Vladimir Putin’s insistence that Ukraine surrender its remaining positions in Donetsk is not simply a dispute over territory. It is a demand that could dismantle Ukraine’s principal defensive barrier in the east, hand Moscow a military advantage it has struggled to achieve through years of fighting, and establish a precedent for further territorial concessions. The latest diplomatic contacts with European leaders have brought this question back to the centre of negotiations.
There are two ways for Russia to capture the remaining Ukrainian-held cities of Donbas. One is to fight its way through heavily fortified defensive positions, accepting substantial casualties, equipment losses and an uncertain timetable. The other is to secure their evacuation through diplomatic negotiations.
The second would achieve an important Russian military objective without requiring Moscow to bear the full cost of a prolonged offensive.
This distinction helps explain why Vladimir Putin continues to insist that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the remaining government-controlled territory of Donetsk region before a comprehensive settlement can be negotiated.
It also raises a more consequential question: would surrendering Donbas bring the war closer to an end, or would it improve Russia’s position in any subsequent confrontation?
A diplomatic opening without a strategic concession
The issue returned to prominence on 27 October when Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a rare telephone conversation with Putin.
According to the Finnish president’s official statement, the call followed discussions in Oslo on 20 October involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff.
The Nordic leaders sought to advance preparations for renewed American-mediated negotiations, expected in Abu Dhabi in November. They emphasised that they were acting on behalf of their respective countries rather than representing Europe collectively.
Stubb described the exchange as “frank and substantive”, arguing that direct communication with Moscow was necessary to address the security consequences of the war.
However, the Kremlin’s account offered little indication of movement on the fundamental disagreements.
Moscow insisted that any durable peace must fully accommodate Russian interests. A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Putin had reiterated his refusal to compromise on the objective of controlling the entire Donbas.
Following the conversation, Zelenskyy confirmed that the Nordic leaders had briefed him and stressed to Putin the need for concrete measures to reduce attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
The diplomatic process has therefore resumed without resolving the territorial dispute at its centre.
The military significance of the remaining Donbas
The territory Russia is demanding includes some of Ukraine’s most important surviving defensive positions.
Since fighting began in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Ukrainian forces have constructed and reinforced an extensive defensive system centred on Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka.
Known as the fortress belt, this network combines urban areas, industrial facilities, transport infrastructure, prepared defensive positions and terrain that complicates offensive operations.
The military importance of this system extends far beyond the administrative boundaries of Donetsk.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, surrendering these positions would allow Russian forces to occupy heavily defended territory without undertaking the prolonged operations otherwise required to capture it.
In its 26 October battlefield assessment, the institute continued to identify the capture of this defensive belt as Russia’s principal military objective in Donetsk. Ukrainian forces retained positions in parts of Kostiantynivka, while Russian operations towards other major cities remained contested.
The implications of a negotiated Ukrainian withdrawal would be substantial.
Russia could occupy the fortified urban corridor, reorganise its forces, establish new logistics routes and potentially redirect formations towards other sectors.
Ukraine, meanwhile, would have to construct or reinforce defensive positions further west, potentially under pressure and in less favourable terrain.
The resulting military imbalance would not necessarily lead to another Russian offensive. But it would change the conditions under which any renewed hostilities might take place.
That is why territory cannot be assessed solely by its surface area. A relatively small section of the front can possess strategic value disproportionate to its size.
Why Moscow prefers a negotiated withdrawal
Russia’s insistence on Donetsk also reflects the limits of what its military has achieved.
Despite years of fighting, Moscow has not secured complete control of the region. Successive offensives have produced territorial gains, but at considerable cost and without the rapid breakthrough originally anticipated.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently acknowledged the central importance of the remaining Ukrainian-held territory.
In an interview published by the US State Department, Rubio characterised the dispute as centred on territory Russia wants but has been unable to capture militarily, while recognising Ukraine’s sovereignty and long-term security concerns.
His remarks demonstrate how Donbas has become the principal territorial obstacle in Washington’s diplomatic calculations.
For Moscow, however, concentrating negotiations on this specific demand offers an additional advantage.
If Ukraine refuses to withdraw, the Kremlin can argue that Kyiv is preventing progress towards peace. If Ukraine agrees, Russia obtains strategically valuable territory without the military costs associated with conquering it.
The demand therefore serves a dual purpose: it establishes a public explanation for the absence of an agreement while offering Russia an immediate military benefit should negotiations succeed on its terms.
The problem with treating Donbas as the final concession
The central weakness in any settlement built around a Ukrainian withdrawal is the assumption that control of Donbas represents the limit of Russia’s territorial ambitions.
Moscow’s previously declared objectives suggest a more complicated picture.
In June 2024, Putin demanded Ukrainian withdrawal from four regions claimed by Russia: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Moscow does not fully control these regions, despite claiming to have annexed them in September 2022.
Russia has also demanded restrictions on Ukraine’s military capabilities and future security relationships.
As EU Today previously reported, renewed diplomatic engagement has not produced a clear abandonment of the Kremlin’s wider objectives.
Consequently, transferring the remaining territory of Donetsk would not necessarily satisfy Moscow’s other demands.
There is a significant difference between conceding territory as part of an enforceable settlement and withdrawing from defensive positions as a precondition for negotiating one.
In the first case, territorial arrangements form part of a wider agreement establishing obligations, verification procedures and security guarantees.
In the second, one party makes a potentially irreversible military concession before knowing whether an agreement will ultimately be reached.
This asymmetry is particularly important where the proposed concession directly affects the withdrawing country’s ability to defend itself.
The strategy of incremental gains
One interpretation of Moscow’s approach is that it reflects a strategy of incremental territorial expansion rather than an attempt to achieve all its objectives through a single decisive offensive.
After Russia failed to capture Kyiv in 2022, its military campaign increasingly concentrated on taking territory through successive, often prolonged operations.
The diplomatic equivalent would involve securing one concession, consolidating the resulting advantage and subsequently presenting additional demands.
Under such a scenario, Russia could obtain control of the remaining Donetsk territory, establish new positions closer to Dnipropetrovsk region and later argue that further territorial or security arrangements were necessary to protect its newly acquired frontier.
Moscow has already used the language of protective buffer zones to justify military operations elsewhere in Ukraine.
There is no evidence establishing that such a sequence would inevitably follow a Donbas settlement. Nevertheless, the possibility must be considered when assessing the military consequences of a withdrawal.
The concern is not merely that Russia might violate a future agreement. It is that the agreement itself could alter the strategic balance in ways that make renewed military pressure more effective.
There is also an internal Ukrainian dimension.
An agreement requiring the evacuation of cities defended for years would create substantial political controversy. Disagreements over territorial concessions, security guarantees and the credibility of Western commitments could complicate domestic political stability.
For Moscow, such divisions might provide another means of influencing Ukraine without immediate military escalation.
Donbas and the wider question of Ukrainian sovereignty
Donbas has considerable political significance for Putin beyond its military value.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Donetsk and Luhansk became central to the Kremlin’s justification for intervention, and their incorporation into Russia was later proclaimed as part of the 2022 annexations.
Control of the entire region would allow Putin to present a tangible achievement after years of warfare.
Yet the Kremlin’s objectives have never been confined exclusively to Donbas.
Putin has repeatedly questioned Ukraine’s historical and political independence, while Russian negotiating demands have extended to the country’s military posture, international alliances and internal political arrangements.
These positions suggest that territorial control forms part of a broader attempt to determine Ukraine’s strategic orientation.
A settlement that ends fighting in Donetsk without resolving these wider disagreements might therefore suspend the conflict rather than settle its underlying causes.
What the next negotiations must establish
The planned talks in Abu Dhabi will test whether Moscow is prepared to distinguish between its territorial demands and the conditions necessary for a sustainable ceasefire.
An immediate halt to hostilities along existing lines would preserve the military status quo while allowing negotiations to proceed.
Russia has resisted this approach, arguing that a temporary ceasefire could enable Ukraine to rebuild its forces without resolving the conflict.
Ukraine, by contrast, argues that withdrawing from fortified territory without credible guarantees would expose it to renewed attack.
Neither side can be expected to disregard the military implications of the proposed arrangements.
For European governments, the principal question is consequently not simply whether Ukrainian and Russian representatives can be brought back to the negotiating table.
It is whether any agreement can prevent the territorial settlement from becoming the starting position for another war.
Stubb and Støre’s conversation with Putin demonstrated that diplomatic communication remains possible. It did not establish that Moscow is prepared to abandon its existing territorial objectives.
The distinction matters.
Putin’s demand for Donbas offers Russia two potential advantages: a justification for continuing the war if Kyiv refuses, and a substantial military gain if Kyiv accepts.
That does not prove the Kremlin has already decided to resume hostilities after a negotiated withdrawal. It does, however, explain why the terms, sequencing and enforceability of any agreement are as consequential as the territory itself.
The essential question facing negotiators is therefore not only whether Russia can obtain Donbas through diplomacy rather than force.
It is whether the price of that concession would be a lasting peace — or a weaker Ukrainian defensive position if peace fails.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre have spoken directly with Vladimir Putin before briefing Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The initiative, undertaken in consultation with Ukraine, comes ahead of planned negotiations in Abu Dhabi but has drawn criticism from other Nordic leaders.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, 27 October, marking an unusual direct diplomatic engagement between Moscow and two European NATO members since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The conversation, initiated by the two Nordic leaders from Helsinki, was followed by a separate call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. According to a joint statement released by the Norwegian government, the initiative had been prepared in consultation with Kyiv.
The objective was to communicate directly with Putin about efforts to end the war and the forthcoming negotiations involving Ukraine, Russia and the United States.
Stubb described the exchange as frank and substantive, arguing that Finland and Norway had particular reasons to participate in discussions concerning European security.
