In Calling For Book On Putin’s Ancestors, University Head Says He ‘Understands What The Kremlin Expects’ – OpEd

Vladimir Putin as a child with his Baba and mother; Maria Shelomova. 

Photo Credit: Vladimir Putin’s personal archive, Kremlin.ru

June 1, 2026 
By Paul Goble


Some of the most obsequious moves by Russian officials appear to be independent efforts to curry favor with the Kremlin, but others are clearly taking place because the Kremlin has ordered them or has ensured that it has put in place people who know in advance what Putin and the Presidential Administration want.

A case of the latter concerns the actions of Andrey Loginov, rector of the Russian State University of the Humanities, who has pushed what to many seem actions more “Catholic than the pope” or in this case more Putinist than Putin but who is in fact ready to say that he knows what the Kremlin leader wants and is acting accordingly.

Several weeks ago, Loginov’s university posted an announcement offering to pay someone to compile a book on the ancestors of Vladimir Putin between 1861 and 1917 (agents.media/rggu-nachal-iskat-biografa-roda-putinyh-kogda-rektor-ponyal-chego-ot-vuza-ozhidaet-kreml/).

This announcement draw snickers from Putin critics but it was fully consistent with what Loginov, a longtime official in the Presidential Administration, has been doing since becoming rector two years ago in promoting Kremlin ideas and an extreme Russian nationalist agenda including courses on people like Ivan Ilin and books on the war in Ukraine.

When others have taken similar actions, they have been careful to specify that they were acting on their own so that if too much criticism arose, those above them could change things quickly and in any case could avoid taking any responsibility for such steps. But Loginov has taken a different tact.

The rector says that “in the course of two years of work in the university, I have formed a clear vision of our tasks and possibilities. We understand what is expected of the Russian State University of the Humanities in institutions above us, from the Presidential Administration to the Russian Academy of Sciences.”

Loginov is thus saying that he is doing what he has been told is “expected,” a declaration that shows just how far Putin has gone in promoting his personalist and nationalist agenda and how even the most outrageous steps in this direction must be laid at his feet rather than blamed on anyone else.

Spain’s PM Sánchez Holds Firm Amid Corruption Scandals

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Photo Credit: Video screenshot @sanchezcastejon, X

June 1, 2026 
 EurActiv
By Inés Fernández-Pontes

(EurActiv) — Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, vowed on Sunday to remain in office until the 2027 general election despite mounting corruption scandals engulfing his ruling Socialist party, key allies and figures close to his political circle.

Speaking at the youth congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Sánchez defended his government’s record at his first major party rally since the Socialists suffered a historic defeatin Andalusia, once a party stronghold.

“Socialism may stumble, but we never give up on a fight,” he told the crowd. “We will continue to govern until 2027. And beyond!”


The Spanish leader insisted more time was needed for voters to feel the impact of the coalition’s social and economic policies, rejecting growing calls for snap elections as a series of judicial investigations pile pressure on his government.

Former socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a longtime Sánchez ally, is alsounder investigation by Spain’s National Court, the country’s top criminal court, over alleged influence peddling and money laundering linked to the bailout Venezuela-linked Spanish airline Plus Ultra.

Spanish police recently raided PSOE headquarters in Madrid as part of a separate judicial investigation into alleged attempts to interfere with legal proceedings involving current and former party figures.

The scandals have exposed growing tensions within the Socialist camp.

Emiliano García-Page, the powerful Socialist president of Castilla–La Mancha and one of Sánchez’s most prominent internal critics, warned this week that the party was facing its most dangerous moment since Spain’s return to democracy and urged Sánchez to hold a vote of confidence or call snap elections.

Patience is also wearing thin among some of the regionalist and separatist parties that keep Sánchez in power.

“Given the situation, we believe that the term has come to an end,” said Aitor Esteban, leader of the conservative Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), a key ally of Sánchez’s coalition. Catalan separatist party Junts also called for early elections.

Both parties, however, ruled out backing a no-confidence vote against Sánchez, as proposed by the far-right Vox party.

Pressure on Sánchez is set to mount in June, with Zapatero due to testify on 17–18 June and a landmark Supreme Court ruling expected before the summer in the graft case involving former minister José Luis Ábalos.

Bulgaria Stops US Military Aircraft Refuelling After Crossing Swords With Trump

June 1, 2026 
 Balkan Insight
By Svetoslav Todorov

Bulgaria’s new Prime Minister, Rumen Radev, stated on Friday that US military aircraft won’t be able to use Sofia’s “Vassil Levski” airport for stay and refuelling after the end of June, after the US failed to approve a visa-free system for Bulgarian citizens.

Earlier in May, the Progressive Bulgaria party leader claimed he had spoken to President Donald Trump over the aircraft stay and called for the suspension of the ‌visa ⁠rule for Bulgarian nationals, hinting at a trade-off.

“I called for the suspension of [the need for US] visas for Bulgarian citizens during my conversation with the US President but I have not received a positive answer. While I fully understand the complexity of all the ​regulatory procedures, we also have our priorities ​and we cannot respond positively to the request ​for long stays of aircraft and tankers at Sofia airport,” Radev said on Friday.

“We’re extending the permission [only] until the end of June so we can give time to our allies to reschedule and find another location,” he added.

In March, Bulgaria’s then-caretaker Defence Minister, Atanas Zapryanov, said the aircraft concerned were not intended for combat operations, instead providing logistical support for allied missions.

The stay was greenlit in February by the previous government. The main types of aircraft deployed in Bulgaria include Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Boeing C-17 Globemaster III.

Former President Radev and his newly founded Progressive Bulgaria party won the April 19 electionswith a landslide victory, with the new cabinet assuming power on May 8 ending a five-year stalemate, which yielded several short-lived governments and eight general elections, during which Radev also de facto occasionally governed through interim cabinets.

Radev is the first Bulgarian politician to have served both as President and Prime Minister. His atypical political career has also raised doubts over Bulgaria’s geopolitical perspectives, given his soft approach to the Kremlin.

The Aggressor’s Trap: Why Future Wars Have No Winners – Analysis

June 1, 2026 
By Suminda Jayasundera


Something has quietly broken in the ancient logic of war. For centuries, military power translated reliably into political outcomes. The stronger army won. The weaker nation submitted. Empires were built on this arithmetic. Today, that equation no longer holds — and the world’s great powers have not yet fully absorbed what this means for them.

We are entering an era where launching a war, regardless of military superiority, is less a path to victory than a walk into a trap. The aggressor does not win. It simply chooses how slowly it wishes to bleed.

This is not an accident of circumstance. It is the operating logic of a doctrine that is reshaping modern conflict — one that now requires a formal name and a precise definition.

The Doctrine: Defined

Attritional Trap Doctrine: The structural condition in which an aggressor’s act of initiating open war in the post-globalization, information-saturated world automatically activates a self-reinforcing cycle of military stalemate, economic isolation, international delegitimization and domestic political erosion — from which no exit exists that does not constitute strategic defeat. The trap is not set by the defender. It is constructed by the aggressor the moment it invades.

Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy: The deliberate defensive posture by which a militarily inferior state redirects the aggressor’s own weight — its overextension, isolation and accumulated costs — back against itself across military, economic, informational and political domains simultaneously, without requiring direct military victory. The defender does not need to be strong. It needs to be unyielding long enough for the aggressor’s own mass to crush it.

These two frameworks operate as a pair. The Attritional Trap Doctrine describes the structural fate that awaits the aggressor. Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy describes the active instrument the defender deploys to ensure that fate is realized. One is the trap. The other is what springs it.

Why This Is Not What You Have Read Before

Strategic thinkers have long grappled with the limits of military power. Clausewitz identified friction and fog degrading superior forces. Liddell Hart counseled the indirect approach. Post-Iraq analysts documented counterinsurgency’s futility. Hybrid warfare theorists mapped the tools — disinformation, proxy forces, economic coercion — deployed short of open conflict.

The Attritional Trap Doctrine is not a refinement of any of these. It is a departure, and the distinction is precise.

Hybrid warfare theory describes the tools a sophisticated actor deploys to achieve strategic ambiguity below the threshold of open war. The Attritional Trap Doctrine describes the structural fate awaiting any aggressor — regardless of tools — the moment it crosses into open war in the modern environment. Hybrid warfare is a strategic choice. The Attritional Trap is a gravitational field entered the moment that choice is made.

Classical attrition theory is symmetrical: two forces grind down until one exhausts first. Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy is asymmetric by structural design — it redirects the aggressor’s own mass back against itself. This is closer in spirit to judo than attrition, but differs critically: it operates simultaneously across economics, information and politics as a unified ecosystem, not between two actors in a single domain.

The concept that comes closest is Paul Kennedy’s strategic overextension — the long-run imperial collapse under unsustainable commitments. But overextension is a retrospective diagnosis across generations. The Attritional Trap is a real-time, deliberately activatable mechanism that a defender can trigger and accelerate within the timeline of a single conflict. The causal speed and the agency of the defender are what make it new.

The core original claim: in the modern environment, the act of aggression itself generates the mechanism of the aggressor’s defeat. Prior theory asks what can go wrong for the aggressor. This framework answers that everything goes wrong, automatically, by structural necessity — because three simultaneous post-Cold War transformations ensure it.

The Enabling Conditions: Why Now

Three structural transformations created the doctrine’s enabling architecture simultaneously — and their convergence is what makes this moment categorically different from prior eras.

