Vladimir Putin doesn’t like acknowledging the problems his policies create, especially those resulting from his war of aggression against Ukraine.
So it was notable when he grudgingly admitted the success of Ukraine’s aerial barrage on July 8. “It’s completely obvious that the enemy is trying to damage the economy,” he said. “But the main thing is that they’re trying to create an atmosphere of nervousness in our society. You and I understand that this task is impossible.”
That will have been news to the millions of Russians now queuing for fuel at filling stations across the country, who are very nervous indeed that strikes on refineries mean their vehicles won’t run. The attacks have increased 11-fold in the first half of 2026 against the same period of last year, and the consequences are serious.
Putin’s propagandists will be nervous too because their task is to reassure the population. The same talking heads that once promised rapid victory and rejoiced that the fighting and destruction were strictly confined to Ukraine now find themselves urging fellow citizens not to panic and warning them to brace for a long and terrible war.
The Kremlin men and women who bristled at the description of Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country” not so long ago are now struggling to assure citizens that Putin’s petrostate can even fulfil its gas station function. There are gasoline shortages that have led to long lines and widespread discontent, with angry citizens getting into brawls that sometimes require law enforcement’s intervention.
On Monday, the Governor of Vologda, Georgy Filimonov, urged his constituents not to succumb to panic and to stop hoarding fuel. Mere hours later, his vehicle ran out of gasoline, prompting Filimonov to hitch a ride with traffic cops.
Russian media outlets are now publishing tutorials, teaching the population how to siphon gasoline, with headlines that read, “Suck, Don’t Swallow: How to Drain Gas from a Car’s Fuel Tank.”
With the mood in Russia getting darker, state TV’s propagandists frequently draw parallels to 1917, apparently fearing a popular uprising that would sweep Putin’s regime from office.
Some propagandists are starting to realize that their fables about Russia’s war are no longer cutting it. Appearing on The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov on July 8, political scientist Sergey Mikheyev noted, “It’s extremely important to have conversations and discussions, to ask questions and receive answers, because in a situation where people see one thing out the window but hear something completely different from senior officials, this situation doesn’t simply lead to a dead end. This situation can become explosive.”
Mikheyev continued: “You have to talk to people…If there is no dialogue between those on top and those down below, there is a vacuum that gets filled with gossip, panic and mistrust…Gossip, panic and frustration spread when people aren’t getting answers to obvious questions.”
He said: “Let me remind you that in the 20th century, we’ve lost our enormous country — twice, in 1917 and 1991.”
State TV host Vladimir Solovyov takes a different approach. He constantly reiterates the need for censorship and increasingly harsh measures against those who dare to criticize the government or expose the extent of damage caused to Russia’s unprotected infrastructure by Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes.
During the July 9 edition of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, the host expressed his relief that school children in Russia will now undergo twice as many hours of basic military training, which will include field exercises and drone lessons.
The implications are clear: the war cannot be lost. It is existential and must be won through even greater effort.
So the war is explained as a seemingly endless fight “against Satanism,” with the Kremlin’s bullhorns blaming Europe for its alleged desire to tear Russia into pieces.
Multiple propagandists on various state TV shows are repeating the same line in unison: unless Russia wins this war, it will cease to exist.
For the most part, their suggestions are limited to urging an escalation against Ukraine and Europe, combined with censorship and growing domestic oppression.
During the July 8 broadcast of a state TV show 60 Minutes, State Duma member Konstantin Zatulin said: “Zelensky & Co. want to turn the lines at the gas stations into a modern-day version of the bread lines of 1917. This won’t happen; it will not come to be, not only because I’m convinced of our resilience, but also because of the understanding of the current situation by the majority of our country’s population.”
Grim-faced host Olga Skabeeva solemnly replied: “God willing.”
Julia Davis is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the creator of the Russian Media Monitor. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild, and Women in Film.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A truce is nigh. That, in a nutshell, captured the mood behind the pitch of the consultants, financiers, contractors, and political expediters who flocked to Gdańsk for the 2026 Ukraine Recovery Conference in June.