“We are neighbouring countries to Russia,” he said, adding that the war’s outcome would directly affect European security.
Both leaders reaffirmed their governments’ continuing support for Ukraine while calling for renewed negotiations. Støre emphasised the humanitarian and economic consequences of the conflict and the need for de-escalation.
Importantly, their statement specified that they were acting as national leaders rather than representatives of Europe collectively.
The Ukrainian president thanked them for their detailed briefing and diplomatic engagement.
According to Zelenskyy, the two leaders had communicated Ukraine’s demand for concrete steps to reduce attacks against its energy facilities and other infrastructure.
The discussion also covered preparations for trilateral negotiations involving Ukrainian, American and Russian delegations, provisionally planned for November.
Kyiv’s confirmation that it had been consulted before the Putin conversation is significant. Ukraine has consistently maintained that decisions concerning its sovereignty, territory and security cannot be negotiated without its participation.
Oslo talks establish new diplomatic channel
Tuesday’s telephone diplomacy followed a meeting in Oslo on 20 October involving Zelenskyy, Stubb, Støre and representatives of US President Donald Trump.
American special envoy Steve Witkoff participated in person, while Jared Kushner joined remotely. European and NATO representatives also attended related discussions.
According to the Ukrainian presidency’s account, the consultations addressed possible steps towards ending the war and establishing security arrangements after a settlement.
Witkoff subsequently travelled to St Petersburg on 21 October for discussions with Putin.
The diplomatic contacts have produced plans for another round of talks in Abu Dhabi, expected after 4 November, although the precise date and representation remain subject to confirmation.
The European Commission has also sought involvement. During its 21 October press briefing, the Commission confirmed its participation in the Oslo consultations, which addressed territorial questions, security guarantees and post-war economic arrangements.
As EU Today previously reported, discussions about appointing a European representative to negotiations have exposed disagreements over who should speak for European governments and what authority such a representative would possess.
Moscow maintains its negotiating position
The Kremlin’s account of Tuesday’s conversation offered little indication of a change in Russia’s principal demands.
According to reports citing the Kremlin’s statement, Putin insisted that a lasting settlement would require what Moscow described as full recognition of Russia’s legitimate interests.
He also accused NATO and European Union countries of pursuing confrontational policies that prolonged the conflict.
These statements indicate that the reopening of direct communication has not, by itself, resolved the differences between the negotiating parties.
Russia continues to seek arrangements concerning Ukrainian territory and the European security order, while Kyiv maintains that its sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.
Denmark questions independent Nordic diplomacy
The initiative has also revealed differences among European governments over direct engagement with Moscow.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen criticised the Finnish-Norwegian approach, saying it had not been coordinated with Denmark and warning against individual European countries pursuing separate diplomatic initiatives.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also expressed reservations about contacts that might undermine a common European position.
Their objections highlight a distinction between consultation with Ukraine and agreement among European governments on the organisation of negotiations.
For Finland and Norway, both of which share borders with Russia, the outcome of the conflict carries direct implications for security in the Baltic Sea region and the High North.
The immediate question is whether their intervention can facilitate substantive negotiations without weakening coordination between Kyiv and its European partners.
With the next US-mediated talks expected in November, Tuesday’s contacts establish another channel of communication with Moscow. Whether that channel produces movement on territorial disputes, security guarantees or an eventual ceasefire remains unresolved.
Journalists from 17 European public service broadcasters, coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Eurovision News Spotlight network, published an interactive map on 23 October 2026. It documents hybrid incidents linked to Russia across 17 European countries between 1 April and 15 October. Journalists compiled a database of hundreds of reported incidents, categorizing each by type and the source and strength of its alleged links to Russia, then verifying them through open-source research.
The map comes as officials warn the campaign is growing. On 28 September, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in Brussels that Russia was planning more acts of sabotage to divide societies and intimidate them into abandoning their support for Ukraine. The points on the map represent an incomplete list of publicly known cases attributed to Russia or suspected of being linked to it, the report states.
The map covers airspace violations, sabotage attempts, “disposable” agents with no formal intelligence training, migration used as a weapon, and Russian military activity near or across European borders. It excludes cyberattacks, influence operations, and espionage by trained intelligence officers.
The EBU calls the result a very conservative estimate, not an official tally. Russia has consistently denied responsibility for the incidents. Many single points represent several incidents of the same type in one area or in quick succession. In Moldova, for example, Defense Minister Anatolie Nosatîi said on 30 September that the government had recorded 84 drone incursions.
Four German incidents are on the map, out of many more
The map shows four incidents in Germany, according to BR.
The four incidents in Germany on the EBU hybrid war map, 2 August to 14 September 2026. Other dots mark Russia-linked incidents in neighboring countries. Map: Luc Martinon/EBU, Eurovision News Spotlight; edited by Euromaidan Press
On 2 August, German authorities arrested a 33-year-old Ukrainian man in Thuringia on suspicion of photographing a Bavarian weapons manufacturer for a foreign intelligence service as part of an alleged sabotage plot.
On 4 August, a drone carrying explosives and a detonator struck the wing of a Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport but failed to explode.
On 3 September, attackers threw firebombs from a car onto a construction site next to defense firms in Munich, and German security authorities suspect Russian intelligence.
On 14 September, investigators learned of a crashed drone found near the Bundeswehr’s Wunstorf air base.
Internal papers from the new Joint Hybrid Defense Center, seen by Correctiv, record 163 suspected sabotage cases in 2026 up to 19 August. The targets included rail lines, military facilities, substations, and radio masts. The same papers record 1,034 drone overflights of critical infrastructure, military sites, and defense companies, and 25 espionage investigations. The papers cover possible attacks by Russia, China, and Iran, and media did not report a breakdown of the sabotage cases by country.
European leaders sound the alarm over Russian hybrid attacks
On 15 April, Swedish civil defense minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said pro-Russian groups had moved from denial-of-service attacks to attempts at destructive cyberattacks, including one on a Swedish power plant in 2025. On 1 September, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul named Russia as the perpetrator of the Leipzig attack and accused Moscow of “blatant hostility” toward Germany.
On 18 September, French President Emmanuel Macron said Russia’s hybrid attacks would not go unanswered and ordered a plan to protect France’s critical infrastructure. On 1 October, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Germany was preparing for new hybrid attacks, “including serious ones.” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on 14 October called the attacks a sign of Russian weakness at a press conference in Tallinn and said NATO would react where needed without being “rattled.”
An investigation involving 17 European public-service news organisations has documented hundreds of suspected hybrid attacks across Europe in just over six months, revealing the scale of a security challenge that increasingly extends beyond conventional espionage and cyberwarfare.
The investigation, coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union, examined incidents reported between 1st April and 15th October 2026, including sabotage attempts, arson, airspace violations, suspicious drone activity and the exploitation of migration routes along the European Union’s eastern borders.
Published on 23rd October, the resulting interactive map provides a geographical picture of incidents publicly linked to Russia by intelligence agencies, law-enforcement authorities, government officials or reporting. The degree of attribution varies considerably, however, and many incidents remain under investigation.
The findings point to a fundamental problem for European security: hostile activities can be conducted across national boundaries without necessarily triggering the legal, military or political mechanisms designed to respond to conventional aggression.
Sabotage Without Conventional Warfare
Among the cases examined is an incident in Munich in September, when two Bulgarian nationals allegedly threw incendiary devices from a moving vehicle onto a construction site near several defence companies.
Police arrested the suspects after a witness reported the incident. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann and regional criminal investigators subsequently indicated that political motives were being considered. Investigators reportedly suspected possible involvement by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, although the allegations have not been established in court.
The case illustrates growing concern about so-called disposable agents: individuals recruited to undertake relatively limited operations without formal intelligence training or a longstanding relationship with an intelligence service.
Such arrangements can complicate investigations. Even where perpetrators are identified, establishing a legally demonstrable connection between their actions and a foreign intelligence organisation may prove considerably more difficult.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office has registered a mid-three-digit number of suspected sabotage and reconnaissance cases since the beginning of 2026, according to information provided to investigators involved in the European mapping project.
Only a small proportion have been publicly attributed to Russia. Four German incidents were included in the map, demonstrating the distinction between a broad national caseload and cases meeting the investigation’s publication criteria.
Europe’s Eastern Borders Under Pressure
The geographical distribution reveals substantial activity along NATO’s eastern flank, particularly around the Baltic states, Belarus and the Black Sea.
Incidents include repeated airspace violations, suspected reconnaissance operations and attempts to facilitate unauthorised border crossings. Lithuanian authorities have accused Belarus of deliberately exploiting migration as an instrument of political pressure.
Commercial shipping has also become increasingly exposed. Drone attacks involving vessels near Romania and Bulgaria have raised concerns about the extension of the war’s consequences into maritime areas adjoining EU and NATO territory.
Teija Tiilikainen, director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, identified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an important factor behind the increasing pressure. According to her assessment, Moscow’s objectives include weakening Western unity and undermining continued support for Ukraine.
The Legal and Institutional Challenge
The central difficulty is not simply the absence of criminal legislation. Arson, espionage, sabotage and unlawful interference with critical infrastructure are already punishable under national laws.
Rather, the challenge involves establishing foreign direction, coordinating investigations across jurisdictions and identifying when a series of apparently separate offences constitutes a wider hostile campaign.
Germany’s domestic intelligence chief, Sinan Selen, has described the environment as a grey area between war and peace. German foreign intelligence chief Martin Jäger has similarly identified Russia as the country’s most dangerous adversary.
European governments are beginning to address these difficulties collectively. At their 15th–16th October summit, EU leaders condemned intensifying hybrid attacks and called for stronger resilience, greater use of existing countermeasures and accelerated work on drone security.
Meanwhile, a European Commission research initiative, published on 23rd October, proposes combining anticipation, active defence and retaliatory measures into a more coherent deterrence strategy.