Deep economic interdependence– Modern great powers are embedded in global supply chains and financial systems that make sustained aggression immediately catastrophic in ways earlier powers never faced. When coordinated sanctions froze $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves, severed major banks from SWIFT and restricted semiconductor access following the 2022 invasion, the effect fractured Russian industrial capacity and forced emergency 20 percent interest rates within weeks. Sanctions of this architectural precision were structurally unavailable to prior generations of defenders.

Real-time global information– Every act of aggression is witnessed, documented and broadcast instantaneously to a worldwide audience capable of forming and organizing political opinion at scale. Within 48 hours of Russia’s invasion, smartphone footage of missile strikes on apartment buildings circulated on every major platform in every language simultaneously. Public resentment against aggressors is no longer a slow historical verdict. It is an immediate, politically actionable force that shapes government decisions and corporate responses in real time.

Democratized precision lethality– Weapons requiring superpower industrial bases to produce can now be manufactured affordably, transferred rapidly and deployed effectively by forces a fraction of the aggressor’s size. Ukraine’s deployment of Turkish Bayraktar drones, American HIMARS systems and British Storm Shadow missiles — on platforms it had never operated before the war — imposed costs on Russian formations structurally impossible for any similarly outgunned defender in any prior conflict.

Remove any one condition and the doctrine weakens substantially. A precise clarification: these three conditions did not emerge simultaneously in a single moment — economic interdependence deepened across decades, the information ecosystem transformed rapidly after smartphone proliferation post-2008, and precision lethality democratized after commercial drone technology matured post-2015. What converged simultaneously was their operational threshold — the point at which each became potent enough to interact with the others as a system. It is that threshold convergence, not simultaneous origin, that created the doctrine’s enabling architecture and that marks the post-2014 period as categorically different from what preceded it.

The Attritional Trap Doctrine is a product of this specific historical convergence. Its durability is precisely as strong as the conditions that created it.

Ukraine: The Novice Who Discovered the Doctrine

When Russia invaded in February 2022, the consensus was brief and brutal: Kyiv would fall within days. Russia possessed overwhelming superiority in armor, air power, artillery and manpower. By every traditional measure, the outcome was not in question.

What followed has become one of the defining strategic lessons of the century.

Ukraine stumbled into — and then deliberately embraced — a framework that neutralized Russia’s advantages across every domain simultaneously. It contested every kilometer. It cultivated international sympathy with extraordinary skill, transforming its president into a global symbol and its soldiers into a cause that mobilized democratic publics from Washington to Warsaw. It did not need to defeat Russia militarily. It needed only to activate Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy — making Russia’s continued presence unbearable across military, economic, informational and political dimensions at once.

The sequence unfolded in a self-reinforcing spiral: military stalemate eroded Russian domestic confidence; sanctions fractured industrial capacity; information operations generated worldwide public resentment; cumulative pressure hollowed out Russian resilience from within. Each domain fed the others. Military stalemate made economic cost harder to justify. Economic fracture made military sustainment harder to fund. Public resentment made domestic political cover harder to maintain.

Russia now finds itself in the aggressor’s trap with no viable exit. It cannot achieve decisive victory. It cannot disengage without admitting catastrophic failure. It bleeds — in treasure, soldiers and international standing — with no clear path out. The war that was supposed to last days has consumed years.

Iran: The Master Class

If Ukraine represents improvised discovery under fire, Iran represents deliberate, architecturally premeditated cultivation across four decades.

Tehran constructed its resistance axis — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militias across Iraq and Syria — not primarily as an ideological project but as a distributed strategic architecture. Iran wages continuous pressure on adversaries while never presenting a clean, attributable target for retaliation. Every attempt to strike back forces adversaries onto multiple fronts simultaneously, dissipating finite resources across a chessboard with no defined perimeter and no endpoint.

Iran does not require defeating the United States or Israel in a single confrontation. It requires only making confrontation perpetually, structurally and unbearably costly — in military resources, strategic attention and domestic political capital. The trap is embedded across an entire regional ecosystem and has been tightening for forty years.

The critical distinction from Ukraine illuminates the doctrine’s two modes. Ukraine activated Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy reactively — under assault, with improvised tools. Iran built the infrastructure of exhaustion proactively — engineering trap conditions before any direct confrontation materialized. Both modes work. The proactive mode is more durable and more strategically instructive for any nation with time to prepare.

The master class has nonetheless shown cracks that demand honest reckoning. Iran’s post-October 2023 exposure — Hezbollah’s near-destruction, Hamas’s decimation, direct military strikes drawing direct retaliation — raises a harder question than mere calibration: does this evidence partially falsify the master class designation, or merely complicate it? The honest answer is the latter, but narrowly. The doctrine’s infrastructure — decades of proxy construction, regional embedding, deniability architecture — survived. What failed was escalation control: proxy action drew the patron into direct exposure the strategy was specifically designed to avoid. Iran’s error was not in building Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy. It was in allowing a proxy to trigger a war Iran had not chosen to fight directly. The lesson is not that the doctrine failed. It is that no doctrine is self-sustaining without continuous calibration — and that the boundary between proxy pressure and patron exposure is the framework’s most dangerous operational line.

The Counter-Case: When the Trap Fails

Afghanistan appears to vindicate the doctrine in its strongest form: a vastly outgunned insurgency exhausted the world’s most powerful military over twenty years. But the mechanism diverges in ways that reveal the framework’s true boundary conditions.

The Taliban did not win primarily through the three enabling conditions. International opinion never mobilized behind the Afghan government — it lacked democratic legitimacy in its own population’s eyes and was perceived as deeply corrupt. External patron commitment was sustained for twenty years but structurally decoupled from genuine state-building. The Afghan government possessed almost none of the leadership credibility that Zelensky would later demonstrate as decisive.

Afghanistan illustrates the doctrine’s precise negative space: the Attritional Trap Doctrine guarantees aggressor cost. It does not guarantee defender victory. Whether those costs translate into strategic defeat depends entirely on whether the defender survives long enough, maintains external support and sustains domestic legitimacy to make the aggressor’s position untenable rather than merely expensive.

The trap requires active maintenance. It does not close and hold on its own. And the Afghanistan case contains one further complication the framework must address honestly: the Taliban itself activated something resembling Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy against the United States — and succeeded. A non-state actor, without democratic legitimacy, without a sympathetic international patron and without the three enabling conditions in their modern form, nonetheless exhausted a superpower over twenty years through territorial denial, time and will. This does not falsify the doctrine. It reveals that an earlier, cruder version of the mechanism — available without the post-Cold War enabling conditions — has always existed. What the modern framework adds is speed, international amplification and the active agency of the defender in triggering and accelerating the spiral. The Taliban waited twenty years. Ukraine compressed the same mechanism into months. That compression is what the three enabling conditions actually provide — and it is the doctrine’s most consequential contribution to the history of asymmetric conflict.

Taiwan: The Most Dangerous Test

Beijing’s military planners have studied Ukraine with the focused intensity of students who know they face the same examination under far higher stakes. They have drawn two conclusions pointing in sharply opposite directions.

The first: a prolonged conflict over Taiwan would activate the Attritional Trap Doctrine in its most catastrophic form for the aggressor. China is integrated into the global economy at a depth dwarfing Russia’s pre-war exposure — accounting for roughly 14 percent of global merchandise trade, with a technology sector structurally dependent on semiconductor supply chains centered in Taiwan itself. The sanctions exposure would be categorically more severe. China would simultaneously face a global information environment structurally hostile to its narrative — democratic sympathy for a self-governing island democracy resisting authoritarian absorption is not a story Beijing can contest on the world stage. And it would face a Taiwanese population that has watched Ukraine and drawn its own conclusions about the viability of sustained resistance.

The second conclusion: the counterstrategy to the Attritional Trap is speed. A swift, overwhelming seizure — completed before the international community organizes a coherent response, before sanctions architecture assembles, before weapons transfer — denies the defender the time required to activate Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy. Speed is the aggressor’s structural answer to the doctrine. It attempts the fait accompli before the trap closes.

This is why Taiwan is categorically more dangerous than Ukraine. Russia never possessed a plausible swift-victory option against a continental nation of forty million with strategic depth. China, with geographic proximity and purpose-built amphibious capacity, believes it may possess one against an island of twenty-three million, 180 kilometers from its coast.

If Taiwan absorbs the initial assault and survives long enough for international support to crystallize, China walks into the deepest activation of the Attritional Trap in modern history: sanctions severing it from the semiconductor supply chains its entire industrial economy depends upon, a mobilized democratic world, and American strategic commitment activated by the most unambiguous act of aggression since 1939.

If Beijing’s calculation is correct and speed forecloses the doctrine’s activation, the framework faces its most serious challenge — and the post-conflict international order faces a rupture from which it may not recover.

The variable that determines which outcome prevails is not military hardware. It is the first seventy-two hours — and the credibility of the signal, delivered before conflict begins, that those seventy-two hours will cost more than any strategic prize can justify.

