2025-05-31 04:37:05
For the last decade and a half, Europe focused on “taming Big Tech” — trying to address “anti-competitive practices” by US tech giants through antitrust and regulation. None of it has worked. No European business has been elevated or turned into a success story by promises of antitrust and regulation creating a “level playing field.”
We have neglected to build. Build our own digital infrastructure. Everything that lies below and supports the apps and services we use every day (from chips to compute to cloud to software to connectivity) is built on non-European infrastructure.
How did this happen? Europe was at the forefront of technology 20 years ago. We have incredible capabilities, and we are a rich continent. Fragmentation is a problem for scaling, but it has not stopped US companies from coming in and rolling out across the entire continent.
Of course, there is our perennial failure to create an Internal Market, a Capital Market Union, and to mobilize private capital, but how did that lead to us being so apathetic and increasingly resigned to our “digital colony” state? The US tech giants came in, set up their HQs, and rolled forward. Yes, they have capital. But capital is not missing in Europe – if anything, we are sending all of our savings to be invested in the US. We have an allocation problem. But all the tech we possibly need is here.
We are now a digital colony. Between 80 and 90% of cloud computing used by European customers is with the three US hyperscalers. Dependencies are high at every level of the “stack.” Our sensitive data is held in non-European hands. It makes us vulnerable to outages (remember Cloudflare last year? – one catastrophic problem with a minor piece of the stack paralyzed half of Europe and reverberated for days).
Critically, we do not own the “kill switch”. What if this infrastructure turns hostile? What if it is weaponized by political actors trying to extract concessions? (International Criminal Court? Greenland, anyone?). The US has made abundantly clear that we are absolutely on our own and need to defend ourselves.
Many in Europe understand we are at a historic moment and need to respond with action. Chancellor Friedrich Mertz’s election day promise of a 1 trillion euro investment in defense and infrastructure spending suggests “Germany may be back” — and if Germany is back, Europe may be back. France has also long understood the imperative to create a competitive space for European digital companies to exist and expand. It is time for Europe to claim at least part of the digital infrastructure.
That’s why I have formed “EuroStack,” a (volunteer, non-lobby) initiative animated by the need to steer a collective industry effort for a European “tech return.” Eurostack does not mean eradicating US tech companies from Europe, nor does it mean protectionism or, worse, autarchy. In fact, the EuroStack “ask” involves relatively modest measures (e.g., mandating that part of public procurement favors European suppliers — “Buy European,” incentivizing private demand, helping suppliers to sell European, direct private capital to European initiatives and dedicate some public funding to dealing selectively with market failures).
The first target is a “Buy European” mandate in public procurement: European taxpayers’ money should be used to create competitive spaces for European suppliers by requiring a portion of new contracts to be assigned to European suppliers. Hyperscalers’ size and commercial inducements (years of free services, discounts, rebates, freebies, and more) make it impossible for European companies to compete upfront for new contracts on a fair basis.
The EuroStack initiative is creating concern among hyperscalers who realize there is a resurgence of pride and concern in Europe (given the new geopolitical environment) about our ability to be more autonomous and self-reliant in a polarized world. They have pulled all the stops in trying to reassure European customers and governments that, in fact, they are dependable and would never let us down. Some claim they will even “sue the Trump Administration” if they were asked to do something in breach of their obligations to European customers.
How credible is this promise? These are not art heists that need to be kept safe in a Swiss vault. They are sensitive data that Europeans need to have on our soil and under our control.
Critics charge that “digital sovereignty will hurt European growth” and that “Europe does not have the products to compete with US suppliers.” We must resist.
Europe’s digital future is in our hands. This is the moment for our governments and institutions to support a digital industry, which has become marginalized but is still alive and kicking. The alternative is to remain a “digital colony,” “between the American hammer and the Chinese anvil,” and never to realize our potential again. This is too bleak for Europe to contemplate.
Dr. Cristina Caffarra, an Honorary Professor at University College London, is a leading competition economist with over 25 years’ experience leading economic analyses in multiple competition investigations on landmark mergers and antitrust matters, before the EC and the competition agencies of the UK, multiple Member States, and across the globe.
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.
CEPA Europe’s Tech & Security Conference in Brussels.
The post “EuroStack”: How Europe Can Compete in Tech appeared first on CEPA.