From Individual Incidents to Collective Security
The investigation’s significance extends beyond the number of incidents recorded. By bringing together information previously dispersed among national authorities and separate investigations, it makes possible a wider assessment of the methods, geographical concentration and recurring characteristics of suspected hostile operations.
Nevertheless, the map does not establish Russian responsibility for every incident it records, nor does it constitute a complete European database. Russia has repeatedly denied conducting the hybrid attacks attributed to it.
For European governments, the unresolved question is how to move from recognising a pattern of hostile activity to demonstrating responsibility and responding effectively.
The emerging security challenge therefore concerns not only the detection of individual perpetrators, but also Europe’s ability to connect incidents across borders, establish responsibility and prevent successive operations from becoming an accepted feature of the continent’s security environment.
European leaders are considering appointing a senior representative to negotiate with Russia over Ukraine. But the search exposes a more fundamental problem: whether Europe can transform its economic strength, military resources and political influence into an independent capacity to shape its own security.
Europe is searching for someone capable of negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Yet the question confronting European capitals is considerably more difficult than identifying a politician with sufficient experience, authority and diplomatic skill. It is whether Europe possesses the political unity and strategic independence to negotiate with Moscow on equal terms.
According to diplomatic accounts published on 22nd October, five European leaders have emerged as possible representatives: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Czech President Petr Pavel, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
No appointment has been announced, and a group of negotiators may ultimately prove more acceptable than a single representative. The initiative reflects concern that Washington’s negotiations with Moscow could produce arrangements affecting European security without sufficient European influence over their terms.
The European Commission insists that the EU is already participating in diplomatic consultations, including discussions held in Oslo on 20th October. But participation in preliminary meetings is not the same as possessing the authority to determine the outcome.
The paradox of European power
Europe’s predicament contains an extraordinary contradiction. The European Union is among Ukraine’s principal financial supporters. Its governments provide military assistance, maintain sanctions against Russia and control decisions affecting Moscow’s future access to European markets. Nevertheless, European capitals remain concerned that the decisive political framework for ending the war could be negotiated principally between Washington and Moscow.
This anxiety has intensified under President Donald Trump, whose transactional approach increasingly treats diplomatic settlements as exchanges of economic concessions and strategic advantages.
As EU Today recently examined, proposals involving sanctions relief, renewed energy cooperation and commercial opportunities raise the possibility of arrangements that depend upon European consent but are negotiated elsewhere.
Washington can discuss reopening economic relations with Russia. It cannot independently reverse European sanctions, guarantee Ukraine’s accession to the EU or decide the continent’s future security arrangements. The European Council explicitly reaffirmed this distinction in its conclusions of 16th October, insisting that decisions affecting the Union’s security and responsibilities belong to Europe itself.
The central issue is therefore not whether Europe has influence, but whether it can organise that influence into a coherent negotiating position.
Why Ukraine must help choose Europe’s representative
An equally important weakness would arise if European governments selected their representative without making Kyiv an integral participant in the decision.
Ukraine is not merely the geographical subject of negotiations. Its government controls whether a proposed settlement can acquire political legitimacy, while its armed forces determine much of what can be implemented on the ground.
A negotiated agreement rejected by Kyiv could neither reliably end the war nor provide the security arrangements that Europe seeks.
European security, moreover, can no longer be considered independently of Ukraine’s military capabilities. Ukrainian forces possess extensive operational experience against Russia, including in drone warfare, electronic warfare and long-range strikes.
Any future continental defence architecture that excludes this experience would disregard one of Europe’s most consequential military assets.
An effective European representative would therefore require a mandate developed jointly with Ukraine, rather than simply endorsed by European governments after the event.
The danger of negotiating without leverage
The proposed candidates illustrate the difficulty of combining political authority with negotiating credibility. Meloni possesses a working relationship with Trump and considerable influence within European conservative politics. Stubb combines experience of Russia’s immediate neighbourhood with access to Washington. Pavel brings military expertise and an understanding of NATO’s command structures. Yet none could independently commit Europe’s governments to financial, military or territorial-security obligations.
This is the fundamental weakness of the proposed office. A negotiator requires more than access to powerful leaders. The ability to make commitments, withhold concessions and impose costs is what gives diplomatic representation substance.
Europe possesses potentially significant instruments: sanctions, industrial capacity, financial assistance and growing defence expenditure. But these remain distributed across institutions and national governments with differing strategic priorities.
Poland, the Baltic states and Nordic governments approach Russian security threats differently from several Western and Southern European capitals. Reconciling those positions is not an administrative exercise. It is a prerequisite for meaningful diplomacy.
The historical shadow of Yalta
The search also reflects European concern about a return to great-power bargaining over the continent’s political geography.
The historical comparison frequently invoked is Yalta in 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin discussed Europe’s post-war settlement. Munich in 1938 offers another warning about negotiating territorial concessions at the expense of directly affected states. Neither precedent precisely describes the present situation.
Unlike the countries subjected to Soviet domination after the Second World War, today’s European states possess established institutions, substantial economic resources and collective defence arrangements. Ukraine, meanwhile, has demonstrated that Russia cannot simply dictate its political future through military superiority.
Nevertheless, the danger lies in accepting the underlying principle that powerful states possess a privileged right to determine the sovereignty and security choices of their neighbours.
Moscow’s demands concerning NATO, Ukrainian territory and Europe’s wider security arrangements extend beyond any conventional ceasefire negotiation.
A European representative would have to challenge that premise rather than merely negotiate the geographical limits of Russian influence.
From diplomatic representation to strategic authority
The debate inevitably leads to Europe’s military dependence upon the United States. An American withdrawal from NATO is not inevitable. Indeed, US legislation restricts unilateral presidential withdrawal. But Washington could substantially reduce its military commitments without formally abandoning the alliance.
Europe must therefore consider how much independent military capacity it requires to support its diplomatic positions. That entails coordinated procurement, integrated military planning, sustainable defence production and deeper cooperation with Britain, Norway, Canada and Ukraine. Recent security challenges in the Black Sea illustrate the difficulty of converting European diplomatic commitments into effective collective action.
These developments would not automatically create a European army or replace NATO. They could, however, give European governments greater freedom to act if American priorities diverge from their own.
The relationship between military capability and diplomacy is particularly important in dealing with Moscow. European representatives cannot expect Russia to revise its demands simply because Brussels has selected a more prominent interlocutor.
Russia would have to conclude that continued aggression carries greater costs than a settlement respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Europe’s diplomatic standing would then derive not from the personality of its representative but from the collective resources and political commitments behind that individual.
The immediate search for a negotiator may appear a limited diplomatic initiative. Its implications are considerably larger.
For decades, European security rested upon an arrangement in which American military power compensated for Europe’s fragmented strategic authority. The present negotiations are exposing the limitations of that model. The decisive question is not whether Meloni, Stubb, Pavel or another European leader can secure a place at the negotiating table. It is whether Europe can establish a common position, backed by Ukraine’s consent and by sufficient economic and military power, that neither Washington nor Moscow can disregard.
Without those foundations, a European envoy risks becoming a participant in decisions made by others. With them, the appointment could mark the beginning of a substantially different European role in international security.
The violence accompanying France’s October protests has revealed how foreign influence networks can exploit domestic grievances to undermine governments and European support for Ukraine. New evidence suggests Russian-linked operations were active before the riots, raising questions about whether information manipulation is moving beyond propaganda towards the mobilisation of political unrest.
France’s violent protests have exposed a vulnerability in European security that conventional policing cannot easily address: the ability of foreign information networks to exploit domestic political crises, amplify social divisions and transform legitimate grievances into instruments of geopolitical pressure.
President Emmanuel Macron has acknowledged foreign manipulation of information surrounding the disturbances of 17–18 October but insists there is no evidence that foreign actors organised the violence itself. His assessment reflects the evidence currently available, although new investigations indicate that Russian-linked networks were actively exploiting the protest movement weeks before the worst disorder began.
On 24 October, France deployed approximately 70,000 police officers and gendarmes to prevent further violence. Yet the security operation addresses only the physical consequences of a crisis whose online dimension extends across national borders.
Researchers examined 547,471 posts and articles across nine languages. They identified 639 coordinated messages attributed with high confidence to Russia’s Doppelgänger operation, generating approximately 7.4 million views in the six weeks preceding 17 October.
The campaign used genuine concerns about living costs and public expenditure to promote a particular political argument: money allocated to Ukraine was being taken from European citizens.
This was not a random selection of grievances. France’s budget difficulties, public-service pressures and disagreements over defence expenditure provided material through which Moscow could seek to weaken support for Kyiv.
The researchers found that the operation targeted pro-European and pro-Ukraine politicians across the political spectrum. It praised selected proposals associated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon while also promoting nationalist narratives, illustrating a strategy driven less by ideological consistency than by opposition to existing European policies.
From manipulating opinion to encouraging mobilisation
Russian-linked channels were not merely commenting on existing demonstrations. They were circulating protest dates, identifying organisers and encouraging French audiences to follow the example of demonstrators in Germany.
On 28 September, the International Reporters network published an appeal urging French audiences to take to the streets. Other channels subsequently reproduced information about planned school blockades and demonstrations.
In one instance, a channel identified as Gavroche published rhetoric encouraging an attack on France’s Education Ministry.
Such activity goes beyond retrospective propaganda. It attempts to influence participation and behaviour while events are developing. Nevertheless, evidence that a network encouraged protests does not establish that it controlled the organisers or directed subsequent violence.
The original demonstrations arose from domestic grievances over schools, prices and government policy. The significance of the foreign activity lies in attempts to redirect and intensify an existing movement.
How France’s crisis was rewritten abroad
Once violence erupted, the information campaign acquired an international audience.