Deterrence, understood through this doctrine, is not the threat of what America will do after Taiwan falls. It is the certainty — communicated without ambiguity, demonstrated through pre-positioned capability and unambiguous political commitment — that the trap closes before the fall can be completed. This position requires engaging a serious counterargument: Schelling’s work on the manipulation of risk holds that deliberate ambiguity can itself deter, by preserving the aggressor’s ability to miscalculate into restraint rather than forcing a binary calculation. That argument carried weight in a prior strategic era. Under the Attritional Trap Doctrine it inverts: when the aggressor’s counterstrategy is speed — when the entire bet is that the fait accompli can be achieved before the trap closes — ambiguity about whether the trap will close is not a deterrent. It is the calculation the aggressor needs to proceed. Certainty of closure is the only signal that forecloses the speed bet. Ambiguity, in this specific context, does not deter. It prices the risk as acceptable.

The Threshold Conditions

The doctrine does not activate automatically. Four conditions must be robustly present:

Geographic and demographic resilience sufficient to absorb the initial assault– Taiwan’s island geography creates acute vulnerability but also natural chokepoints — every viable landing beach is known, prepared and defensible. Urban warfare in a densely built modern city imposes costs no swift-victory timetable was designed to absorb.

Leadership credibility capable of sustaining domestic will and generating international sympathy at scale– Zelensky demonstrated this is perhaps the single most decisive variable. Taiwan’s democratic institutions provide structural legitimacy that no authoritarian defender can replicate.

An external patron with sustained, unambiguous political will- The doctrine’s most fragile dependency. For Taiwan, that patron is the United States — and the credibility of that commitment is now openly debated globally. Ambiguity does not deter. It invites calculation.

Information infrastructure established before conflict begins- The defender must win the global story in the first hours. Ukraine managed this partly through the fortunate accident of a gifted communicator at its helm. Taiwan cannot rely on fortune. The infrastructure must be operational before the first missile is fired.

Where all four conditions are robustly present, the trap closes and holds. Where any one is absent, the doctrine’s effectiveness degrades proportionally. These are not battlefield variables. They are strategic assets requiring years of deliberate cultivation before the moment of crisis arrives.

Implications for the Coming Decade

The nations that internalize this doctrine earliest will shape the security architecture of the century. Those that do not will repeatedly pay unlimited prices for objectives that recede as they advance.

For potential aggressors, the calculus has been permanently restructured. The question before initiating war is no longer “Can we win militarily?” It is “Can we achieve the fait accompli before the trap closes?” — and in an era of instantaneous global information, pre-positioned weapons stocks and standing sanctions architecture, that window is measured in hours and days, not weeks and months. It is narrowing as the doctrine becomes better understood and threshold conditions more deliberately pre-built by potential defenders.

For defenders, the doctrine offers something unprecedented in the history of statecraft: a reproducible, learnable framework by which a militarily inferior state can deny strategic victory to a superior aggressor. It is not guaranteed. It is not cheap. But it is structurally available to any defender with the strategic foresight to build toward it — and the discipline to sustain the four threshold conditions before, not during, the crisis.


For the international community, the burden cannot be evaded without systemic consequence. The trap closes only when the world actively keeps it closed. Every withdrawal of external support, every signal of wavering commitment, every prioritization of short-term economic comfort over a defender under assault — each is a signal to every potential aggressor alive that the trap has a release mechanism and they have located it. The doctrine operates inside a political order whose coherence is itself the most critical strategic variable in the entire framework. Treat that coherence as optional and the doctrine dissolves. Treat it as the asset it actually is and the trap holds — not just for today’s defender, but for every nation that may need it tomorrow.

The Open Question

The Attritional Trap Doctrine and Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy represent a genuine shift in the structural logic of modern conflict — not merely in tactics or technology, but in the fundamental relationship between military power and political outcome. That shift is real, empirically documented and accelerating as more actors study and deliberately build toward the framework.

But the doctrine rests on a foundation that is political rather than military, and therefore contingent rather than permanent. The center of gravity in every conflict governed by this logic is not on the battlefield. It is in the sustained will of democratic societies to bear the costs of supporting distant defenders against distant aggressors — against the perpetual pull of fatigue, competing priorities and the temptation of accommodation.

That will must be argued for, organized, institutionalized and renewed in every political cycle. It cannot be assumed.

The trap is set. It works — when the conditions are met and the commitment holds. Whether those conditions will be built in Taiwan before the moment of crisis arrives, and whether that commitment will hold when tested at that scale, is not a military question. It is a question about the character of the international order and the seriousness with which this generation of democratic societies treats the difference between the world it has and the world that would replace it.

History is watching. And unlike previous eras, it is watching in real time.

The Attritional Trap Doctrine and Sovereign Exhaustion Strategy are original analytical frameworks first formally defined in this essay, explicitly distinguished from Clausewitz’s friction theory, Liddell Hart’s indirect approach, Frank Hoffman’s hybrid warfare framework, Paul Kennedy’s strategic overextension thesis, Schelling’s ambiguity-as-deterrent theory and post-Iraq asymmetric conflict literature. Original contributions: 

(1) aggressor self-defeat as structurally automatic rather than contingent; 

(2) three post-Cold War enabling conditions unified as a threshold-convergent causal architecture; 

(3) formal pairing of trap doctrine and defender strategy as complementary frameworks; (4) the 72-hour threshold as Taiwan’s decisive strategic variable.

The Three Shifts In Global Research Paradigms Driven By AI Development – Analysis

June 1, 2026 
Anbound
By He Yan

In recent years, the global scientific research field has witnessed an intense emergence of disruptive achievements. In 2024, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, a Chinese-Australian team discovered over 160,000 entirely new RNA viruses, a figure nearly 30 times the number of previously known virus species. In April 2026, the Chinese Academy of Sciences officially released the “Panshi 100” scientific large model system, establishing intelligent clusters across eight major disciplines to empower the entire chain of scientific research. During the same period, a Chinese self-developed AI for Science ultra-large computing with 60,000-GPU cluster was completed, accelerating and empowering research in the fields of materials, aerospace, and life sciences.

Based on long-term observation and research, ANBOUND’s founder Kung Chan pointed out that behind this series of landmark events lies a global wave of scientific research paradigm reshaping, driven centrally by AI. The focus of such a shift is on the underlying logic of scientific research operations, manifesting primarily as three systemic transitions of research methods, organizational models of research, and the participating subjects of scientific research.

However, before analyzing the three systemic transitions mentioned by Kung Chan, it is first necessary to understand the four critical iterations that the global scientific research paradigm has undergone. In history, every paradigm shift has been driven by core technological breakthroughs, adapted to the social development needs of different stages, and shaped differentiated research models and industry characteristics. These shifts have also laid a solid technical foundation and provided developmental experience for the current new paradigm driven by artificial intelligence.


Before the 17th century, global scientific research was in the developmental stage of the empirical paradigm. During the era of the Renaissance, scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo broke through the medieval tradition of speculative philosophy, pioneering the primitive research model of “observation—experiment—induction”. In that period, scientific research activities were primarily based on individual exploration, relying on manual experimental operations and human sensory observation to accumulate research experience. There was no professional or systematic research organization back then. The scale of research was small, and research efficiency was relatively low, which only adapted to the foundational exploration needs of the embryonic stage of natural science.

From the 17th century to the mid-20th century, the theoretical paradigm gradually replaced the empirical paradigm to become the mainstream of scientific research. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany successively became world scientific centers, and modern foundational science experienced explosive growth. Major scientific theories, such as Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field, and Einstein’s theory of relativity, were introduced one after another. This shifted the logic of scientific research from empirical induction to rational deduction, forming a standardized deductive research model of “mathematical modeling—logical deduction—theoretical validation”. At the organizational level, universities and private laboratories became the main vehicles for research, small-scale and closed research teams became the mainstream form of study, and governments began to intervene marginally in the field of foundational scientific research. This paradigm established the rigor and logic of modern science, building a solid technological foundation for the advancement of the Industrial Revolution and the construction of the modern industrial system, and driving a leap-forward surge in humankind’s modern science and technology.

In the 1950s, the advent of computer technology ushered in a new era of the computational paradigm, which first emerged in the United States and long dominated global scientific research development. Relying on the powerful computing capabilities of computers, researchers could perform digital simulations of complex systems, solving scientific conundrums that traditional theoretical deductions found difficult to analyze, and adding a new scientific research path of “numerical computation—simulation prediction”. The organizational form of scientific research began to exhibit cross-institutional collaboration characteristics, and the government officially became the core subject of scientific research funding investment. Relying on the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. coordinated the layout of major scientific research projects, gradually forming an embryonic scientific research structure of division of labor and collaboration among universities, national laboratories, and technology enterprises. The computational paradigm expanded the boundaries of human scientific exploration, aided breakthrough developments in complex fields such as nuclear fusion, aerospace, and high-end manufacturing, and drove the implementation and shaping of high-tech industries such as semiconductors, nuclear energy, and precision instruments.

As the world entered the 21st century, the popularization of the internet and the rapid explosion of massive data gave rise to the data-driven paradigm. Global scientific research stepped into a developmental stage characterized by “massive data—statistical analysis—pattern mining”, with digitalization and informatization becoming the core features of scientific research. This stage remained centered on human-dominated data analysis. Scientific research data gradually achieved digital sharing, and open-source research platforms began to sprout and develop. Tech corporations such as Google and IBM entered the scientific research field by virtue of their massive data resources, constructing a diversified structure of scientific research subjects comprising “government + institutes of higher learning + enterprises”. However, this paradigm still prolonged the older hypothesis-driven logic of scientific research. When facing highly complex and strongly coupled research fields such as biomedicine and novel materials, it exhibited shortcomings such as low data analysis efficiency and insufficient pattern mining capabilities, making it difficult to adapt to the R&D demands of cutting-edge, hardcore technologies.