The war is not over, but many behaved as if the next phase had already begun. Reconstruction is being priced, influence is being positioned, and Ukraine’s future is becoming less about solidarity and more about access.
Few countries are better placed to capitalize than Poland. Four years of serving as Ukraine’s principal logistical gateway, absorbing millions of refugees, and facilitating much of the West’s support effort should have translated into a privileged position in shaping what comes next. Yet the conference exposed a harsher reality: Warsaw has helped Ukraine survive, but appears far less capable of shaping its future.
Officially, URC was a success. Some 7,500 participants attended while over 160 agreements worth over €10bn ($11bn) were announced, international financial institutions unveiled fresh funding, and Ukraine increasingly presented itself not as a recipient of aid but as an exporter of military innovation. Drones, battlefield software, autonomous systems, and defense manufacturing occupied as much attention as reconstruction itself.
For Poland, however, the conference became an uncomfortable reminder that geopolitical relevance alone does not produce strategic influence.
This was the tragicomedy of URC 2026. Poland had the opportunity to convert four years of wartime political capital into lasting influence. Instead, institutional churn and competing centers of authority exposed a striking mismatch between Poland’s geopolitical position and its capacity to act strategically.
Polish firms were present, but too often without the state support that increasingly accompanies their German, French, or Nordic competitors in Ukraine. The contrast with Kyiv was instructive. Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko arrived with a clear mandate and a coordinated team. Poland was so consumed by domestic rivalries that its own president, at odds with the government, was not even invited. Bafflingly, an MoU signed by Polish energy majors on rebuilding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure included no Ukrainian counterpart.
It is tempting simply to blame the diplomatic escalation that preceded the conference in early June and contributed to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s absence. It is true that there is a deep-seated and painful dispute over Ukraine’s wartime and post-war insurgent army, and that Ukraine’s decision to name a special forces unit in its honor was poorly judged. Kyiv surely cannot have been surprised by the response.
But there is a broader issue for Poland. The dispute exposed a deeper weakness: Poland still struggles to align institutions behind strategic objectives, regardless of which political forces are governing the country.
That weakness matters because reconstruction is no longer simply about rebuilding Ukraine. It is increasingly about determining who will shape its future economy, industrial partnerships, transport and data corridors, and political orientation. Various EU states have understood this, small and large, especially Germany. Berlin and Kyiv have deepened defense-industrial cooperation, expanded drone partnerships, and strengthened economic ties at remarkable speed.
For Ukraine, Germany offers industrial scale and political weight within the European Union. One explanation discussed in diplomatic circles is that Kyiv has begun to view this growing relationship as reducing its dependence on Warsaw. Whether that is correct matters less than the fact that it may now be influencing Ukrainian decisions. The more Poland appears divided or reactive, the easier it becomes for Ukraine to treat it as indispensable, but only for infrastructure, not for politics.
This is where the history dispute found fertile ground. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist movement that fought Soviet rule after the Second World War, was also responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish civilians in the Volhynia region. As Timothy Snyder has argued, Ukrainians tend to remember the UPA through its post-war struggle against the Red Army, whereas Poles remember above all the Volhynia massacres of 1943. These competing memories cannot be reconciled by decree; they can only be managed.
Zelenskyy’s decision to grant a military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” placed Poland’s leadership in a dilemma. Ignore it, and look weak. Respond, and the dispute shifts onto terrain where emotion quickly overtakes calculation. Polish President Nawrocki chose the latter. His decision to revoke Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor, was forceful enough to inflame Kyiv.
Both sides have reason to believe escalation works in their favor. In Poland, anti-Ukrainian sentiment has expanded well beyond the political fringe. Even Prime Minister Donald Tusk has adjusted his rhetoric, arguing that the period of one-sided Polish assistance has ended.