Alliance4Europe found that claims blaming migrants or Islam for the disturbances appeared in approximately one in 33 French-language posts, compared with nearly one in five English-language posts.
False allegations that immigrants had burned Limoges town hall circulated substantially more frequently in English than in French.
The same report identified 1,018 articles distributed through 28 websites associated with the Russian Pravda network. Their rapid republication across languages enabled a common narrative to reach audiences far beyond France.
The operation also presents a longer-term technological problem. Repeated publication of manipulated accounts can contaminate material subsequently retrieved or reproduced by artificial-intelligence systems, allowing false narratives to persist beyond the original campaign.
The political effects were visible when President Donald Trump and other foreign leaders portrayed France’s unrest principally through immigration and cultural conflict.
Speaking in Qatar on 21 October, Macron rejected these portrayals and criticised the circulation of fabricated AI-generated images. His remarks identified foreign manipulation after the riots but stopped short of alleging foreign responsibility for their organisation.
The Heritage Foundation and transatlantic networks
The transcript raises a more substantial allegation: that the American Heritage Foundation and Russia’s FSB have participated in a coordinated effort to destabilise France.
There are documented connections between the Heritage Foundation and political institutions associated with Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán.
These relationships demonstrate the development of transatlantic political networks capable of circulating common ideas about sovereignty, migration and European integration.
They do not establish operational cooperation with Russian intelligence. Nor has credible evidence emerged connecting Heritage to the organisation or financing of France’s October riots. Ideological convergence, institutional cooperation and participation in a clandestine operation require separate evidential assessments.
The implications for European security
The European Union’s response has exposed a regulatory problem.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, major online platforms must address systemic risks arising from their services, including the amplification of illegal content and threats to public security.
These measures targeted unlawful online activity, particularly incitement to violence and looting. They did not constitute findings that the suspended accounts belonged to foreign intelligence networks.
The European Commission has likewise refrained from activating emergency measures under the Digital Services Act without sufficient evidence connecting foreign manipulation to the violence.
The broader security concern is that foreign operations can exploit the interval between the emergence of social unrest and the establishment of reliable information about its causes.
Russia need not organise an entire protest movement to advance its strategic interests. By amplifying domestic grievances, promoting hostility towards support for Ukraine and circulating distorted accounts internationally, it can attempt to convert France’s internal political difficulties into pressure on European policy.
With France approaching its 2027 presidential election, these operations warrant continuing scrutiny. The central investigative question is no longer simply whether foreign networks spread false information after violence occurred, but whether their activities before and during demonstrations materially influenced mobilisation, radicalisation or political responses.
The evidence currently demonstrates organised manipulation and attempts at amplification. Establishing direct responsibility for violence would require a further evidential step, involving financial records, communications, operational instructions or connections with identifiable perpetrators.
France’s experience illustrates how contemporary information warfare can operate within a democratic society without necessarily directing events on the ground. Its immediate objective may be to alter the political interpretation of a crisis; its longer-term consequence may be to influence the policies adopted in response.
Italian authorities are examining whether foreign interference helped intensify violent protests across the country, as Defence Minister Guido Crosetto warns that social media is being used as an instrument of hybrid warfare. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has introduced emergency security measures and deployed additional troops to Milan, while further demonstrations are planned for Saturday, 24 October.
Italy is investigating the possibility that foreign actors, including Russian operatives, helped amplify the violent unrest that swept Milan and other Italian cities on 17–18 October. The inquiry introduces a national security dimension to demonstrations initially driven by rising living costs, dissatisfaction with public services and broader economic grievances.
According to information disclosed about the government’s intelligence inquiries, officials working under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have requested assessments of whether foreign provocateurs contributed to the disorder. No public evidence has established that Moscow organised the violence, and Meloni’s office has declined to comment on the reported intelligence discussions.
The developments follow EU Today’s earlier coverage of the Milan disturbances, which documented extensive looting, attacks on police and the detention of hundreds of young people, many of them minors. Since then, Rome has moved beyond emergency consultations, approving legislation that expands police powers and introduces tougher criminal penalties for violent demonstrations.
On Saturday, 24 October, Italian security forces are preparing for another wave of protests, with additional military personnel, drones and specialist police units deployed in several major cities. The immediate question is whether the government can prevent further disorder while establishing how much of the unrest was locally organised and whether foreign information operations influenced its development.
Crosetto warns of hybrid warfare through social media
Defence Minister Guido Crosetto introduced the hybrid warfare argument during a Defence Procurement Forum in Rome on Tuesday, 20 October. In remarks recorded by Italian public broadcaster Rai, he described the disturbances as the culmination of a form of conflict being conducted through TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms.
Crosetto argued that young Italians were undergoing what he called a form of counter-education outside their families and schools, absorbing political attitudes and values increasingly hostile to democratic institutions. He criticised Western governments for failing to recognise the consequences of this process, although he did not publicly present intelligence establishing Russian responsibility for the riots.
His comments also exposed differences within the governing coalition. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini questioned suggestions of Russian involvement, arguing that the immediate priority was identifying violent groups and preventing their movement into Milan.
Russian information operations under scrutiny
European investigators have identified activity by established Russia-linked disinformation networks, including Operation Overload and Doppelgänger, which have circulated and amplified material concerning the unrest.
These operations have previously used manipulated content, misleading narratives and coordinated online distribution to influence European audiences. In the present case, investigations into the online amplification of the violence have identified foreign exploitation of the disturbances, rather than proof that foreign governments organised them.
The European Commission has consequently declined to initiate emergency intervention against social media platforms, citing insufficient evidence linking foreign manipulation directly to the organisation of the protests.
France has taken a similarly cautious position. President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that foreign actors had manipulated information after the violence but said there was no established evidence that they caused the disturbances. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot has separately identified hostile narratives originating from Russia, China and Iran.
For European security authorities, the principal investigative question concerns the relationship between genuine domestic grievances and externally coordinated information campaigns. Foreign networks can exploit political divisions without necessarily directing the organisations or individuals involved in street violence.
Meloni introduces tougher security legislation
Meanwhile, Meloni’s government has proceeded with a substantial legislative response. Following cabinet approval on 20 October, Decree-Law No. 190 of 22 October 2026 entered into force on 23 October.
The legislation introduces penalties of two to five years’ imprisonment and fines of €10,000 to €20,000 for specified forms of organised violence during public demonstrations. Those organising or encouraging qualifying violent groups, including through digital communications, face potential prison terms of four to twelve years. It also expands provisions concerning juvenile offenders and preventive policing. The decree must undergo parliamentary consideration within 60 days.
Separately, the Italian Defence Ministry confirmed the deployment of 500 additional soldiers to Milan under Operation Strade Sicure until 31 December. The soldiers will reinforce security around sensitive locations and support existing police operations without acquiring additional judicial policing powers.
New demonstrations test the government’s response
Security arrangements have been intensified ahead of demonstrations scheduled for Saturday, 24 October, in Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Florence and other cities.
According to the latest security preparations, Rome is deploying approximately 1,500 officers, while Milan is preparing a combined police and military presence supported by aerial surveillance.
On Friday, Italian investigators conducted searches targeting approximately 100 people suspected of involvement in the previous weekend’s disturbances, including 51 minors. Authorities are also monitoring online calls for renewed protests, some organised by groups whose leadership and membership remain unclear.
The unrest presents Meloni with two parallel challenges: containing violence and determining whether hostile foreign networks have played a significant role in its escalation. Italy’s investigations may help establish whether the events represent primarily a domestic public-order crisis, the exploitation of existing tensions by foreign actors, or a combination of both.
For Brussels, the outcome could influence future enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act and its wider response to foreign information manipulation. For now, the evidence supports concern about Russian amplification of European unrest, but not a definitive conclusion that Moscow orchestrated the riots.
Bulgarians vote on 25 October in a presidential election shaped by Russia’s war in Ukraine, attacks on Black Sea shipping and economic pressures. The contest between incumbent Iliana Yotova and reformist challenger Andrei Gyurov will also test the political authority of Prime Minister Rumen Radev.
Bulgaria will elect a president on Sunday, 25 October, in a contest that has become a test of the country’s relationship with Russia, its commitments to NATO and the European Union, and its response to deteriorating security in the Black Sea.
An opinion poll conducted by Market Links between 13 and 19 October placed Yotova ahead with 47.3 per cent support, compared with 30.6 per cent for Gyurov. However, low anticipated turnout makes a second round on 1 November highly likely.
Although Bulgaria’s presidency is primarily ceremonial, the office carries constitutional authority over defence, legislation and government formation. The election also comes six months after former President Rumen Radev secured a parliamentary majority and became prime minister, substantially changing the country’s political landscape.
A presidency shaped by political realignment
Yotova, 62, became Bulgaria’s first female president in January 2026 after Radev resigned to enter parliamentary politics. Previously his vice-president, she is now seeking a five-year mandate of her own.
Her candidacy is supported by Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria coalition, which won 131 seats in the 240-member National Assembly in April, as well as the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Her running mate is Kiril Valchev, director-general of the Bulgarian News Agency.
Gyurov, an economist and former deputy governor of the Bulgarian National Bank, is supported by the pro-European reformist opposition, including We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria. His vice-presidential candidate is Georgi Kandev, a former senior Interior Ministry official.
A third significant contender is Kostadin Kostadinov, leader of the nationalist Revival party, whose political platform includes opposition to Western military assistance for Ukraine and closer relations with Moscow. His running mate is European Parliament member Petar Volgin.
The election follows years of political instability, during which Bulgaria held eight parliamentary elections between 2021 and April 2026. Radev’s parliamentary victory ended a prolonged period of fragmented governments, but it has also raised questions about the concentration of political influence.
A Yotova victory would place both the presidency and the parliamentary majority within the same political camp. A Gyurov victory would instead create an institutional counterweight to Radev’s government.