In the past decade, especially since 2020, along with the iterative upgrading of large language models (LLMs), the continuous improvement of computing power infrastructure, and the increasing maturity of automated experimental technologies, the AI-driven paradigm has officially exploded, becoming the fifth-generation scientific research paradigm and the core nucleus of the current global scientific research transformation. Kung Chan emphasized that AI technology is thoroughly overturning the traditional operational logic of scientific research, driving a systemic transition across research methods, organizational models, and participating subjects, and reshaping the global landscape of technological innovation. The 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, respectively, recognized research related to the application of machine learning in physics and the AI prediction of protein structures, marking the authoritative recognition of the AI-driven research paradigm by the global scientific community and officially establishing its mainstream scientific research status.

At the level of research methods, global scientific research logic has also undergone a fundamental reversal, transitioning from the dominance of deductive methods to the dominance of AI-inductive methods. Conventional scientific research follows an inherent pattern of “subjective hypothesis—repeated validation”, which presents long R&D cycles, high costs of trial and error, and significant difficulties in achieving breakthroughs within complex scientific research. In 2021, the AlphaFold model developed by DeepMind precisely solved the puzzle of predicting three-dimensional protein structures, compressing what used to be a months-long analysis period down to the hour level, marking the upgrade of AI from a research auxiliary tool to a core research engine. Currently, the U.S., the European Union, and China all position AI for Science as a focus of their technological strategies, relying on artificial intelligence to mine massive scientific literature and experimental data, autonomously generate research hypotheses, and predict experimental results, thereby substantially compressing R&D cycles. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. utilized AI technology to screen novel battery materials, boosting material R&D screening efficiency by 90%. Insilico Medicine in the European Union developed the GENTRL intelligent model, completing the entire process of designing, synthesizing, and validating a novel drug molecule in just 46 days. In April 2026, the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the “Panshi 100” scientific large model system, building intelligent model clusters for eight major professional disciplines to achieve AI empowering the entire chain of the research process, which officially marks the historic transition of research logic from “pattern-searching by humans” to “data and intelligence collaboratively mining patterns”.


At the institutional level, the paradigm of scientific research has fundamentally shifted from a closed-source mode to an open-source, collaborative ecosystem. During the mid-to-late 20th century, mainstream research institutions in Europe and the U.S. predominantly operated under a closed approach. Research data and experimental code were strictly guarded, which led to widespread duplication of effort and significant resource inefficiencies across the sector. The turn of the millennium marked a transition, as the gradual rise of open-source platforms like GitHub provided the necessary infrastructure for sharing research assets. By the 2010s, global research collaboration began to accelerate rapidly. This trend culminated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when research institutions worldwide shared viral genome sequencing data and experimental findings in real time. This unprecedented level of cooperation drastically shortened vaccine development timelines and served as a definitive proof of concept for open, collaborative research. Currently, there are also focuses on refining open-science infrastructure. The U.S. is building shared scientific research platforms that consolidate public research resources, including computing power, data, and experimental equipment. Meanwhile, the European Union, leveraging the European Research Council, has established a transnational research collaboration framework that defines explicit guidelines for the advancement of open science. Today, global researchers leverage open-source foundational models and public scientific databases to build distributed collaborative networks that transcend geographical barriers and disciplinary boundaries. Consequently, co-creation of knowledge and resource pooling have become the dominant operational models for research organizations. By 2026, the utilization of ultra-large-scale computing power across the world’s top ten biological AI research projects has continued to climb, with the U.S., China, and Europe accounting for 38%, 31%, and 19% of these computing resources, respectively. The sharing of computational capacity has thus emerged as the core foundation sustaining open and collaborative scientific research.


At the level of research entities, it has been shifted from being government- and university-led to being enterprise-driven, marked by the deep integration of industry, academia, and research. In the 20th century, basic research in Western countries was heavily reliant on government fiscal appropriations, with universities serving as the primary executors of scientific inquiry. This resulted in a protracted technology transfer chain and significant inefficiencies in bringing research to market. In the 21st century, leveraging their advantages in capital, computational power, and market applications, leading technology firms have gradually become the core force of R&D. These enterprises focus on real-world market demands to tackle technical bottlenecks, effectively bridging the complete innovation chain from basic research and applied development to industrial commercialization. In the U.S., companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla continue to increase investment in foundational research. Notably, Google’s DeepMind developed the Cell2SentenceScale27B model, which successfully and autonomously identified entirely new research directions for cancer treatment. In Europe, Siemens and AstraZeneca are deeply invested in industrial technology and biopharmaceuticals, utilizing corporate capital to drive the implementation of frontier technologies. Concurrently, China’s research industry has undergone a parallel upgrade. Dawning Information Industry has constructed the nation’s largest AI research computing cluster, featuring 60,000 GPUs, driving the deep integration of supercomputing and intelligent computing to empower local corporate innovation. Under this new paradigm, governments focus on top-level strategic planning and policy guidance, while universities specialize in basic theoretical research and professional talent cultivation. Enterprises now lead the charge in technical breakthroughs and the commercialization of findings, forming a modernized ecosystem of research entities defined by enterprise-centric, industry-academic-research synergy.

The current evolution of research paradigms has emerged as the central battlefield in the global strategic competition for science and technology, with nations formulating distinct AI research strategies tailored to their specific industrial foundations and technical advantages. The U.S. continues to lead in AI research by leveraging its profound technical accumulation and corporate dominance. The European Union focuses on ethics and open science to cultivate a collaborative ecosystem. China is rapidly aligning with global research trends, integrating “AI for Science” as a core priority within its 15th Five-Year Plan and continuously deepening its integrated industry-academia-research system. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea are maintaining a precise focus on niche sectors such as advanced materials and biopharmaceuticals to drive the practical application of AI technologies. As it stands, the global research landscape is undergoing a structural reconfiguration. While the United Kingdom and the U.S. have begun to scale back budgets for certain traditional areas of basic research, France, Germany, and the European Union as a whole have increased investment in talent acquisition and research funding. This has accelerated the mobility of elite scientific talent, computational resources, and data assets, resulting in a development climate where open collaboration and geopolitical competition coexist. The industry has defined 2025 as the strategic inaugural year for AI4S (AI for Science), as global competition intensifies across all fronts, from computational infrastructure, research data, intelligent models, and industry standards, marking a period of unprecedented heat in the technological Great Game.


All in all, the ongoing shift in global research paradigms is the inevitable result of the convergence of technological iteration, market demand, and international competition. At this moment, the AI-driven research paradigm is still in a phase of refinement and deepening. The industry continues to grapple with systemic challenges, including non-standardized research data, a lack of regulatory frameworks for AI ethics, and a critical shortage of high-end, interdisciplinary scientific talent. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that human-machine collaboration, open sharing, and demand-driven innovation have become the defining characteristics of modern inquiry. The scientific community has officially entered a new era of development. Moving forward, nations will continue to increase investments in intelligent research infrastructure and optimize their innovation systems to secure the commanding heights of global technological development. Under these multifaceted forces, the global technological landscape will accelerate its departure from unipolar dominance, evolving instead toward a mature ecosystem of pluralistic symbiosis and collaborative checks and balances. This transition will see sustained momentum in global scientific innovation and the advancement of human civilization.
Final analysis conclusion:

The global community has officially entered the “Fifth Paradigm” of scientific research, driven by AI. This transformation is currently undergoing three major transitions involving research methodology, organizational structures, and participating entities. Methodologically, the logic of inquiry is shifting from human-led hypothesis deduction to AI-driven pattern discovery. Organizationally, the research model is evolving from closed, siloed efforts toward global open-source collaboration. In terms of the broader landscape, the framework has transitioned into an enterprise-led system characterized by the deep integration of industry, academia, and research. Currently, major powers including China, the U.S., and Europe are intensifying their strategic positioning in AI-driven research, leading to increasingly fierce global technological competition. While the sector still faces systemic challenges like fragmented data standards, a void in ethical oversight, and a shortage of specialized talent, the future of global research is moving towards human-machine collaboration and open-source sharing. Consequently, the global scientific landscape will accelerate its evolution toward a model of pluralistic symbiosis.

He Yan is a researcher at ANBOUND, an independent CHINESE think tank.

Electric Collective: Europe’s Clean Energy Future Without Russia – Analysis

 June 1, 2026 

ECFR

By Szymon Kardaś 

LONG READ

Back from the brink—but still near the edge

Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed a structural weakness in Europe’s energy system: its deep dependence on fossil fuel imports. Over the past four years, the EU and member states have successfully secured alternative gas supplies and signed many new deals with countries around the world. This “energy diplomacy” has shown what the bloc can achieve in a geopolitical emergency situation that undermines governments’ ability to keep the lights on for their citizens.

But the EU remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels, which meet nearly 60% of the bloc’s energy demand. This creates import dependency: the EU’s dependence on oil imports stands at 90%, and on gas imports at 85%. Europe’s energy security—in its primary, conservative sense as security of supply—thus relies strongly on relations with external partners and the mercy of geopolitics. The fallout for European energy prices caused by the Iran war is only the latest iteration of this problem.