2025-05-29 23:35:57
Maksym Kolesnykov — a former artillery scout and prisoner of war — is now working with Vesta, a Ukrainian charitable foundation supporting military personnel, veterans, their families, the families of the fallen, and those missing in action.
“Before the war, I was a marketing director,” Maksym recalls. “It was a pleasure for me. I loved communicating, doing research. I planned to go on in that direction.” But for Maksym, as for so many other Ukrainians, everything changed with Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014. He became a soldier and was eventually captured (and, like all prisoners of war, cruelly mistreated) by the Russians.
The experience of combat and captivity changed him, as it has for many of the country’s 1.2 million veterans. Once the war ends and those currently serving are demobilized, that number will rise to 5-6 million, the government estimates.
So there’s a huge job to do in helping military men and women to reintegrate, and to meet their unique needs.
Maksym notes the gap in understanding between those who have been on the battlefield and those who try to live as if nothing is happening. “It’s difficult for me to communicate with people who consciously avoid the war. I don’t mind that they want to live their best life — but for that to be possible, the country has to survive. I can’t accept when people just ignore that.”
Maksym had always considered himself an active citizen. “But now I demand even more — from myself and from others.” That drive led him to Vesta, where he now works on veteran issues.
He is an internal project analyst, in particular analyzing the mobile psychological support groups project. These are support groups for veterans, where lawyers and psychologists provide services to those who have returned from the war — and their families as well
“I analyze the needs of veterans and their families, systematize requests, assess to what extent these needs can be met at the community level, and also study the level of satisfaction among the project’s beneficiaries and how much their psycho-emotional state improves with the availability of such services,” says Maksym.
Vesta is a Ukrainian partner of Amnesty International Ukraine, Amnesty International Denmark, and the Danish CISU fund in the Tribe project, which helps Ukrainian veterans to protect both their own rights and those of others.
Maksym has personal experience of this from his military service and history as a PoW. After the first Russian invasion of 2014, he was determined to contribute. “I was looking for ways to get involved. I hadn’t served in the army before, but eventually, I ended up on a reserve list and was later mobilized.”
That moment changed not only his life but the very structure of his identity. “I ended up in artillery reconnaissance, and gained a new focus—I wanted to do what I was doing well. I had a degree in radiophysics, so I had to recall that knowledge for artillery calculations. I had to dive into military strategy and learn fast”
After demobilizing in 2016, the war followed him in other ways. “The people I spoke with had changed. Some fell away, those who dodged the draft, people I knew had received the call and didn’t go,” he said. “There were disappointments, even with close friends who left the army under questionable circumstances. But I also gained new strong bonds, brotherhoods that still last.”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Maksym didn’t hesitate. He was a part of the first-line reserve, and returned to service. He was captured by Russian forces in 2022.
His experience as a prisoner of war became a turning point, not only personally, but socially. “After I came back from captivity, I completely switched to Ukrainian,” he says. “I had tried to speak Ukrainian only in 2014–2015, but some of my environment was Russian-speaking”.
As a member of Vesta, he’s now involved in the Tribe project, with its human rights education providing tools and knowledge. Veterans learn how to communicate with the authorities and work with the media, and how to build a reputation and remain psychologically stable.
For Maksym, socially active veterans are a logical continuation of what they fought for. “After a war like ours, one of survival in the most literal sense, the sense of injustice becomes very sharp. When you’ve fought on the side of good against evil, it’s very hard to accept injustice or incompetence.”
That’s why veterans, he says, are particularly well-suited to human rights work. “There’s this hunger to make things better here, on this land. And it’s great that we have the chance to do that constructively, not by destroying or shooting, but through advocacy, law, dialogue. That kind of work benefits society far more than lashing out.”
Veterans bring something else to the table: credibility.
“There’s a public demand for moral authority. Veterans and military people have that. Society recognizes their contribution, so when a veteran speaks or acts constructively, people listen. If someone was willing to die for this country to survive, there’s a basic trust in their intentions. They’ve already proven that their words aren’t empty.”
And for the veterans themselves, the benefits are mutual.
“There’s a story you carry — something you feel but might not know how to express. Activism and advocacy give us not just the will but also the tools to act. Veterans bring energy and integrity, and when they gain knowledge and support, it becomes a force for real change.”