Russia and Bulgaria’s foreign policy divisions
Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007, but its relationship with Russia remains politically complicated.
Historical and cultural ties, including shared Orthodox traditions and the legacy of Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule, have influenced public attitudes towards Moscow. During the Cold War, Bulgaria was among the Soviet Union’s closest allies, and Russian influence continued after the collapse of communism, particularly through energy, business and political networks.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed divisions over whether Sofia should provide military assistance to Kyiv or adopt a more cautious position.
Since returning to power as prime minister in May, Radev has advocated maintaining Bulgaria’s European commitments while seeking improved relations with Moscow. His government has halted military deliveries to Ukraine and taken a more restrictive approach to further sanctions against Russia.
Yotova has similarly emphasised negotiations as the means of ending the war and warned against further militarisation of the Black Sea. Her position appeals to voters concerned that escalating confrontation could expose Bulgaria to additional security and economic risks.
Gyurov represents a more explicitly Euro-Atlantic political orientation, arguing for stronger Western alignment and institutional reform.
The contest therefore concerns not whether Bulgaria will formally leave its existing alliances, which would require decisions far beyond presidential authority, but how actively it participates in their policies towards Russia.
Black Sea attacks bring the war closer
The security debate has intensified following a series of drone attacks against merchant vessels operating near Bulgarian and Romanian waters in October.
According to a maritime threat assessment published by Ambrey, three commercial ships were struck on 5–6 October within the exclusive economic zones of the two NATO members. Two sank, marking a substantial escalation in the geographic exposure of commercial shipping.
Ambrey assessed that Russian forces were highly likely responsible and that the vessels had been targeted because of their connections to Ukrainian grain exports.
The attacks have raised concerns about navigation, maritime insurance, food exports and the potential for further incidents involving NATO member states.
Bulgaria’s position on the western Black Sea coast gives these developments particular significance. Its ports, maritime infrastructure and commercial shipping depend on maintaining secure access to international sea routes.
As EU Today previously reported, the expansion of Russian attacks into areas close to NATO territory creates difficult questions for coastal governments seeking to protect commercial interests without becoming direct participants in the conflict.
For Bulgarian voters, maritime security is no longer simply an aspect of the war taking place elsewhere. It has become a question of national security, economic vulnerability and the government’s capacity to respond.
Energy prices and economic concerns
The campaign has also been influenced by inflation and higher energy costs, particularly among lower-income households and residents of rural areas.
Bulgaria’s historical dependence on Russian energy has long complicated its foreign-policy choices. Although the country has pursued diversification, fluctuations in international energy markets continue to affect domestic prices and industrial competitiveness.
The transition represents a significant stage in Bulgaria’s economic integration with the European Union, but it has occurred during a period of price pressures and uncertainty over household purchasing power.
The presidency does not determine energy policy or monetary decisions. Nevertheless, candidates’ positions on Russia, European integration and economic security form part of the wider political debate.
Why a second round is likely
Under Article 93 of Bulgaria’s Constitution, a candidate must receive more than half the valid votes, with turnout exceeding 50 per cent of eligible voters, to win in the first round.
Neither requirement is expected to be easily satisfied. Turnout in the first round of the 2021 presidential election was approximately 38.6 per cent, reflecting the broader problem of electoral participation after repeated national votes.
If no candidate meets the constitutional requirements on Sunday, the two leading candidates will contest a runoff on 1 November.
Yotova enters the election with a substantial polling advantage, but Gyurov could benefit from opposition voters consolidating around his candidacy in the second round.
The result will determine more than the occupant of the presidential office. It will indicate whether Radev’s parliamentary dominance can be extended to the presidency, or whether voters prefer a political counterweight at a time when Bulgaria faces growing pressure to define its position between Moscow and its Western allies.
Austria has ordered four Russian diplomats to leave the country after security authorities identified activities incompatible with their diplomatic status, in a further deterioration of relations between Vienna and Moscow.
The Austrian foreign ministry announced the expulsions on Friday, 23 October. Three of the officials were accredited to the Russian embassy in Vienna, while the fourth served at Russia’s mission to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), where the diplomat worked on military security and arms control. All four have been declared persona non grata.
The decision follows findings by Austria’s security authorities, according to the details of the foreign ministry announcement. Officials have not publicly disclosed the activities involved or brought criminal charges in connection with the announcement. Moscow has indicated that it will retaliate, although the nature of its response has not yet been specified.
Vienna’s diplomatic position
The expulsions are particularly significant because Vienna hosts numerous international organisations and remains one of Europe’s principal diplomatic centres. In addition to the OSCE, the city accommodates United Nations offices and organisations dealing with nuclear policy, international development and arms control.
That concentration of diplomatic missions gives Austria a distinctive position in European security affairs. Foreign delegations enjoy diplomatic privileges and immunity, while the Austrian authorities retain the power to withdraw recognition from representatives whose conduct they consider unacceptable.
Austria’s constitutional commitment to military neutrality has not prevented successive governments from supporting European Union sanctions against Russia or condemning Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Neutrality limits participation in military alliances; it does not require Vienna to remain politically neutral over the conduct of a war.
Russian missions to international organisations also have a particular role. The OSCE brings together European, North American and Central Asian states, including Russia and Ukraine, and provides a forum for discussions on military transparency and conflict prevention. Its proceedings have become more contentious since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Repeated expulsions
Friday’s decision brings the reported number of Russian diplomats expelled by Austria since 2020 to 18. In May 2026, Vienna expelled three Russian diplomats amid security concerns involving antenna installations on Russian diplomatic buildings. Those concerns added to wider scrutiny of possible intelligence-gathering activity in the Austrian capital.
Diplomatic expulsions are a familiar response when governments suspect espionage but do not pursue ordinary criminal proceedings. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a receiving state can declare a diplomat persona non grata without publicly explaining the underlying evidence. The sending state must then recall the official or terminate their functions.
The mechanism is politically consequential but is not in itself a criminal judgment. A declaration of persona non grata establishes that the host government will no longer accept the diplomat’s accreditation; it does not establish guilt in a court of law.
Moscow has regularly responded to expulsions of its diplomatic personnel from European countries with reciprocal measures. Such retaliation can reduce the number of diplomats available for routine consular work and political dialogue, even when wider bilateral relations remain formally intact.
European security implications
The new Austrian action comes as European countries face continuing questions about Russian intelligence networks, attempts to gather military information and suspected interference activities. The circumstances of individual cases vary, and intelligence allegations cannot automatically be treated as proven simply because diplomats have been expelled.
The latest episode nonetheless illustrates how Russia’s war against Ukraine has affected the functioning of diplomacy in European capitals. Vienna must balance its international hosting responsibilities and established channels of communication with the security obligations arising from suspected abuses of diplomatic status.
For now, Austria has confirmed the expulsions but has not published an account of the conduct attributed to the four officials. The next diplomatic development will be Russia’s response and whether it affects Austrian representatives in Moscow.
The European Parliament has called for substantial additional funding for the European Union’s eastern border regions, proposing that up to 10 per cent of the budgets of relevant EU financing instruments be earmarked for areas affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine and growing security threats.
The resolution, adopted on Thursday, 22nd October, received 414 votes in favour, 79 against and 90 abstentions.
It seeks greater financial assistance for regions bordering Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, as well as territories along the Black Sea, under the EU’s 2028–2034 financial framework.
The proposals include higher EU contributions towards infrastructure projects, additional investment in local economies and targeted assistance for communities experiencing declining investment, population losses and increased security costs.
However, the resolution is not binding legislation and does not itself allocate new funding. Its provisions must be incorporated into future budget agreements and individual EU spending programmes.
Eastern regions face economic and security pressures
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has significantly changed economic conditions across the EU’s eastern frontier.
Border restrictions, disrupted trade routes, increased defence activity and uncertainty over regional security have affected investment and commercial activity.
The pressures are particularly apparent in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
Some communities previously depended on cross-border trade with Russia or Belarus, much of which has declined sharply following sanctions and restrictions introduced since 2022.
Other regions have experienced increased transport demand linked to Ukrainian refugees, military logistics and the movement of goods towards Ukraine.
The European Commission has recognised that conventional regional development programmes may not adequately address the combination of economic and security pressures.
The resolution calls for up to 10 per cent of funding within relevant EU instruments to be earmarked for eligible eastern border regions.
This does not mean that 10 per cent of the entire EU budget would automatically be transferred to those areas.
Instead, Parliament wants targeted allocations within programmes covering regional development, agricultural policy, transport, industrial competitiveness and infrastructure.
MEPs also propose significantly higher EU contributions towards eligible projects.
Under the parliamentary position, certain projects could receive up to 95 per cent EU co-financing, reducing the amount that national or local authorities would have to contribute.
Projects connected with security, resilience or critical infrastructure could potentially receive funding covering 100 per cent of eligible costs.
Additional pre-financing would help local administrations begin projects without having to provide substantial initial expenditure.
The proposals are particularly relevant to municipalities with limited budgets and regions where private investment has declined.
Wider definition includes Moldova and Black Sea regions
Parliament has also proposed broadening the geographical criteria used to identify eligible territories.
The resolution covers regions bordering Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, as well as regions with access to the Black Sea.
The proposed framework would use the EU’s NUTS 2 regional statistical classification.
For borders with Russia and Belarus, the parliamentary proposal includes geographical thresholds concerning the length of land or maritime frontiers.
For Romania, the revised approach could extend support to regions connected with Moldova, Ukraine and the Black Sea.
The proposals would also have implications for transport corridors linking Ukraine with the EU, including railways, ports, roads and border-crossing facilities.
Such infrastructure serves both civilian trade and military mobility requirements.
Existing programmes and new investment plans
The Commission has already introduced measures intended to support Europe’s eastern regions.