European energy diplomacy has also managed to develop a more progressive dimension. For example, the EU and member states have increased efforts to conclude agreements on the supply of critical raw materials (CRMs) and cooperation on hydrogen. However, they still need to not only diversify their supplies but also secure access to new value chains linked to the energy transition, including technologies and raw materials for renewables, hydrogen and synthetic fuels. They can do this by signing agreements with countries outside Europe that have strong potential for renewable energy production.

This policy brief examines the ways in which European energy diplomacy has reshaped the energy landscape within the EU. It draws on ECFR’s Energy Deals Tracker, which records the most important energy agreements concluded by the EU and member states with third countries. The tracker maps the notable successes of the EU’s and member states’ energy diplomacy as they find alternative sources of fossil fuel supplies, particularly in the gas sector. It follows how many energy agreements EU countries concluded in individual sectors between 2022 and 2026. More particularly, it identifies how many of these were binding, how many were only indicative and how many contained elements of clean energy.

The paper finds that agreements concluded individually by member states are the most numerous by far, with many fewer deals concluded by the EU itself or via collective action undertaken by member states clubbing together. European energy diplomacy has proved itself to be creative and vigorous over the last four years. Nevertheless, the policy brief identifies ways the EU and member states can work more closely together, specialise and divide up tasks for mutual benefit and complete the final phasing out of Russian fossil fuels.

How Europe weaned itself off Russian energy

One of the EU’s greatest energy security successes is its radical reduction in dependence on fossil fuel supplies from Russia. This has come about partly through measures initiated by the EU as part of sanctions packages—but also partly through Russia’s own actions, which forced Europeans to seek new supplies.  

The sizeable number of energy agreements collected in ECFR’s Energy Deals Tracker testifies to the diplomatic efforts made by the member states and the EU to secure alternative energy supplies. The tracker shows which countries have replaced Russia as the main supplier, but also clearly illustrates the extent of the resulting dependencies on gas supplies from outside Russia. Gas remains the area of greatest activity—and an area of potential weakness.

Policy

The EU’s response to the 2022 energy crisis was the REPowerEUprogramme, adopted in May of that year. The programme’s primary aim was to address European dependence on Russian fossil fuels in response to the war in Ukraine, by simultaneously reducing energy consumption, diversifying supplies and accelerating the development of renewable energy sources. This plan formed part of the EU’s broader energy transition, strengthening energy security and system resilience while driving progress towards climate targets. At the same time, the EU’s external energy policy strategy, also adopted in May 2022, focused on strengthening cooperation with international partners to diversify energy sources and supply routes, develop global clean energy markets such as hydrogen and increase the EU’s resilience to geopolitical shocks. It also envisaged a more active role for the EU internationally in promoting the energy transition and developing stable, sustainable energy supply chains.

Over the last four years, the EU has translated REPowerEU objectives into legislation. In January 2026 the EU adopted a regulation to introduce a phased ban on imports of Russian gas (both pipeline gas and liquefied natural gas—LNG). The ban took effect in March 2026, with transition periods for existing contracts and a licensing system. A complete phase-out of Russian gas imports is scheduled for 2027. Meanwhile, the European Commission is preparing regulations regarding crude oil. These will require member states to draw up diversification plans to completely eliminate imports of Russian crude oil by the end of 2027 at the latest.  

The result is that, between 2021 and 2025, the EU drastically reduced its imports of fossil fuels from Russia: the share of Russian gas in EU imports fell from around 45% to about 12%, the share of Russian oilfrom around 26% to about 2%, and imports of Russian coal have been eliminated due to sanctions. This has been one of the greatest successes of European energy policy in recent years, significantly strengthening the EU’s energy security and reducing its dependence on Russian energy commodities.  

Gas

As recently as 2021, the volume of gas imports from Russia (including both pipeline gas and LNG) stood at almost 160 bcm a year. That accounted for almost 40% of total EU gas demand in 2021. But by 2025, this had fallen to 37 bcm. Similarly, the share of Russian gas in EU imports fell from nearly 45% in 2021 to around 12% in 2025.

This change was driven mostly by measures taken by Russia itself early in the war. In March 2022, Vladimir Putin signed the “gas for roubles” decree, through which he cut off supplies to those countries and companies that refused to accept a settlement mechanism to pay for gas using roubles unilaterally imposed by the Kremlin. (Poland and Bulgaria were among the countries cut off.) Then, from June 2022, Gazprom began restricting supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, until Russia completely halted exports via this pipeline at the end of August 2022. Sabotage on two lines of Nord Stream 1 and one line of Nord Stream 2 in September 2022 completely ruled out the possibility of operating either pipeline.

Ukraine also played its part in reducing the EU’s gas dependence on Russia. In December 2024, the five-year Russian-Ukrainian agreements on the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine expired. Kyiv refused to extend them, with the result that, from January 1st, 2025, Russian gas ceased to flow to the EU via the Ukrainian pipeline.

Countries such as Germany, Italy and Poland have been particularly successful in this regard. Until 2021, they all imported large quantities of Russian gas. But in 2026 they are either obtaining gas through newly sourced supplies of LNG (Germany and Poland) or through alternative pipeline routes (Italy and Poland). Poland now imports no Russian gas at all while Germany and Italy import only very small volumes. In terms of what remains: Russian pipeline gas is still shipped to Hungary and Slovakia through the TurkStream pipeline, and some Russian LNG is directly exported to Belgium, France, Greece and Spain.

Deals

Both the EU and member states led energy diplomacy efforts in their own right. For example, in 2022 the European Commission concluded agreements with Algeria, America, Azerbaijan and Norway to compensate for the drop in Russian fossil fuel imports. Germany rapidly replaced its heavy reliance on Russian pipeline gas (about 55% before the war) by expanding LNG infrastructure and shifting to suppliers such as Norway and America, while also signing agreements with Qatar and others. Italy similarly reduced its dependence on Russia and increased imports via pipelines from North Africa and LNG from multiple global suppliers. Thanks to the launch of the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline in September 2022, the expansion of the LNG terminal in Swinoujscie and contracts with America, Norway and other suppliers, Poland became completely independent of Russian supplies.

The biggest change for European gas imports between 2021 and 2025 was the large rise in supplies coming from America. This followed the conclusion of numerous new long-term contracts between European and American companies. Imports from the US to the EU thus rose fromalmost 21 bcm in 2021 to almost 83 bcm in 2025—a volume equivalent to Germany’s total gas consumption in 2025. America is now the second-most important supplier of gas to the EU after Norway. Elsewhere, companies from EU countries concluded long-term contracts with QatarEnergy. Gas imports from Azerbaijan have also risen (ten EU countries receive gas under long-term and short-term contracts from Azerbaijan).

The EU now has a much more diverse supply of gas across the bloc, and individual member states have similarly diversified.

Infrastructure

Some EU member states are now much better placed to receive gas imports. For example, at the start of 2022, LNG import capacity in Italy was low and Germany did not have a single terminal for importing LNG. Yet now, in Italy, regasification capacity has increased from 17 bcm at the end of 2022 to almost 27 bcm as of April 2026. (It has also commissioned new regasification capacity.) The most notable infrastructure investment to enable LNG imports was in Germany, which invested in the construction of regasification terminals. Polandhas expanded the regasification capacity of the Swinoujscie LNG terminal. Poland also plans to launch a second—this time floating—regasification terminal in Gdansk.

In addition to increasing the capacity of LNG terminals to enable gas imports from outside Russia, initiatives to deepen the integration of the gas market within the EU are of great importance to Europe’s energy security. This includes a successful expansion of interconnectors—cross-border connections between countries that enable them to move gas around more easily, making better use of gas imported from third countries and helping landlocked European countries unable to build their own LNG terminals. This has strengthened energy security by allowing diversification of supplies and a faster response to crises. Examples of such investments include the commencement in 2022 of two important interconnectors: Poland–Lithuania (GIPL) and Greece–Bulgaria (IGB).

Projects such as the Vertical Gas Corridor (VGC) are also of key importance. This is a strategic infrastructure initiative in central and south-eastern Europe designed to enhance energy security and diversify gas supplies by linking transmission systems along a north-south axis, from the Baltic Sea region to the Aegean Sea. It is based on expanding interconnectors and market integration, enabling flexible gas transmission from various sources (such as the Caspian region) between countries in the region. Plans for the VGC began to take shape around 2014-2015, partly in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But in 2022 European countries accelerated efforts to reduce their dependence on Russian gas and increase the resilience of their energy systems.

Oil

The EU has also drastically reduced its dependence on Russian crude oil and petroleum products. As recently as 2021, the EU imported around 115m tonnes of crude oil from Russia—over 20% of the EU’s total oil demand in 2021. By 2025, imports had fallen to around 10m tonnes, and Russia’s share of oil imports to the EU dropped from over 25% to just 2% between 2021 and 2025. In 2026, Slovakia and Hungary are the only EU countries still directly importing crude oil from Russia.

The EU’s sixth sanctions package was decisive: it banned the import of Russian crude oil by sea and banned the import of most petroleum products. The restrictions came into force for crude oil in December 2022 and for most petroleum products in February 2023. In turn, the 11th sanctions package, adopted by the EU in June 2023, introduced a ban on crude oil imports via the northern branch of the Druzhba pipeline (used for oil supplies to Poland and Germany). This ban formalised a situation that had effectively existed since early 2023—Germany had already halted imports of Russian oil via the Druzhba pipeline early 2023, and Poland was cut off from Russian supplies in February 2023.