Now Maksym channels the same clarity and purpose he once applied to military calculations into defending rights and building a better society. From the battlefield to the courtroom of public opinion, he continues to serve — not with weapons, but with words and will.
And that, he believes, is a very important fight.
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary ‘Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
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.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CET
The post Combat Veterans Fight for a Better Ukraine appeared first on CEPA.
2025-05-29 23:05:23
The Trans-Balkan Pipeline (TBP), a vital piece of energy infrastructure in Southeastern Europe, is barely used because of over-inflated transit charges. Its dormancy inflates gas prices in Central and Eastern Europe, curtails the efficiency of Greek LNG terminals, and serves Russian energy interests, undermining core EU strategic goals.
Unlocking the pipeline is not merely an economic choice but a pressing matter of regional security and EU policy coherence.
Originally built to transport Russian gas south through Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria to Turkey and Greece, the TBP saw its primary purpose diminish with the advent of TurkStream. But the extensive network can be put to use again. With minor upgrades, it could provide northbound capacity of up to 20bn cubic meters a year, significantly diversifying gas flows and enabling liquefied natural gas (LNG) from southern ports to reach Moldova, Ukraine, and Central Europe efficiently.
The system, with its multiple high-diameter pipes, should offer one of the most cost-effective transit routes, translating into minimal tariffs if priced on the actual operational costs of the network. Its geography makes it an ideal conduit for Greek LNG to reach landlocked markets historically reliant on eastern supplies.
So what’s the problem? The TBP is commercially sidelined by a thicket of uncompetitive national tariffs. While new multi-billion-euro gas infrastructure projects have received EU support in Romania and Bulgaria, this capable asset is neglected.
The TBP’s underutilization for northbound flows stems from “tariff pancaking.” As gas moves north from Greece, each national transmission system operator (TSO) in Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova levies separate tariffs. The cumulative effect is an exorbitant final cost for shippers, making the route uncompetitive.
Data from Ukraine’s Gas TSO clearly illustrates this distortion. Transporting LNG from Alexandroupolis via the pipeline incurs an indicative tariff of €13.61 ($15.43)/MWh, while it is €10.27/MWh from Revithoussa. These figures dwarf costs on other routes. Poland’s pipeline from Świnoujście to Ukraine, for example, is about €3.98/MWh, and Croatia’s Krk to Ukraine is €3.93/MWh. The discrepancy is irrational, especially as Alexandroupolis is closer to Ukraine than Świnoujście.
Adding to the frustration, certain sections of the Trans-Balkan Pipeline (such as in Romania) are reportedly not fully integrated into the national domestic gas networks. However, the costs of entire national grids are still being disproportionately allocated to these non-integrated sections, artificially inflating their tariff base beyond their actual operating costs.
Unblocking the TBP would offer widespread benefits. For the Central and Eastern European gas market, it would provide a much-needed alternative supply route, alleviating congestion on existing west-east and north-south corridors. With Ukraine and Moldova planning to import 5-6bn cubic meters of gas a year, reliance on existing northern/western routes could create bottlenecks and higher prices across the region.
The TBP could rebalance these flows, allowing significant imports from Southern Europe via Greece. Increased route diversity enhances energy security, fosters regional hub liquidity, and pushes down prices.
Revitalizing the TBP is also intrinsically linked to optimizing Greece’s LNG infrastructure. Terminals like Revithoussa and the Alexandroupolis Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) are key strategic assets for diversification, and their underutilization stems from a lack of economic onward transit.
The TBP’s tariff blockade inadvertently aids Russia’s energy strategy. As Europe strives to decouple from Russian gas, the high cost of moving LNG north through the Balkans creates a gap, which is then filled by Russian gas from TurkStream and BulgarStream.
Allowing this directly contradicts the EU’s REPowerEU plan to eliminate Russian fossil fuel reliance by 2027. Continued Russian gas flows, facilitated by the TBP’s effective blockade, preserve Moscow’s influence and perpetuate dependencies the EU aims to dismantle. In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, these are direct security threats.
The situation starkly illustrates how national regulatory fragmentation undermines the EU’s single energy market principles of free, fair, and non-discriminatory energy flow. The solution is primarily regulatory and political. The European Commission, with the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas, and the Energy Community Secretariat, should:
As a last resort, the Commission should investigate tariff-setting practices for compliance with EU law, initiating infringement procedures if necessary, to ensure national operators and regulators facilitate, rather than obstruct, vital cross-border flows.
