Russia's war against Ukraine: Consequences for South East Europe

On 3 December 2024, the European Studies Centre hosted a compelling seminar on the impact of Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine on Southeast Europe. The discussion featured a distinguished panel, including Julie Newton, Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford; Maxim Samorukov, Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre; Kyril Drezov, Lecturer in Politics at Keele University; and Vuk Vuksanovic, Senior Researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy. The event was chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of the European Studies Centre and Southeast European Studies at the University of Oxford. The seminar delved into the far-reaching consequences of Russia's geopolitical strategies on energy security, political alliances, and regional stability in the Balkans and Southeast Europe.

Context
Julie Newton opened the seminar by contextualising Southeast Europe’s pivotal role in Russia’s broader confrontation with the West. She described the region as a "grey zone" in European security—a strategic area where external interventions by Russia and the West remain likely. This zone is crucial for Russia, as it seeks to weaken Western cohesion while maintaining influence through populist and illiberal allies in countries like Serbia and Hungary. At the same time, Southeast Europe presents challenges for the West, given its vulnerabilities in governance and susceptibility to societal frustration, which can fuel populism and external manipulation.

Newton identified Russia’s medium-term goals, including neutralising threats from Ukraine, reshaping European security to counter NATO, and shifting the global balance of power away from Western dominance toward a Russia-China-led alternative. Southeast Europe, she argued, will continue to serve as a key battleground in this broader geopolitical conflict.

The New Politics of Poland

Jarosław Kuisz’s recent seminar at the European Studies Centre offered a compelling and timely exploration of Poland’s evolving political identity, based on his new book The New Politics of Poland. Drawing on his background as a legal scholar, editor-in-chief of Kultura Liberalna, and seasoned commentator on Polish and European affairs, Kuisz presented an argument centred around the concept of “post-traumatic sovereignty”. This term, he explained, captures how the repeated historical loss of statehood continues to shape political life in Poland today—often in ways that transcend rational policymaking.

Poland’s modern trajectory is striking: from communist domination to democratic transition, followed by a period of democratic backsliding, and more recently, renewed efforts at re-democratisation since the 2023 elections. But for Kuisz, these political shifts cannot be understood in isolation from deeper historical legacies. Drawing on historical and cultural analysis, he argued that Polish politics is still haunted by the experience of being “wiped off the map”—first in the 18th-century partitions, again during the Second World War, and later through Soviet domination. This sense of impermanence and vulnerability, passed down through education, family memory, and literature, forms what he calls a "sovereignty trauma."

Kuisz traced how this trauma has been reactivated in recent decades, not only in relation to Russia, but also to the European Union. For many Poles, he argued, the EU was originally seen as a means of securing sovereignty—“escaping the trap of history”—but later came to be viewed, by parts of the political class, as a potential threat. During the Law and Justice government’s eight-year rule, this perspective was increasingly weaponised. Brussels was portrayed as a new Moscow, and sovereignty became a rallying cry not only against Russian authoritarianism, but also against perceived Western overreach.