Europeans have replaced oil supplies with increased imports from other sources such as America, Kazakhstan and Norway. The change is not as comprehensive as for gas, however. By the end of 2025, EU member states Hungary and Slovakia were still importing Russian oil directly, as these supplies were exempt from the oil sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022-2023. Additionally, Russian crude or refined products (petroleum products) continued to reach Europe between 2022 and 2025. This includes, among other, an increase in exports of petroleum products from India derived from the processing of Russian crude oil. Nevertheless, this does not compare to the volumes that flowed from Russia to the EU up until 2021.

Coal and nuclear

EU sanctions banned imports of Russian coal, further reducing European energy dependence on Russia. At the same time, many countries that rely on Russian nuclear fuel have begun to diversify their sources. For example, the Czech Republic has signed agreements with Westinghouse and Framatome; Bulgaria has chosen Westinghouse fuel; and Finland and Slovakia have selected Framatome as a nuclear fuel supplier. These states intend these measures to enhance energy security and make the nuclear sector independent of Russian raw materials.

Clean electricity imports

Agreements concluded since 2022 providing for the import of clean electricity from third countries represent a potentially promising contribution to the EU’s energy security in the long term. Such deals are primarily driven by EU efforts to support the energy transition and the increasing need for cross-border renewable energy infrastructure. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the EU was exploring plans for new Africa-Europe interconnectors. At the same time, geopolitical disruptions—including the 2026 war on Iran, which disrupted fossil fuel supplies and energy markets—have made these projects more attractive as a means to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Some of the deals related to clean electricity imports were concluded after 2022 and are therefore included in the Energy Deals Tracker. Others were concluded before 2022. Deals agreed in the last four years include agreements on the Black Sea Green Energy Corridor, and they envisage the import of electricity from Azerbaijan via Georgia and the Black Sea to the EU. The project may also include the import of electricity from Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan via the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and thence to the EU. Another important deal is the January 2025 trilateral agreement between Albania, Italy and the United Arab Emirates to develop a subsea electricity interconnector linking Albania and Italy for the transmission of renewable energy across the Adriatic. This €1bn project is intended to strengthen regional energy security and support the broader integration of renewable energy across the Mediterranean region.

Plans for cross-border interconnectors linking North Africa with southern EU countries are of real importance and reflect the EU’s aim not only to diversify its sources of fossil fuel supply but also to import electricity. The most advanced example of existing infrastructure is the Spain-Morocco interconnector, operational since the 1990s, which—via subsea cables with a total capacity of around 1,400 MW—enables two-way power transmission between Europe and Africa. Plans are currently under way to expand this interconnector with a third cable, which would add around 700 MW of new capacity. Although its impact would be mainly at the regional rather than EU-wide level, it will increase total exchange potential and enable more frequent and larger cross-border electricity flows.

Projects in the Eastern Mediterranean are also significant, including the EuroAfrica Interconnector, which is set to link Egypt with Greece and Cyprus via a 2,000 MW cable. This would create an “energy bridge” between the continents enabling the export of solar energy from Africa to Europe. An EU-backed Greece-Egypt direct interconnection project, which aims to supply Europe with cheap renewable energy (GREGY), also has a similar objective. These projects are part of the EU’s policy to support cross-border infrastructure investments (eg, through the “Connecting Europe” facility), which are crucial for decarbonisation and the creation of an integrated energy market.

That being said, although projects involving the import of clean electricity can help strengthen the EU’s energy security, the volume of imported electricity will remain small compared to EU demand. This will be the case even under the optimistic assumption that all planned interconnectors with non-EU countries are completed. Projects such as connections with North Africa or the Green Energy Corridor from Azerbaijan via Georgia to the EU could supply a total of between a dozen and several dozen TWh per year by the 2030s. For comparison, total electricity consumption in the EU already exceeds 2700 TWh per year and is expected to rise significantly with the electrification of transport, heating and industry and potentially reaching 3500-4000 TWh by 2030-2040. This means that even in the maximum scenario, imports would account for only around 1-3% of demand.

Electricity imports may be a useful supplement, but they will not become the cornerstone of the EU’s electrification. The bloc will, for the most part, have to rely on domestic production and the expansion of internal infrastructure. In future, member states will need to develop renewable energy capacity and nuclear energy potential (which is also a source of clean energy) and invest in the modernisation and expansion of electricity grids. Progress in this area is crucial for reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports.

Critical raw materials and rare earth elements

Between 2022 and 2026, the EU and member states ramped up their energy diplomacy in search of cooperation on CRMs and rare earth elements. These are crucial for producing batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and power grids that support the development of clean energy. The energy crisis triggered by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine highlighted the EU’s vulnerability to the risks associated with the concentration of strategic raw material supplies in the hands of a few countries (especially China).

EU energy diplomacy and technological cooperation on hydrogen and CRMs were not initiated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they were significantly accelerated and reframed by it. Earlier frameworks such as the European Green Deal, the EU Hydrogen Strategy and the Critical Raw Materials Action Plan had already been developed, primarily to support decarbonisation and industrial policy goals. However, after 2022, these initiatives became central instruments of energy security under REPowerEU, which prioritised rapid diversification away from Russian fossil fuels and strengthened external partnerships. As a result, hydrogen and raw materials policies shifted from long-term transition tools to core pillars of EU energy resilience and geopolitical strategy, culminating in measures such as the Critical Raw Materials Act.

In terms of activity, member states and the European Commission stepped up negotiations on bilateral agreements and strategic partnerships with non-EU countries. For example, France has actively developed cooperation not only with North African countries, but also with Australia, Canada and Japan. This covers the security of supply of lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements, joint research and development projects, and investments in processing and environmental standards. Meanwhile, Germany has cooperated with Australia, Canada and African countries on securing supplies of lithium and cobalt, while also investing in battery recycling and energy storage.

Poland has increasingly engaged in EU and bilateral cooperation initiatives concerning CRMs with partners such as Canada, Chile and Norway, while also supporting the development of domestic processing capacity and logistics infrastructure linked to CRMs supply chains. Projects such as the rare earth separation facility in Pulawy and logistics expansion around the Port of Police illustrate efforts to strengthen Poland’s role in European critical mineral value chains. Finland, meanwhile, has intensified its contacts with Brazil and Chile, focusing on the extraction of rare earth elements and the development of efficient processing technologies. Cooperation on CRMs imports increases the resilience of EU industry to global fluctuations in the prices and availability of raw materials and accelerates the achievement of climate targets.

The EU’s energy diplomacy also encompasses scientific and technological cooperation. Examples include joint research and development programmes between EU countries like France or Germany and African countries (including Morocco and Namibia, among others) on green hydrogen. These integrate renewable energy and energy storage, which require stable access to CRMs. (Green hydrogen can help sectors that are hard to electrify directly to make progress on decarbonisation.)

One important development is the new EU mechanism for the joint purchase of CRMs. In July 2025, the commission introduced the EU Energy and Raw Materials Platform to help European companies source energy-related products (including hydrogen, natural gas and biomethane) more efficiently and in a coordinated way. The platform gathers demand and supply proposals from companies, providing aggregation and matchmaking services to connect suppliers with potential buyers. This enables joint procurement of various energy-related products and critical strategic raw materials. The Hydrogen Mechanism is the first initiative launched under the platform. It is a matching system to connect the demand and supply of renewable hydrogen and its derivatives across Europe and partner countries, helping to coordinate purchases and investments to build a functioning hydrogen market. As an element of EU energy diplomacy, it translates the EU’s hydrogen strategy into practical cooperation on supply, investment and partnerships.

After 2022, the EU and member states pursued a vigorous energy diplomacy that was not limited solely to fossil fuels and energy supply security, but increasingly focused on CRMs and rare earth elements. The active partnerships with Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan and North African countries helped the EU create legal frameworks for the future diversification of raw materials supplies, increase industrial resilience, develop local processing capacities and strengthen Europe’s position in the global market for low-carbon technologies. This constituted a significant step in the bloc’s energy transition and towards strategic security. These measures stand the EU in good stead to reduce its dependence on dominant suppliers, such as China, and support the development of European technological capabilities.

Weaknesses in the EU’s energy diplomacy

The imbalance between gas agreements and other agreements

Over the last four years, Europeans have diversified their supplies but Energy Deals Tracker data confirm that imports remain heavily skewed towards agreements on fossil fuel supplies, particularly gas. This leaves Europe exposed to the risk of supply disruptions due to geopolitical shocks, as seen in 2026 with the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Moreover, this high dependence on fossil fuels makes it more difficult to achieve the EU’s climate targets.

Many of the new long-term contracts extend beyond the 2050 horizon—the date by which the EU has pledged to achieve its climate neutrality target. Gas import commitments made on such timescales may hamper efforts to achieve long-term EU energy transition goals, especially given that the bloc’s fossil fuel agreements are, in the vast majority of cases, legally binding commitments.

In contrast, the EU’s clean energy agreements of the last four years have been concluded predominantly in the form of memoranda. The same is true for the agreements on CRMs and on hydrogen, which the tracker shows are also largely declarations of intent. Many of these deals provide for the construction of infrastructure for the production or transmission of clean energy. But their non-binding nature calls into question the prospects of their implementation. This applies even to promising projects like the energy bridge. What is more, the implementation of such projects requires not only significant financial investment but also entails political risks, linked, for example, to the wars between Russia and Ukraine, or between America and Israel and Iran. Ongoing conflicts threaten both the construction and the protection of offshore infrastructure once it is built.