The TBP is a significant missed opportunity for European energy security. Allowing this vital artery to remain clogged by tariff barriers is unsustainable. The European Commission, with member states and Energy Community parties, must act decisively. The challenge is to transform the TBP from a symbol of fragmented interests into a vibrant corridor of energy, solidarity, and resilience.
Sergiy Makogon is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a seasoned executive and energy expert with over 20 years of expertise in the Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European (CEE) gas markets, as well as European security.
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.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CET
The post Flick Switch for Better European Energy Security appeared first on CEPA.
2025-05-28 22:47:57
From the moment Donald Trump was elected US President, Russia and its allies began to assert that Washington was more interested in peace than Moscow because “Russia was winning.” But the Kremlin’s position is not as strong as it likes to pretend; economists say the economy is struggling and will have serious difficulties meeting rising military expenditure.
The main threats are the falling price of oil and tightening sanctions on Russia’s energy exports, which will result in its revenues being driven even lower. The Russian economy is stagnating, while the civilian sector is close to recession. Higher tax rates may not have the anticipated effect of bringing in extra revenue since the tax base also shrinks as the economy contracts.
Against this background, it will be problematic for Moscow to increase military spending to the levels it will need to sustain the war. In the first years after the full-scale invasion, Russia benefited from weapons reserves that had been preserved since Soviet times, but these too have been depleted.
Last year, military analysts noted a reduction in stocks not only of armored vehicles but also of multiple launch rocket systems like Grad, Uragan, and Smerch. Aware of this, Moscow is trying to increase production, but analysis by Radio Liberty suggests this will not be enough to cover the supply needed to replace losses at the front and arm new military units.
Economists suggest the government may tackle the crisis by devaluing the ruble. Should combat continue, this would permit increased military spending, but sectors not related to military production would suffer from a reduction in government demand, with citizens facing stagnation or a fall in real incomes.
There’s no sign of that for now, indeed, Russian real incomes are still above pre-war levels. But growth is slowing even as the economy suffers acute labor shortages and remains unable to fix deep-seated inefficiencies.
Companies directed to go “on a war footing,” as demanded by Vladimir Putin, are often recording losses. For example, Zaryad, a manufacturer of carbon fiber ice hockey sticks in Naberzhnye Chelny, lost 198m rubles ($2.5m) in 2024 after switching to the production of bulletproof vests.
The Lotus shipyard, in the Astrakhan region, switched to manufacturing potbelly stoves for the military and lost nearly 1.5bn rubles ($18.8m) in 2023, then 2.6bn rubles the following year. The Tambov Bread Factory, which at the beginning of 2023 started producing drones in one of its workshops, also saw a dramatic fall in its profits.
In addition to these difficulties, there have been losses caused by Russia’s endemic corruption. The conservative TV channel Tsargrad was outraged when it emerged that almost 400bn rubles ($5bn) seized from corrupt officials was stolen for a second time. The Prosecutor General’s office had reported the seizure of 504bn rubles in corrupt assets and property, but only 114bn appeared in the budget. “The fight against corruption only breeds new corruption,” the TV station said in a story posted online.
Pro-Kremlin commentators have tried to offer reassurance about the economic position. The business newsletter Vzglyad, for example, said India’s increased purchases of oil from the US instead of Russia were not bad for Moscow, as India will need Russian oil to refine the American fuel. It argued that Europe was threatened with dependence on American oil in the event of a refusal to buy from Russia, and argued that the growth of OPEC+ oil production and fall in prices are in Moscow’s interests.
Pro-Kremlin economists also hope that, with American mediation, Russia will share the European gas market with the US and resume supplies to European countries. Another hope is that Serbia and Hungary will form a “new Austro-Hungary,” which would be completely “tied to Russian oil” and soon joined by Austria and Slovakia in a pro-Russian alliance.
While the new Austro-Hungarian Empire exists only in a world of dreams, such Putin-supporting commentators and propagandists have been forced to look for more realistic ways of coping with Russia’s difficulties. Some have even proposed the compulsory distribution of university graduates to companies, as was the case in Soviet times.
But the authorities will strive to avoid such unpopular measures, and one way of doing so would be to engineer a pause in the war or a reduction in its intensity. It is important for both Ukraine and the West to understand this weakness in Moscow’s negotiating position.