Its February 2026 strategy identified security, economic growth, connectivity, local industries and demographic resilience as principal areas requiring action.
A proposed investment initiative, EastInvest, is intended to facilitate financing through European and national financial institutions, with the potential to mobilise up to €28 billion by the end of 2027.
This would principally involve lending and investment support, rather than direct grants equivalent to the total facility value.
The Commission has also identified approximately €5.6 billion in cohesion funding redirected towards eastern border regions under the current financial framework.
Those reallocations form part of approximately €34.6 billion redirected towards new priorities across participating member states.
Parliament’s latest demands concern the period after 2027 and would operate separately from these existing arrangements.
Budget negotiations will determine the outcome
The proposal places additional pressure on governments negotiating the EU’s next long-term budget.
Agricultural policy, regional development and industrial investment are already competing for funding alongside increased European defence expenditure.
Eastern border governments are likely to argue that infrastructure and economic development in their territories contribute directly to the EU’s wider security.
Other member states may resist dedicated allocations if these require reductions in existing regional development programmes elsewhere.
Parliament has proposed that additional assistance should not come at the expense of support for other less-developed regions.
The negotiations will determine whether that position is financially achievable.
The next stage will involve discussions over the overall EU budget and the individual programmes through which eastern border assistance could be delivered.
For now, Thursday’s vote establishes Parliament’s demand for a larger and more clearly defined financial commitment to Europe’s eastern frontier, without creating an immediate entitlement to additional EU funding.
France, Germany, Austria and Poland are expanding or reviewing the authority of critical infrastructure operators to defend facilities against drones, raising legal and operational questions over the growing role of civilian companies in national security.
European governments are reconsidering who should be authorised to intercept hostile drones as energy companies and critical infrastructure operators confront an increasingly serious threat to electricity networks, transport systems and other essential facilities.
France has already introduced legislation permitting approved operators to deploy counter-drone systems, while Germany is reviewing similar arrangements and Austria has announced plans to extend certain protective powers to infrastructure companies.
Poland has moved further by authorising designated security units to disable or destroy drones entering restricted areas around important energy installations.
The changes reflect concerns that national police and armed forces cannot provide permanent protection for every substation, power station, railway facility or pipeline against relatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft.
France establishes a new approach
In August 2026, the French parliament approved legislation allowing authorised operators of critical infrastructure and their contractors to detect, jam and intercept drones near designated facilities.
The legislation followed a series of reported drone incursions over sensitive locations, including military installations.
Under the French approach, operators of strategically important infrastructure may eventually use approved counter-drone systems without relying exclusively on the immediate intervention of military personnel.
Potential beneficiaries include electricity operators and organisations responsible for transport infrastructure.
French authorities are testing detection equipment, electronic countermeasures and interceptor drones at Brétigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris.
The programme examines systems capable of identifying approaching aircraft, determining whether they present a threat and initiating an appropriate response.
France intends to expand the protection of sites classified as strategically important, with further deployment planned during 2027.
The initiative would introduce responsibilities traditionally associated with military or police operations into the management of civilian infrastructure.
Germany and Austria reconsider existing restrictions
Germany is examining the legal conditions under which private companies and infrastructure operators could participate in active counter-drone operations.
At present, responsibility for neutralising threatening aircraft remains primarily with the competent public authorities.
The debate has intensified following security incidents involving unmanned aircraft, including the discovery of an explosives-laden drone near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle airport in August.
German authorities attributed the incident to Russia, an allegation Moscow denied.
The German government’s review concerns not only the equipment that companies may possess but also whether trained security personnel should be permitted to deploy countermeasures without waiting for a separate police authorisation.
Austria announced plans in September to extend comparable powers to selected critical infrastructure operators, including major energy companies.
The government has acknowledged the practical limitations of protecting a large number of widely dispersed installations using state security personnel alone.
Poland has already established restricted drone zones around sensitive energy facilities, with designated security units authorised to intercept aircraft entering those areas under applicable national rules.
Electricity networks face particular risks
Electricity infrastructure presents a difficult security problem because essential installations are distributed across extensive geographical areas.
Transmission operators manage thousands of kilometres of high-voltage lines, while substations, transformers and switching stations connect generation facilities to consumers.
A successful attack against critical equipment can produce consequences extending well beyond the immediate site.
Large power transformers are particularly difficult to replace. Manufacturing, transporting and installing specialised equipment can require lengthy preparation, making rapid recovery uncertain after serious damage.
European utilities have traditionally concentrated on physical security, maintenance and restoring services after technical failures or accidents.
The spread of drones creates additional demands for surveillance, early warning and the ability to respond before an attack reaches its target.
Russia’s repeated strikes against Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure have demonstrated the extensive disruption that attacks on power systems can cause.
European governments are now evaluating how comparable vulnerabilities could be exploited against their own networks.
Electronic jamming can interfere with communications and navigation systems beyond the targeted aircraft. A drone brought down over an industrial or residential area could injure members of the public or damage surrounding property.
Security personnel must also determine whether an unidentified drone is hostile, operating unlawfully or simply present because of an error by its operator.
A mistaken interception could expose infrastructure companies to compensation claims and other legal consequences.
European governments must therefore establish who can authorise an intervention, which countermeasures are permitted and how responsibility is allocated when damage occurs.
There is no uniform European approach.
Some operators support expanding their protective powers, while others argue that the use of force should remain the responsibility of the state.
Finland’s national electricity transmission operator, Fingrid, has expressed reservations about transferring such authority to energy companies.
The position reflects a wider concern that infrastructure operators should concentrate on maintaining essential services rather than assuming responsibilities for armed or coercive security operations.
A growing European security market
The regulatory debate is developing alongside a rapidly expanding market for counter-drone technology.
Manufacturers are offering equipment that integrates radar, optical sensors, electronic detection and software capable of classifying possible threats.
Interceptor drones and electronic countermeasures are increasingly being designed for use around civilian infrastructure rather than exclusively on military installations.
German defence company Rheinmetall has reported growing interest from private infrastructure operators in counter-drone protection.
However, the technology is advancing faster than the legal frameworks governing its use.
The immediate challenge for European governments is to establish protective arrangements that allow rapid intervention while preserving clear accountability.
A counter-drone system can identify an approaching aircraft within seconds. Determining who is authorised to stop it remains a matter for national law.
Talks in Oslo have restored diplomatic contact between Kyiv and Washington, but Donald Trump continues to demand concessions from Ukraine while Moscow shows little willingness to compromise. Steve Witkoff’s forthcoming meeting with Russian officials will expose the limits of the American peace initiative.
The latest negotiations over Russia’s war against Ukraine have produced a renewed diplomatic initiative, with US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff preparing to travel to St Petersburg on Wednesday, 21 October, following consultations with Ukrainian and European leaders in Oslo.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Witkoff alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Tuesday. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, participated remotely. The discussions covered territorial questions, security guarantees, sanctions and proposals for a partial ceasefire.
The meeting concluded with cautious expressions of optimism. Stubb suggested that the negotiating process was back on track, while Støre confirmed that Witkoff would present proposals developed by American, Ukrainian and European representatives to the Russian leadership.
However, the diplomatic improvement contrasts with Trump’s renewed public pressure on Zelenskyy, raising questions about Washington’s negotiating strategy and whether Moscow has any intention of accepting the proposed settlement.
Washington’s contradictory signals
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump again insisted that Ukraine must reach an agreement with Russia, portraying Moscow’s military position as increasingly advantageous.
His remarks closely resembled arguments advanced during earlier disputes with Zelenskyy, when Washington pressed Kyiv to accept territorial concessions rather than increase pressure on the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to reassure the Ukrainian leadership that American military cooperation had not been deliberately restricted.
Rubio denied that Trump had ordered changes to intelligence-sharing or weapons assistance. Zelenskyy subsequently confirmed that Ukraine was again receiving American early-warning intelligence concerning Russian ballistic missile attacks.
Nevertheless, serious problems remain. Ukraine has reported delays in deliveries of American-made Patriot interceptors purchased by European allies, while restrictions affecting the military Starshield satellite communications system have not been fully resolved.
These difficulties are particularly serious as Russia intensifies attacks against Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, attempting to undermine civilian services ahead of winter.
The conflicting signals leave Kyiv negotiating with an administration whose diplomatic representatives promise continued cooperation while its president publicly demands Ukrainian concessions.
Security guarantees without NATO membership
Among the proposals discussed in Oslo were security arrangements intended to provide Ukraine with protection comparable to NATO’s Article 5 collective-defence provision.
Zelenskyy acknowledged that American representatives had discussed such guarantees, although their precise obligations and enforcement mechanisms remain undisclosed.
The proposal presents a fundamental negotiating problem.
Russia has consistently opposed Ukrainian NATO membership, partly because the alliance’s collective-defence commitments would increase the consequences of any renewed Russian aggression.
An alternative arrangement offering genuinely comparable protection would consequently encounter many of the same Russian objections.
Conversely, guarantees lacking a credible enforcement mechanism would leave Ukraine exposed to another attack after a ceasefire.
Moscow’s record provides little reassurance. Russia violated Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders in 2014 and launched its full-scale invasion in 2022 despite previous commitments to respect Ukrainian sovereignty.
The Kremlin’s objectives extend beyond territory
Washington’s approach appears increasingly concentrated on securing an agreement involving territorial concessions and restrictions on Ukraine’s future security arrangements.
Yet Putin’s objectives have consistently extended beyond the territories occupied by Russian forces.
The Kremlin has demanded constraints on Ukraine’s military capabilities, international alliances and strategic independence. Accepting territorial gains alone would not necessarily satisfy Moscow’s wider political ambitions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has maintained that Moscow is unwilling to make substantial political concessions, while the Kremlin continues to insist that any agreement must address what it describes as the underlying causes of the conflict.