The tension revealed by the data—between the need to ensure secure (long-term) supplies of fossil fuels, and the acceleration of decarbonisation measures and other actions related to the energy transition—is particularly significant for the EU and member states because of their high dependence on imported energy. Consequently, the EU will continue to face rising energy costs, industrial competitiveness pressures and political sensitivity around energy prices, all of which can slow the pace of decarbonisation.

The limited effectiveness of EU mechanisms 

Although the EU’s efforts to create new mechanisms for collective action on the security of fossil fuel supplies should be commended, they have not yet proved as effective as anticipated.

One example is the AggregateEU initiative, launched by the European Commission in 2023 as part of the EU Energy Platform. AggregateEU is an EU mechanism for the joint purchase of natural gas by member states and companies. The platform enables the aggregation of gas demand and the organisation of joint tenders. It strengthens the EU’s negotiating position with suppliers and helps secure more favourable prices. The initiative aims to enhance energy security, reduce competition between EU countries and stabilise the gas market.

However, the mechanism’s impact has been limited due to the voluntary nature of participation and the fact that companies prefer to agree their own bilateral contracts. As gas prices have fallen and supply has stabilised, the platform’s role has diminished, serving as a supplementary rather than a key market instrument. According to European Commission data, from April 2023 to March 2025 the commission conducted a total of seven matching rounds, during which more than 119 bcm of gas demand from European companies was aggregated and 191 bcm was offered by international suppliers. After seeking the most competitive offers, AggregateEU matched close to 100 bcm to cover European demand. However, it remains unclear how much of these matched volumes has resulted in actual contracts concluded between companies.

Meanwhile, between 2023 and 2026, the European Hydrogen Bank—another EU mechanism—proved partially effective, but remains in the early stages of development. On the positive side, there has been significant interest in the auctions aimed at developing mainly hydrogen production projects in the EU (for example, 132 projects in the first round and 61 in the second) along with tangible financial support. By 2025, 15 projects worth around €1bn had been selected, which could potentially contribute to the production of around 2.2m tonnes of green hydrogen in the EU over the next decade. The mechanism has also helped to kickstart the first investments and narrow the cost gap between renewable hydrogen and fossil fuels.

At the same time, its effectiveness is limited by numerous problems: the small number of projects actually moving forward (for example, only six contracts were signed in one of the rounds), the withdrawal of some investors, and uncertainty regarding demand and regulation. As a result, the European Hydrogen Bank acts more as a market catalyst than its main driver—it is an important but insufficient tool for scaling up production. It also plays a minor role in stimulating projects involving the import of green hydrogen into the bloc since it focuses mainly on domestic (EU) hydrogen production projects. However, there are some positive examples of import-orientated projects. One is the Canada-Germany Hydrogen Alliance, signed in 2022. The alliance aims to establish a supply corridor for clean hydrogen exports from Canada to Germany. The Hydrogen Bank helps reduce financial risks for hydrogen import projects by providing investment support and market certainty for producers and buyers. This support encourages private investment and helps develop a reliable international hydrogen market.

Too many individual actions, too little a collective approach

As noted, the ECFR Energy Deals Tracker confirms that energy diplomacy is largely driven by individual state actions. Few agreements have resulted from collective action by EU member states or the EU itself. The most active countries—such as France, Germany and Italy—have concluded numerous bilateral agreements with energy suppliers. For example, Germany has developed close cooperation with the US on LNG and signed agreements with Qatar, while investing in regasification infrastructure. Italy has strengthened its energy ties with Algeria and North African states to become one of the main gas hubs in the Mediterranean region. While some joint initiatives are emerging in EU energy diplomacy, their scope remains very limited (including the green energy bridge from Azerbaijan through Georgia and the Black Sea to the EU). Another example is the cooperation between EU member states regarding gas supplies to those states which, due to their location, are unable to import gas directly as LNG. This applies, for example, to Austria, which cooperates with other EU member states to import gas under supply contracts concluded with Norway or America.

Excessive self-interest and a lack of broader coordination led to several specific problems.

Firstly, too individual an approach leads to growing competition among countries over access to resources. In periods of energy crisis, limited coordination among EU member states intensifies short-term competition for scarce supplies and weakens collective bargaining leverage at the margin, although these effects are ultimately constrained by global LNG market dynamics. This was evident during the energy crisis following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when European buyers all entered the spot LNG market at the same time in search of replacements for Russian pipeline gas. The result was not only higher prices but also instances where EU buyers effectively competed against one another for cargoes, reinforcing sellers’ pricing power in a tight global market where Asian demand was also recovering. Instead of acting as a single large buyer via the EU, which would give Europeans greater bargaining power, they have often operated as a collection of smaller, competing entities.

Secondly, the dominance of a national approach to infrastructure investments—such as LNG terminals, gas pipelines and storage facilities— has created coordination challenges at the EU level and resulted in overcapacity in some parts of Europe (stranded assets) and shortages in others. For example, parallel investment in LNG terminals in different northern European countries has not been optimally coordinated with the needs of the entire internal market and long-term projections. Following the 2022 energy crisis, several countries rapidly expanded LNG import capacity in parallel. For example, Germany commissioned multiple floating terminals in Wilhelmshaven and Lubmin between late 2022 and 2023, while the Netherlands and Finland also deployed new floating terminals within months. At the same time, Poland expanded the Swinoujscie terminal and pipeline connections to Norway. These investments significantly improved short-term energy security and helped replace Russian pipeline gas. But in the long run some investments could be better coordinated across different EU regions.

Coordination challenges remained evident in 2025 and early 2026, despite improvements in the resilience and integration of the EU gas system. Although some LNG terminals continued to operate below capacity, concerns about supply security, lower storage levels after the winter of 2025-2026 and uncertainty in global LNG markets reinforced political support for maintaining substantial import redundancy. Meanwhile, the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators(ACER) and other EU institutions continued to highlight the risk that declining long-term gas demand could lead to: inefficient infrastructure utilisation; and rising system costs if investment decisions are not sufficiently coordinated at the European level. The gradual phase-out of remaining Russian gas imports and continued reliance on globally traded LNG have further strengthened the strategic importance of cross-border coordination and joint infrastructure planning within the EU. Consequently, the tension between national energy security objectives and the efficient development of an integrated European energy market is likely to persist in the coming years.

Numerous hydrogen agreements, little practical effect

In recent years, the EU and its member states have shown increasing interest in developing hydrogen projects and strengthening cooperation with third countries in this area. The Energy Deals Tracker shows around quarter of deals are related to hydrogen cooperation.

Produced from renewable energy sources via water electrolysis, green hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in heavy industry (such as steel and chemicals) and long-distance transport. It can also serve as an energy storage solution, helping to stabilise an energy system based on intermittent sources such as wind and solar power by storing surplus energy for use during periods of shortage. This is particularly important for the EU, helping it reduce its dependence on fossil fuel imports, enhance the bloc’s energy security and achieve its climate targets.

Despite this, EU and member state attempts at hydrogen diplomacy have proved particularly ineffective. Between 2022 and 2026, both the EU and its member states concluded numerous agreements on cooperation in the hydrogen sector. However, the practical significance of most of the agreements concluded is, for the time being, limited in terms energy security. This is because most hydrogen agreements take the form of memoranda of understanding or letters of intent.

Some more concrete agreements which set out specific commitments for the implementation of hydrogen projects have been signed, in particular by Germany. Noteworthy are German agreements that provide for the implementation of a significant large-scale hydrogen project in Kazakhstan.

Furthermore, the hydrogen market in the EU is at a very early stage of development: projects are costly, often delayed and transport infrastructure (for example, ammonia terminals or hydrogen networks) is only just being established. Even the European Commission reportsthat the vast majority of green hydrogen projects are currently at an early, pre-investment stage within EU matchmaking and support mechanisms designed to link supply and demand. Thus, there remains uncertainty about how many will ultimately reach final investment decisions or be implemented.

It is unlikely that the EU will succeed in achieving the targets for the import of green hydrogen into the EU, which were adopted back in 2022. The REPowerEU programme envisaged imports of 10m tonnes by 2030. Meanwhile, the quantity of green hydrogen actually imported is very small. On the current course, there is little to suggest this situation will change dramatically by 2030.

How to fire up European energy diplomacy

Agree an energy diplomacy framework

By acting more jointly, member states can overcome the fragmented and competing approaches towards energy agreements that characterised their energy diplomacy after 2022. To boost their collective leverage they should pool demand, coordinate negotiations and align their long-term energy strategies. This will strengthen their bargaining power, help them secure more stable and affordable supplies, and more effectively shape global energy markets.

More joint actions by EU member states could gradually enable the development of a coherent EU-level energy diplomacy framework—adopted on the level of the European Council—to support negotiations with non-EU countries. Rather than aiming for full uniformity, this approach could build on existing mechanisms like AggregateEU, but the European Commission should encourage member states to use them more often, especially where their interests align. The newly agreed energy diplomacy framework should address not only the security of fossil fuel supplies, including encouraging joint purchasing contracts, but also the joint approach in concluding agreements on clean energy partnerships, such as hydrogen projects, renewable energy investments and cooperation on CRMs.