Kseniya Kirillova is an analyst focused on Russian society, mentality, propaganda, and foreign policy. The author of numerous articles for CEPA and the Jamestown Foundation, she has also written for the Atlantic Council, Stratfor, and others.
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.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CET
The post Putin Can’t Afford an Endless War appeared first on CEPA.
2025-05-28 01:27:39
A new book, Zbig, details the life and vision of a great strategist who, rooted in Poland, became a leading scholar and policy shaper in the United States. Written by Edward Luce, chief US commentator and columnist for the Financial Times, Zbig traces its subtitle, The Life of Zbigniew Brezinski, America’s Great Prophet (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Like his older rival and eventual friend, Henry Kissinger, Zbig spent his earliest years abroad and later excelled in academia and then in government. His father was a Polish diplomat who had been posted to Kharkiv in the then-Soviet Ukraine from 1936-1937, during Stalin’s purges and in the wake of the Holodomor. He went briefly to Leipzig, and finally to Quebec in 1938, where he left government service after the communist takeover of Poland.
Starting in his teens. Zbig wanted to liberate his homeland from alien rule. His 1950 master’s thesis at McGill University laid out the incompatible realities between Moscow’s internationalist ideology and the national consciousness of the peoples the Kremlin sought to rule — beginning with Ukrainians, about whom Zbig heard from his dad.
From McGill, he moved to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. Denied tenure at Harvard in 1959, Brzezinski instead became a superstar at Columbia. He continued to write important books and articles such as Peaceful Engagement in Eastern Europe with MIT professor William Griffith in Foreign Affairs (Spring 1961). They rejected the diplomat George Kennan’s focus on containing Soviet expansion and the activist call of John Foster Dulles to roll back the Soviet empire. Instead, Zbig and Griffith called for bridge building — economic, cultural, political — to liberate the captive nations by peaceful means. This approach — a blend of hard, soft, and smart power — continued to serve as leitmotif of Brzezinski’s vision.
Having persuaded the investment banker David Rockefeller to underwrite the Trilateral Commission (Europe, Japan, US), he invited Jimmy Carter to New York to help plan its global aspirations. A peanut farmer, nuclear engineer, and state governor. Carter showed he could catch on quickly to international affairs and become a serious presidential candidate.
Zbig became Carter’s major foreign policy adviser during the 1976 campaign and, from 1977-1981 was National Security Assistant to the President. Could an opponent of Soviet imperialism collaborate with an idealist hoping to foster human rights? The two orientations blended to serve each other. Brzezinski’s worldview expanded from Poland to the entire Soviet bloc, to East-West relations, to trilateral relations linking Japan with Europe and the USA, and to the Middle East. Unlike Kissinger, Zbig saw the Soviet Union as an empty shell that a healthy push could splinter.
Carter and his National Security Assistant managed to normalize relations with China; sign the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, (not ratified after the USSR invaded Afghanistan); support anti-Soviet dissidents and human rights advocacy; and mediate the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Carter’s most overlooked foreign policy success was the Soviet Union’s non-invasion of Poland in 1980. Brezinski played a key role in convincing the Kremlin that Poland would be indigestible, albeit at the cost of a martial law regime imposed by Poland’s communist authorities.
Still, hubris led Brzezinski and Carter to major mistakes with Iran and China. They failed to see that Washington’s ally, the Shah, would be replaced by a radical theocracy that blamed the United States for Iran’s problems. When US diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, the United States tried to rescue them in a 1980 raid with helicopters that had to be refueled in the desert, where mechanical and other issues produced a catastrophe that did not help Carter’s reelection later that year.
Meeting for hours with Deng Xiaoping, Brezinski helped distance Beijing from Moscow. To normalize relations, however, the Carter administration — without Senate approval — broke its treaty relations with Taiwan. The White House hoped that normal relations with China would foster democracy there, but this did not happen. As China became richer, it became more dictatorial and more active in trying to displace American influence. Forty-five years after Carter’s presidency, the leaders of China and Russia now claim to be best friends.
Yet despite the failures of Brzezinski’s strategy in some respects, it contributed to the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe and achieved other successes in Asia and the Middle East. Given today’s challenges facing the US and its partners, the West again needs a consistent and enlightened vision such as that fostered by Zbig and, before him, by Churchill, Monnet, and Adenauer.
