security outcome? The specific targets require policy expertise to set, but without targets at all, there’s no accountability.
In the era of artificial intelligence, this approach becomes much easier and simpler as data and progress can be measured by automated tools, databases, and financial reporting analyses. We’re regulating AI — we should be using it to make compliance smart.
The hardest test is whether European companies can compete under these rules. The Omnibus will aim to build Europe as a “global standard-setter for trustworthy technology.” But what does trustworthy mean in OKR-measurable terms?
If European companies’ time-to-market doesn’t improve, or if their global market share continues to decline, the regulatory framework isn’t working. European cloud providers hold just 15% of their home market, with US cloud leaders controlling 70%, despite Europe pioneering the GDPR as a global standard. When the reports show your protection metrics holding steady, but market share declining, you know something needs adjusting.
This is a management reform, not a policy tweak. We need discussions focused on the results. EU institutions must set clear objectives, define measurable results, track progress, and adjust when targets aren’t met.
Ieva Ilves advises Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and WithSecure, a Finnish cybersecurity company. She has a master’s from Johns Hopkins University SAIS. Previously, she led Latvia’s first national cybersecurity strategy and the project to establish NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-11-25 22:37:14
What might Europe look like if the fighting finally ends in Ukraine? Would we return to a pre-2022 continent of mutual suspicion but broad economic ties to Russia? Or something very different and even more concerning?
That, of course, depends on the exact terms agreed by the warring parties and their various backers. But any deal favorable to Vladimir Putin, a deal in which Ukraine effectively loses its sovereignty, would also be warmly welcomed by China as an endorsement of its efforts to tilt the outcome.
China has gambled on Putin and would expect to collect its winnings. And given the now-extraordinary mismatch in power between the two countries — China’s national wealth is more than eight times greater than Russia’s — Putin’s diminished and dependent country would have little choice but to agree.
What would China demand as a reward?
We can discern the outlines from Chinese behavior. Despite a long litany of denials, it has not only aided the Russian military campaign, but it has also tried to reap battlefield knowledge.
Russia’s enormous efforts to build a drone industry were possible in considerable measure because of Chinese (and Iranian) help, including the deployment of Chinese engineers at Russian factories. Chinese officers have also toured the frontline to understand drone combat. If Ukraine’s fractured but highly innovative drone industry fell into Russian hands, the Chinese would expect to benefit.
And that would only be part of a broader exploitation of Ukraine’s security assets: defense innovation that has made Ukraine a case study for many Western governments and companies, and Western weapons systems deployed by Ukraine that would fall into Chinese-Russian hands. This, by the way, is what happened when Nazi Germany was handed Czechoslovakia along with its extremely advanced arms industry — many of the tanks that invaded France were Czech.
Russia would, of course, itself benefit from a Ukrainian tech transfer flowing directly to Moscow, and would become a far more formidable military power as it adopts Ukrainian and Western capabilities. But China, with its advanced manufacturing base and speed of adaptation, would be the ultimate winner. Which, of course, is a serious concern for the US military that may one day have to fight them.
There are geopolitical wins too from Ukrainian defeat or dismemberment.
European NATO has, for some years, been pivoting toward Asia-Pacific by sending aircraft carrier task groups and signing basing agreements with regional powers that clearly understand the threat China poses. But with a resurgent Russia menacing its borders, there are reasons to doubt its sustainability or utility. One critic called the policy “borderline reckless,” given the paucity of European military capabilities and the Russian threat.
So China could reasonably hope that the presence of Russia’s victorious legions along NATO’s extended eastern flank would persuade Europe to stay well away from Asia.
It might have no choice. Despite evidence that Russia has been badly mauled in Ukraine, its revitalized arms industry is producing large amounts of equipment, and it will find the manpower to garrison a new western border with NATO.
For example, there are questions about the fate of Ukraine’s bloodied but combat-tested armed forces. Amounting to around 900,000 personnel, some might leave for Western Europe. But for the remainder, the Kremlin could be expected to induce or intimidate some into serving for Russia. This is not a theoretical prospect; Moscow has already forcibly conscripted tens of thousands of Ukrainians in the occupied territories.
There would be much for China to exploit in this new world. After all, it would present some relatively easy wins. Like Russia, China loses when the West is united and clear on its aims. Like Russia, China works to exploit European divisions.
It would therefore present itself as an honest broker between Europe and the Kremlin, and offer what Xi Jinping likes to call “win-win deals”, which are in fact one-sided in Beijing’s favor and that damage continental security (remember Italy’s Belt and Road participation, which it extracted itself from in 2023).
The broader aim would be to peel Europe away from the United States and so strip Washington of old allies, leaving a debilitated and neutered alliance.
Dr. Alina Polyakova is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) as well as the Donald Marron Senior Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Christopher Walker is Vice President at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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