To support diplomatic efforts, the EU must strengthen the bloc’s internal energy market. This includes investing in infrastructure, integrating grids and promoting regulatory alignment. Strengthening the EU’s energy market, including closer cooperation between member states, can facilitate joint action on the international stage. More joint actions in energy diplomacy would enhance collective bargaining power and reduce counterproductive competition between member states.

This is particularly significant in the context of geopolitical conflicts involving regions rich in energy resources. One example is the war involving America and Israel against Iran in the Middle East, which led Qatar—one of the world’s largest LNG producers—to suspend gas production and exports. If this situation continues throughout 2026, it could increase global competition for access to the resource and may also result in competition among EU member states for LNG supplies from third countries. Greater collective action could remedy the risk of internal competition in times of crisis.

For energy diplomacy efforts to be effective, support from the financial institutions is required, along with appropriate support from the European Commission in the regulatory sphere. The European Investment Bank and other public and private financial institutions should expand their role in mobilising financing for strategic projects, particularly by de-risking investments. They should also support early-stage development, particularly in less mature sectors such as hydrogen and strategic raw materials.

The European Commission has recently made efforts to streamline permitting procedures; but it should go further on this, providing regulatory certainty and strengthening cross-border coordination to accelerate project implementation. Greater progress in implementing internal investment projects, particularly in energy connectivity, will bring tangible benefits to all EU member states. Larger-scale action will enable better contract terms, price stabilisation and diversification of supply sources, while also strengthening cooperation on cross-border clean energy projects. Expanding these mechanisms increases the resilience of the EU’s energy system to disruptions, facilitates the redistribution of raw materials between member states, and introduces common technical and regulatory standards that support the integration of renewable energy and hydrogen technologies.

Divide the tasks and specialise

To make the EU’s energy diplomacy more effective and strategic, member states should agree to a specialisation and division of tasks in their dealings with partners outside the EU. Countries with a technological edge in hydrogen, such as Germany, could focus on developing partnerships and investments in green hydrogen with countries in North Africa, the Middle East and North America, creating stable supply chains and joint renewable energy projects. Those with more experience and developed legal framework in CRMs, such as France, could establish specialised partnerships in the extraction, processing and supply of raw materials essential for renewable energy technologies. In turn, countries with plans for, and the capacity to build, energy hubs—for example, Poland in the context of LNG and gas pipelines—should develop transport and storage infrastructure, enabling the redistribution of fossil fuels across the EU and to close partners such as Ukraine and Moldova.

Such a division of labour could maximise negotiation efficiency, reduce the risk of duplication of effort and excessive competition between member states, and strengthen the energy security of the entire EU. It would help accelerate the development of clean energy and facilitate the achievement of ambitious climate targets by 2030. Ideally, the introduction of a specialisation in energy diplomacy should be part of the aforementioned new EU energy diplomacy framework.

Ramp up the number of binding deals with a clean energy component

As many contracts with non-EU partners still focus on fossil fuels, the EU and member states must move rapidly to conclude more binding agreements on clean energy (rather than relying solely on non-binding memoranda). Such agreements should cover the supply of green hydrogen, participation in renewable energy projects and the transfer of technology and know-how for low-carbon energy production. Each contract should contain measurable commitments, such as specific volumes of imported hydrogen, the percentage share of renewable energy in the investments being carried out and a timetable for the implementation of technologies.

The benefit of ramping up this approach would be to construct an effective mechanism for supporting decarbonisation and accelerating the EU’s energy transition. At the same time, binding commitments enhance Europe’s credibility and its attractiveness to investment and technology partners, fostering long-term cooperation.

Coordinate on internal energy infrastructure investment

There can be no effective collective EU energy diplomacy without greater coordination on energy matters within the EU—that is, between member states but also with the participation of EU institutions. Although EU-level coordination mechanisms and joint purchasing initiatives have been expanded, infrastructure planning and contracting decision remain largely national. This is regularly evident in the official statements accompanying contracts for the supply of raw materials concluded by companies from member states.

As the Energy Deals Tracker records, officials are present at the signing of many important agreements—which suggests their significance for strengthening energy security and building new infrastructure. As a result, differences in member states’ risk perception, energy mixes and strategic priorities continue to produce uneven infrastructure utilisation and limit the overall efficiency of the EU internal gas market.

As gas demand declined after 2023, utilisation rates of LNG terminals in the EU fell from 58% in 2023 to 42% on average in 2024, with some newer terminals operating at very low levels, such as Mukran in Germany (8% in 2024) and Alexandroupolis in Greece (9% in 2024). This highlights the emerging risk of overcapacity and underutilised assets, particularly as additional LNG import projects continue to be developed despite structurally lower EU gas demand and the growing role of renewables. However, a certain degree of redundancy reflects deliberate efforts encouraged at both EU and national levels since the 2022 energy crisis to reduce dependence on Russian gas, diversify supply routes and strengthen resilience against future disruption.

Therefore, a more coordinated approach at the EU level is needed, meaning more joint actions by member states but also a strengthened role for some EU institutions. Coordination could involve enhanced EU-level infrastructure planning, where national network development plans, LNG terminal investments and cross-border interconnector projects are jointly assessed against common demand scenarios aligned with the EU’s climate and energy targets. If ACER, the European Commission and ENTSOG had played a greater role in screening projects, member states could have avoided the risks linked to utilisation rates or long-term cost efficiency before regulatory approval or public support is granted. At the same time, coordinated regional planning mechanisms developed by member states and shared capacity allocation frameworks could help prevent overinvestment while maintaining security of supply during the energy transition.

Finish phasing out Russian fossil fuels

Member states should implement the EU regulation mandating the phasing out of Russian gas imports by autumn 2027 consistently and without delay. Although the regulation (adopted in January 2026) sets a strict timetable for member states to stop importing gas from Russia, in the context of the latest energy crisis not all will have the resolve to comply.

The EU should also adopt and ensure the implementation of a similar mechanism for Russian oil as soon as possible. This is to safeguard the achievements of the intensive energy diplomacy conducted since 2022, which has enabled the diversification of supplies, the development of LNG infrastructure and closer cooperation with reliable partners. Returning to contracts with Russia—even if they appear attractively priced in the short term—would mean renewed dependence on a supplier that has demonstrated unreliability and a propensity to use energy as a political weapon. Maintaining the current course is therefore not only a matter of energy security, but also of the EU’s credibility as an international actor.

Monitor and report on the impact of agreements on the energy transition

Many European energy agreements of recent years lack specific indicators or mechanisms for reporting progress. This often makes it difficult to assess their impact on energy security and the transition. The EU should therefore introduce a monitoring and reporting system covering fossil fuel supplies, green energy, hydrogen and CRMs. Regular assessments will enable the identification of effective strategies, the vetting of partners and the adjustment of energy diplomacy in a timely manner. Transparency and consistent reporting also enhance the EU’s credibility on the international stage, helping to attract new technological and investment partners who are key to accelerating the energy transition and reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Get ahead of the next energy crisis

The last four years showed the EU and its member states to be unexpectedly talented energy diplomats. The swift, individual actions of member states proved highly effective during the crisis in 2022. Contracts concluded for the supply of fossil fuels, particularly gas, helped avert serious energy shortages and stabilise the situation in the short term. A combination of individual measures—new long-term contracts for the supply of non-Russian fossil fuels, the expansion of import infrastructure capacity (primarily LNG terminals), and the opening of further interconnectors—places the EU in a better position in the event of another energy crisis.

However, in practice many countries focused primarily on securing oil and gas supplies from alternative sources, rather than systematically reducing dependence on these commodities. The EU and member states still too rarely use their energy diplomacy to promote renewable energy sources and build sustainable energy autonomy, and they have too often worked separately rather than together. At times this pushed up the prices that they (and their citizens) were paying for gas. They have missed out on the opportunity to learn how to work together on energy diplomacy.

As a result, the EU’s continued high dependence on gas imports leaves the bloc exposed when serious disruptions in the global LNG market occur. The US-Israeli war against Iran illustrates this, with financial consequences set to be felt throughout the EU for years. The EU is confronted—again—with a sharp rise in energy commodity prices (of crude oil in particular) and disruptions to supply. The Middle East remains crucial to the global oil and gas market: any restrictions on transport via strategic sea routes significantly affect the availability of these resources.

Every subsequent geopolitical crisis only serves to reveal the structural weaknesses of the European energy system. Without deeper integration, joint investment and a consistent shift away from fossil fuels, the EU will remain vulnerable to similar shocks in the future. The challenge is therefore to ensure that European energy diplomacy much more skilfully converts existing non-binding agreements into binding contracts for clean energy projects and ultimately reduces the EU’s dependence on fossil fuels.

• About the author: Szymon Kardaś is a senior policy fellow on energy in ECFR’s European Power programme, based in the Warsaw office. His analysis focuses on the geopolitics of Europe’s new energy environment. 
• Source: This article was published by ECFR
• Acknowledgments: The author thanks those whose support was invaluable in preparing this policy brief. In particular, he thanks Michał Kędzierski, Filip Rudnik and Piotr Szymański from the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), and Alberto Rizzi (ECFR), for their invaluable assistance in compiling the database, which was one of the main sources for the conclusions in this policy brief. The author also thanks Adam Harrison for his excellent editing, as well as his consistently valuable comments and questions, which have certainly helped the author to express his thoughts more clearly. The author thanks Nastassia Zenovich for creating the beautiful visualisations. Any shortcomings in the text remain solely the responsibility of the author.

The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.