Those conditions have previously included demands that would substantially restrict Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Consequently, even a Ukrainian willingness to consider elements of Washington’s proposals would not guarantee Russian acceptance.
The political calculation behind an energy ceasefire
One possibility under consideration is a limited ceasefire protecting energy and potentially food-related infrastructure.
Zelenskyy has indicated that Ukraine could suspend attacks against Russian energy facilities if Moscow stopped striking Ukrainian infrastructure.
Such an arrangement could reduce immediate civilian suffering. It would also have military and economic consequences.
Ukrainian attacks against Russian refineries, oil terminals and other energy installations have increasingly targeted infrastructure supporting Moscow’s war economy.
A temporary suspension could allow Russia to repair damaged facilities, restore production and stabilise export revenues. Without credible monitoring and enforcement, Moscow could exploit a limited agreement while leaving the wider conflict unresolved.
Trump has additional reasons to seek a rapid diplomatic result. With American congressional elections scheduled for 3 November, his administration is attempting to contain domestic fuel prices and demonstrate progress towards ending the war.
His recent decision to ease restrictions on Russian diesel exports has already provoked concern in Kyiv and European capitals over the potential financial benefits to Moscow.
The danger for Ukraine is that an agreement presented as a diplomatic achievement in Washington could provide Russia with economic relief without altering its military objectives.
The decision awaiting Washington
Witkoff’s visit to St Petersburg will establish whether Moscow is prepared to engage with the proposals developed in Oslo.
Putin could accept a temporary arrangement, particularly one suspending Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, while postponing discussions over territorial and political questions.
Alternatively, Moscow could reject the initiative and maintain its existing demands.
In either case, Washington will face a decision over the consequences of Russian intransigence.
For Kyiv, continued engagement with the United States remains essential because American intelligence, satellite communications and advanced air-defence weapons cannot readily be replaced.
But the prospects for a negotiated settlement will depend less on further Ukrainian concessions than on whether Russia faces sufficient political, military and economic pressure to abandon its maximalist demands.
The Oslo negotiations have restored cooperation between Ukraine, Europe and American mediators. They have not established that Putin is prepared to end the war on terms compatible with Ukraine’s continued independence.
US envoy Steve Witkoff is joining negotiations in Norway before an expected visit to Moscow, but American pressure on Ukraine, uncertainty over military assistance and renewed economic dealings with Russia raise questions about Washington’s approach to ending the war.
The latest American diplomatic initiative on Ukraine comes at a particularly difficult moment in relations between Washington and Kyiv. President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is taking part in talks in Oslo on Tuesday, 20 October, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, before an anticipated visit to Moscow for discussions with Vladimir Putin.
The Norwegian government has confirmed that the meetings will include Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will participate remotely. The meeting was requested by Zelenskyy, with Norway and Finland providing the diplomatic setting.
Yet the significance of the Oslo discussions lies less in the gathering itself than in the political circumstances surrounding it. Washington is seeking an agreement with Moscow while simultaneously becoming more confrontational towards Kyiv. Recent American decisions affecting military assistance, intelligence cooperation and Russian energy exports have introduced serious doubts about how the administration intends to use its considerable negotiating leverage.
Washington’s pressure on Kyiv
The immediate difficulty concerns the growing discrepancy between American diplomatic assurances and the practical conditions under which Ukraine is expected to negotiate.
Among the disputed deliveries are Patriot air-defence interceptors purchased by European NATO members through the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List programme. Zelenskyy has indicated that shipments remain subject to authorisation by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.
These are operational matters with immediate consequences. Ukraine relies on American intelligence, communications infrastructure and air-defence equipment to counter Russian missile attacks. Any interruption affects Kyiv’s military calculations, irrespective of whether Washington formally acknowledges a change in policy.
The political message is equally consequential. Trump has publicly questioned Zelenskyy’s willingness to negotiate and suggested that Ukraine might need somebody else to conduct talks with Russia. Such remarks place additional pressure on the Ukrainian leadership while leaving Moscow’s territorial demands largely untouched.
Russia’s incentives remain unchanged
The central weakness in the American diplomatic approach is the assumption that renewed engagement with Putin will necessarily produce meaningful Russian concessions.
Moscow has repeatedly treated negotiations as an opportunity to pursue political objectives that its armed forces have not achieved on the battlefield. Russian demands concerning Ukrainian territory and restrictions on Kyiv’s future security arrangements remain incompatible with Ukraine’s sovereignty.
An agreement reached under these conditions could suspend hostilities without resolving the underlying conflict. Russia would retain the capacity to rebuild its forces, while Ukraine could find its military options constrained by commitments made in exchange for an uncertain ceasefire.
The Trump administration’s recent economic dealings with Moscow further complicate the negotiations. Washington’s arrangements concerning Russian diesel have attracted criticism from Kyiv and European governments, particularly because Russian energy revenues remain an important source of financing for the war.
Trump has also pressed Ukraine to curtail attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, reflecting American concerns about fuel prices. For Moscow, relief from attacks on refineries would preserve economically important facilities that Ukraine has demonstrated an increasing ability to reach.
Any arrangement limiting such operations without corresponding Russian concessions would alter the military and economic balance in Moscow’s favour.
The broader American proposals reportedly include possible post-war economic cooperation with Russia. Their implications extend beyond Ukraine: commercial normalisation could offer the Kremlin substantial benefits before the conditions for a stable European security settlement have been established.
Europe’s influence depends on its willingness to use it
European participation in the Oslo process is therefore more substantial than a question of diplomatic representation.
Britain, France, Germany and Poland, alongside the European Union and NATO, are expected to be involved in the wider discussions. European governments would almost certainly bear much of the financial and military responsibility for implementing any settlement, including Ukraine’s reconstruction and long-term security.
They also possess considerable economic leverage through sanctions, financial restrictions and decisions concerning frozen Russian assets. Those instruments would form part of any serious negotiation over Moscow’s future relations with Europe.
However, European influence remains constrained by continuing dependence on American military technology and equipment. The controversy surrounding Patriot deliveries illustrates the problem: European governments can finance weapons for Ukraine without necessarily controlling when those weapons are released.
As EU Today previously examined, Washington’s negotiations with Moscow have consequences for European security that cannot be separated from the future of Ukraine.
European governments consequently face a difficult calculation. They wish to preserve American involvement, but excessive accommodation of Washington’s demands could leave them financing security arrangements over which they exercise limited control.
Norway and Finland have helped bring the Ukrainian and American delegations together at a moment when their relationship is deteriorating. Whether that produces progress will depend partly on Moscow’s response, but also on whether Washington is prepared to maintain the military and economic pressure necessary to make Russian concessions possible.
Witkoff’s anticipated journey from Oslo to Moscow will offer an early indication of the administration’s priorities. Putin will be assessing the terms Washington is prepared to offer, while Kyiv remains concerned about restrictions affecting equipment it needs to defend its cities.
For the Ukrainian leadership, the danger is that negotiations intended to end Russia’s invasion could become a process in which the country resisting that invasion is asked to make the most immediate concessions.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s unusually direct criticism of Donald Trump marks a turning point in relations between Kyiv and Washington. With American satellite restrictions disrupting Ukrainian military operations, intelligence cooperation under scrutiny and the White House easing pressure on Russian energy exports, Ukraine faces a fundamental question: how can it defend itself when its most powerful partner is increasingly willing to accommodate Moscow?
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has abandoned much of the diplomatic restraint that characterised his dealings with Donald Trump since their confrontation in the Oval Office in February 2025. In an interview on 14 October, the Ukrainian president accused his American counterpart of moving towards Russia and choosing the wrong side of history.
His intervention followed a series of American decisions that have increased pressure on Kyiv while offering Moscow economic and diplomatic advantages. A controversial agreement involving Russian diesel exports, uncertainty surrounding the provision of American intelligence and sudden restrictions on military satellite communications have brought relations between the two countries to their most difficult point since Trump’s return to the White House.
Zelenskyy’s criticism was unusually personal. Questioned about whether he felt betrayed by Washington’s recent decisions, he acknowledged the sense of betrayal but emphasised that Ukraine’s survival could not be treated as a commercial negotiation. He said Ukraine was not selling its country and argued that an American president claiming to act as an intermediary must not favour one of the belligerents.
The shift reflects the apparent exhaustion of a strategy Kyiv has pursued for more than a year: avoid openly challenging Trump, maintain personal contact with the White House and hope that American support can be preserved through diplomatic accommodation. That calculation is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain as Washington’s demands threaten to constrain Ukraine’s military operations without producing corresponding concessions from Russia.
American leverage becomes a Ukrainian vulnerability
The immediate demonstration of Ukraine’s dependence on American technology came during the night of 13–14 October, when SpaceX imposed restrictions on Starshield, the military-grade version of its Starlink satellite communications service.
According to accounts provided by Ukrainian frontline commanders, the changes disrupted connections to terminals travelling above approximately 160 kilometres per hour, forcing the abandonment of several drone missions. The restrictions affected systems used for reconnaissance, interception and strikes against Russian military targets.
As EU Today reported on 14 October, the disruption exposed a weakness extending beyond individual drone missions. Satellite communications form part of Ukraine’s operational infrastructure, supporting the movement of battlefield information, remote weapons control and communications across areas where conventional networks are vulnerable to Russian electronic warfare.
An interruption imposed remotely by a commercial provider can therefore affect military capabilities without any physical attack on Ukrainian equipment. Decisions taken outside Ukraine’s military command structure can alter the effectiveness of systems already deployed on the battlefield.
There is no established evidence that the Trump administration ordered SpaceX to impose the restrictions. Nevertheless, their timing, amid mounting disagreements over Ukraine’s military operations, has reinforced Kyiv’s concerns about relying on communications infrastructure controlled by an American company.