Remember the big picture; remember who your friends are; engage with your enemies but never forget they aim to destroy you.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University, He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
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.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CET
The post A Man of Vision in a Time of (Cold) War appeared first on CEPA.
2025-05-28 01:18:47
Russia has always been on the outskirts of Europe, desperate to be inside. The political history of the country is one of constant battle between isolation and modernization through reconnection with the West.
Russia’s way of connecting, isolating, and then reconnecting to the world has often been through war: Peter the Great’s wars, the wars with Napoleon, and World War II, when soldiers returned from battle with a new taste for Western material culture, and some with Western ideas.
The all-out war that started in February 2022 in Ukraine was part of the same pattern. But this time, Russia was fighting against a former part of the Soviet Union, a war in which contact with the West was minimal. There were no British or American soldiers in Russian villages, as there had been German soldiers during World War II.
The result of the war, no matter how it ends on the battlefield, will be Russia’s further isolation. The Western world is now tired of Vladimir Putin, and its sanctions against Russia will entrench the country’s isolation from Western Europe and the United States.
The re-isolation of Russia is not, however, just a consequence of the war in Ukraine. It is, rather, a deliberate strategy intended to reverse a trend that began in 1991, when Russia became more and more globalized. It came closest to the West in around 2011–2012, the moment when Putin decided to reassert his power.
He understood that globalization — through ideas and technologies — was the biggest threat he faced. What we’ve experienced since 2011 is a series of actions and maneuvers intended to detach Russia from the West. After two years of isolation conveniently imposed by COVID-19, Putin made the drastic move of severing the country completely from the West by a full-scale attack on Ukraine.
Our book is the story of Putin’s campaign to wall off Russia from the West, told through a group of friends who were on the front line of the ideological battle over Russia’s future following Putin’s ascent to power. Many of them ended up as key players on the Putin side.
It is a personal story, since they were our friends at a time when we could never have imagined that our lives, our perceptions of truth, and our hopes for our country could diverge so profoundly.
In the spring of 2000, a group of journalists met at Izvestia, a Russian daily newspaper. Putin had just been elected president, and the country was in the middle of the Second Chechen War.
In the years that followed, we kept each other, and our significant others, in sight: Evgeny Krutikov, a deeply traumatized scion of an elite Soviet family whose ties with military intelligence mystified everybody; Sveta Babayeva, a reporter in Putin’s press pool; Petya Akopov, an intellectual with a soft spot for North Korean postage stamps and the North Korean regime; and Zhenya Baranov, a war correspondent with deep ties to Serbia. Later, they were joined by Baranov’s wife Olga Lyubimova, a TV host with close family ties to Nikita Mikhalkov, a film director who had a significant ideological influence on Putin.
By 2022, some of our dear friends in Moscow were serving Putin in one way or another. Meanwhile, we were in London, in exile, separated from our families and wanted by Russian authorities.
What happened? How could we have ended up on such violently opposed sides?
To answer that question, we decided to reconnect with our former friends in Moscow. Thanks to the internet, that was possible even from exile. To our surprise, most of them responded, and some agreed to talk to us.
This book is our attempt to follow this group, and a few other people who would become significant to us, throughout the optimistic first years of the 2000s — a period that included the relative liberalism of Dmitry Medvedev’s brief reign, the annexation of Crimea and the repressions that followed in 2016–2021, and the current attack on Ukraine — to show the journey that Russia has made during these years from a highly globalized and aspirational society to a dismal walled-in fortress.
We needed to reconnect and speak with our friends — the protagonists of the story — for several reasons. The first was obvious: to hear their reasons for what they did. But the second was more challenging: to walk with them through the 20-plus-year journey the country has taken since the early 2000s, and to compare how they — and we — remember what it was like on a personal level at every crucial step along the way.
In a sense, it was like reliving those 25 years all over again. It was not easy, to put it mildly. But in the end, we understood that the crucial choices we all made throughout that journey were probably inevitable, as was our break as friends — our positions had become irreconcilable.
And that meant the rupture the country is going through under Putin was also inevitable.
Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov is published in the US on June 3 in the US and June 26 in the UK.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
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.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CET
The post Our Dear Friends in Moscow appeared first on CEPA.
