This spring, the IAUNRC welcomed András Kós to give a lecture on Russia’s invasion and subsequent war in Ukraine and its geopolitical implications for Central and Eastern European geopolitical security. This talk was an installment of the IAUNRC’s continuing “Security across Central Eurasia in the 21st Century” series. Kós is a Security and Defence Counsellor at the EU Delegation to the UK. Before, he worked as a senior expert on EU-NATO cooperation and security and defence issues at the European External Action Service in Brussels.
Dr. Jamsheed Choksy, IAUNRC Director, opened the talk by commenting on the importance of coordinating events that incorporate a wide breadth of interdisciplinary expertise, given the severity of worsening geopolitical and military conflict across the Eurasian landmass. This talk took place as a roundtable discussion, where the threat of large-scale war in Europe functioned as a point of departure for talking about the most serious challenges to European security. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the thought of large-scale war between European states seemed less plausible, with most EU member-states cutting their military budgets. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and subsequent wars in the Balkan states, however, were a clear warning that issues of ethnonationalism must not be downplayed in making informed decisions about geopolitical security.
Though the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, came as a shock event, Russian geopolitical rhetoric has been structuring justification leading up to this moment for decades. In a statement made by Vladimir Putin in 2005, in which he described the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” he also alludes to the words of Slobodan Milošević during his famous address at the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo in which Milošević beseeched Serbs all over the world to think very deliberately about their historical relationship to Kosovo Serbs. This patriotic and ideological positioning allows leaders like Milošević and Putin, for example, to create powerful momentum in pushing for ethnonational, territorial, and material dominion.
While the EU has enforced nineteen packets of sanctions targeting key sectors fueling the Russian invasion, geopolitical factors – such as Hungarian reliance on Russian energy and oil and tensions over Hungarian ethnonational minorities in Ukraine – continuously strain EU relations. Viktor Orban had consistently positioned Hungarian dependence on Russian gas as a main vehicle to keep utility bills low for Hungarians. However, other states – such as the Czech Republic, as of April 2025 – have been able to re-structure their supply sources away from Russian lines entirely, which begs reflection on whether Hungarian dependence on Russian energy is purely economically motivated.
Given that Russia is a permanent UN security council member and a signatory of the Paris Charter, the war in Ukraine will continue to pose a serious threat not only to European security, but also to established foundations of international order in post-Soviet Europe. The roundtable also turned to discuss the importance of robust and credible security guarantees on part of EU member-state military budget spending and cooperation in relation to mitigating the threat of all-out war in Europe.
The IAUNRC looks forward to welcoming back Mr. Kós for future collaborations.