Intelligence warnings and the protection of civilians
The dispute over satellite access coincides with growing uncertainty about American intelligence cooperation.
Following Russian ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv on 12–13 October, Zelenskyy complained that Ukraine had received no advance warning from its international partners. The attacks damaged residential buildings and energy infrastructure, while Ukraine’s authorities raised concerns about the absence of advance intelligence.
Advance information about Russian missile launches is particularly important when ballistic weapons leave civilians only minutes to reach shelters. Intelligence cooperation also supports Ukrainian air-defence units in assessing threats and preparing interceptions.
Trump denied on 13 October that Washington had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha likewise confirmed that cooperation continued. The absence of warnings about particular attacks therefore cannot be equated with a complete suspension of American assistance.
Yet the consequences of unreliable warning arrangements remain serious. For Ukraine, the distinction between information withheld, delayed or simply unavailable offers little protection when Russian ballistic missiles reach civilian neighbourhoods without sufficient warning.
The wider concern is that intelligence provision could become another instrument of diplomatic pressure. Accounts of negotiations over Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries have raised the possibility that Washington might use such assistance as leverage. Reports of explicit threats have been disputed, but the controversy has increased uncertainty surrounding a capability central to Ukraine’s defence.
Why the diesel agreement changes the strategic calculation
The confrontation has also exposed a contradiction in Washington’s approach to the war.
The American administration has justified the arrangement partly through the need to ease fuel prices. Yet the initially announced quantities are modest in relation to international petroleum markets, raising questions about how much immediate relief the measure can realistically provide.
For Putin, its diplomatic significance may be considerably greater. Russia has secured a relaxation of American economic restrictions while Washington simultaneously presses Kyiv to limit attacks on the infrastructure that generates revenue for Moscow’s war economy.
The commercial implications of Washington’s sanctions reversal extend beyond the initial shipment volumes. The Treasury authorisation permits certain transactions involving Russian-origin diesel until April 2027, creating opportunities for international traders and financial intermediaries while leaving the broader sanctions framework formally intact.
Trump’s proposed energy ceasefire has compounded the difficulty. As EU Today examined earlier this week, Kyiv has offered to suspend strikes against Russian energy facilities if Moscow reciprocates. Russian attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure have nevertheless continued.
An arrangement in which Ukraine stops targeting Russian refineries while Russia retains the ability to strike Ukrainian electricity generation would remove an important source of pressure on Moscow without protecting Ukrainian civilians.
Such an outcome would change the military and economic conditions of the war in Russia’s favour, regardless of how Washington describes its diplomatic objectives.
The White House, Congress and the limits of presidential power
Zelenskyy’s sharper language also reflects a possible reassessment of where influence over American policy can be exercised.
For much of Trump’s second presidency, Kyiv’s diplomacy has concentrated on preserving a workable relationship with the president himself. That approach assumes that personal engagement can influence White House decisions even when Trump’s broader political instincts favour accommodation with Putin.
The events of October suggest that this strategy has reached its limits.
Ukraine’s alternative is not necessarily an outright confrontation with Washington. Rather, it involves placing greater weight on Congress, the American defence establishment and the institutional relationships that have supported Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
There is a historical precedent. During Trump’s first presidency, Congress supported military assistance to Ukraine despite differences within the administration over relations with Russia. Under Joe Biden, congressional resistance also demonstrated how domestic American politics could determine the timing and scale of weapons deliveries.
The months-long delay in approving the 2024 military assistance package contributed to severe ammunition shortages at a critical stage of Russia’s offensive operations. Ukraine’s loss of Avdiivka illustrated the danger of making battlefield planning dependent on political negotiations in Washington.
The congressional elections on 3 November 2026 could alter the balance of power. A change in control of either chamber would increase opportunities for oversight, investigations and legislative pressure on the administration, although Congress cannot independently direct every aspect of intelligence sharing or presidential diplomacy.
A less compliant Congress could nevertheless make it politically harder for the White House to restrict Ukrainian assistance without explanation.
Europe confronts a more permanent problem
For European governments, the dispute carries implications extending well beyond the immediate confrontation between Trump and Zelenskyy.
The transatlantic security relationship has historically depended on the assumption that American military capabilities, intelligence networks and political commitments would remain available to European allies during a major security crisis.
That assumption is increasingly difficult to reconcile with an American administration prepared to link assistance to Ukraine with wider commercial negotiations and domestic political objectives.
The consequences are particularly acute in areas where European capabilities remain insufficient to replace American systems quickly, including satellite intelligence, strategic reconnaissance, missile defence and specialised communications.
Europe can expand weapons production, finance Ukrainian purchases and develop alternatives to American technology. Replacing the full range of capabilities provided by the United States, however, requires investment measured in years rather than months.
The problem will not necessarily disappear when Trump leaves office. His return to power demonstrated that the American foreign-policy consensus which supported European security for decades can be challenged through the electoral process.
Future American administrations may seek to restore traditional alliances, but European governments must now account for the possibility that another election could reverse those commitments.
For Zelenskyy, the immediate calculation is exceptionally difficult. Public criticism risks provoking further retaliation from a president whose administration still controls capabilities essential to Ukraine’s defence. Continued diplomatic restraint, however, has not prevented Washington from offering concessions to Russia or introducing uncertainty into Ukraine’s military planning.
His latest intervention suggests that Kyiv is no longer convinced that avoiding confrontation will preserve American support. The question is whether greater political scrutiny of Washington’s decisions can prevent a further erosion of assistance before Russia turns the resulting military advantages into territorial gains.
Poland has launched a nationwide security operation after three knife attacks at educational institutions left one woman dead and more than a dozen people injured. Police have detained 117 people amid a wave of online threats, while intelligence officials are examining whether Russian disinformation networks exploited the violence to spread panic.
Poland is confronting an unprecedented school security crisis after a succession of violent attacks by young people triggered widespread fear, school closures and a nationwide police mobilisation. By Sunday, 11 October, officers had detained 117 people and conducted nearly 64,000 security checks at educational establishments, as the authorities attempted to contain both genuine threats and an escalating campaign of intimidation on social media.
The crisis reached its height on Friday, 9 October, when warnings circulated about a supposed nationwide killing campaign known as “Bloody Friday”. Videos, threatening messages and lists of potential targets spread through TikTok, messaging platforms and school discussion groups, prompting parents to keep children at home and several local authorities to suspend classroom teaching.
Although police have found no evidence of an organised nationwide conspiracy, the violence that preceded the rumours was real. Three separate attacks took place between 7 and 10 October, while investigators are examining hundreds of other incidents involving threats or suspected criminal activity.
Two attacks that triggered nationwide panic
The first major incident occurred on Wednesday, 7 October, at a vocational school in Ostrołęka, north-east of Warsaw. A 19-year-old student armed with a machete attacked pupils, teachers and other people in and around the building, injuring nine victims before harming himself.
Investigators subsequently discovered a homemade explosive device inside his backpack. The suspect was arrested, and prosecutors brought nine charges against him, including attempted murder. The discovery of explosives raised further questions about the extent of his preparations and the possibility of a substantially higher death toll.
The following day, a 15-year-old former pupil entered a primary school in Leszczydół-Nowiny, near Wyszków, and attacked three members of staff with a knife. A 37-year-old caretaker died from her injuries, while two teachers, including the headteacher, were wounded.
According to investigators, the teenager wore a helmet-mounted camera, raising suspicions that he intended to record the assault. The official prosecution statement confirmed the victim’s death and the detention of the suspect.
The attacks were followed by threatening messages from other teenagers, including a video attributed to a 17-year-old in the Przasnysz district who claimed to be participating in a competition involving killings. Police subsequently detained him. In Sierpc, another 17-year-old was arrested after allegedly discussing plans for violence at school; officers discovered two knives.
Thousands of schools under police surveillance
The rumours produced an immediate reaction. Schools in Wyszków, Ciechanów, Pułtusk and other municipalities cancelled classroom teaching or introduced remote lessons. Elsewhere, parents independently withdrew their children, leaving some classrooms largely empty.
Police launched an extensive preventive operation, deploying additional officers around schools and investigating online threats.
According to the figures released on 11 October, the authorities had recorded 275 incidents requiring investigation, detained 117 people and carried out nearly 64,000 checks at schools, nurseries and other educational facilities.
The situation deteriorated further on Saturday, 10 October, when a 21-year-old student attacked three people at a post-secondary educational institution in Warsaw. Two 17-year-old girls and a 24-year-old woman were injured. One victim required hospital treatment, although none of the injuries was considered life-threatening.
Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński subsequently stated that investigators had established no links between the recent attacks. The authorities nevertheless remain concerned about imitation offences, particularly where threatening material circulates among teenagers through closed online communities.
Russia’s possible role in spreading panic
The events have also raised questions about whether hostile foreign actors deliberately amplified the crisis. Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s minister responsible for coordinating the intelligence services, warned that Russian organisations routinely exploit domestic emergencies to spread disinformation and undermine confidence in public institutions.
In his statement on 9 October, Siemoniak acknowledged the possibility of foreign involvement but stressed the need for evidence before assigning responsibility.
There is, at present, no publicly established evidence that Moscow organised the school attacks or directed the subsequent threats. Nevertheless, the rapid circulation of alarming videos, fabricated warnings and unverified target lists illustrates how genuine violent incidents can be exploited to disrupt everyday life without further physical attacks.
The episode also presents a challenge for European regulators. Poland is examining measures against dangerous online content, while its existing obligations under the EU Digital Services Act provide a framework for addressing systemic risks associated with major platforms.
For Donald Tusk’s government, the immediate priority is preventing further attacks as schools reopen under heightened security. The longer-term challenge concerns the interaction between online radicalisation, copycat violence and disinformation capable of transforming isolated crimes into a national emergency.
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.
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.
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.
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