Zelenskyy faces different pressures: wartime nationalism, veterans’ politics, and a growing confidence that Ukraine possesses alternatives unavailable in 2022. Some in Kyiv may also calculate that a colder atmosphere in Poland encourages at least part of the Ukrainian diaspora (more than a million Ukrainians live in Poland) to return home. The danger is that both sides may be confusing short-term political incentives with reality.
Poland has enjoyed a manageable security environment because Ukraine has borne the human cost of resisting Russia. Ukraine, meanwhile, remains dependent on infrastructure running through Poland. Most military assistance, equipment, and supplies sustaining Ukraine’s war effort still move through Polish ports, railways, roads, and the “J-town” city of Rzeszów.
Both countries face demographic decline, and both benefit from the presence of Ukrainians working in the Polish economy. The current trajectory, therefore, undermines interests shared by Warsaw and Kyiv alike. It also weakens the gradual emergence of a Baltic–Black Sea security community, long entertained as the Intermarium or Three Seas Initiative, now increasingly connected to the Nordic states. Its realization would strengthen Europe’s eastern flank and reinforce the shift of American strategic attention eastward.
For Ukraine, there is an additional risk. Germany cannot simply replace Poland. Berlin’s current trajectory depends on political conditions that may not endure. The AfD is no longer a fringe force, while France faces its own electoral uncertainties, as do other EU countries. Across Europe, support for Ukraine remains substantial but increasingly conditional.
At the very moment Kyiv appears willing to toy with the notion of greater tensions with Warsaw, it is becoming more exposed to political developments elsewhere over which it exercises little influence. Betting on Germany while alienating Poland may prove a far riskier calculation than it appears today.
Poland remains Ukraine’s critical ally, and it is in Ukraine’s interest that it stays one. Ukraine remains Poland’s shield, and it is in Poland’s interest that it wins. Russia does not need the two countries to become adversaries. It merely needs them to stop seeing each other as indispensable. Neither side should allow that to happen.
Maciej Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
The soccer World Cup may be over, but the geopolitics of international sports are only just heating up. The executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced on July 7 that it is provisionally lifting Russia’s suspension from the organization.
It reasoned that Russia “no longer includes as its members any regional sports organizations in territories falling under the jurisdiction of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine,” which was the reason for its suspension in October 2023.
The announcement follows a shift by Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. He said in February that he favored lifting the ban on Putin’s regime, imposed four days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, because it had “achieved nothing.”
Infantino said in April 2025 that he wanted to bring Russia back “in the football landscape because this would mean that everything is solved.”
But the IOC and FIFA appear to have based their change of heart on the unsupportable notion that Russia believes in fair play. This is laughable. It doesn’t. Russia believes in dishonesty and underhanded, if not illegal, behavior by its agents to cheat and distort international sports.
The IOC said Russian athletes will have to be in full compliance with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), but said the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) would do the testing.
This is the same organization the Kremlin used to carry out the largest-ever doping operation in modern sport. The scheme, exposed after the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, resulted in more than 50 medals being stripped from athletes, and the investigations are still ongoing.
As of March, there were more than 300 sporting sanctions in place against Russian athletes.
“Our conclusion was that all of this could not have happened, and continue to happen, without the knowledge of and, either actual or implied, consent of the state authorities,” said Richard Pound, head of the WADA investigation commission.
Infantino’s comments also ignore the legacy of Russia’s 2018 World Cup. The tournament featured stadiums built with North Korean slave labor, channeled massive corruption to Kremlin allies, and shed light on connections between the state and racist and violent Russian soccer hooligans.
And this is all before the world accounts for more than 650 Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed on the battlefield and at home during Russia’s 12-year war.
Many Russian athletes, often competing as “neutrals” in international competition, have supported the Kremlin’s war propaganda, with some even wearing “Z” armbands on the podium.
Now, more than ever, Vladimir Putin craves the legitimacy global sports provide. The Sochi Olympics and 2018 World Cup gave him a prominent place on the world stage, an image he cultivated at every opportunity.
But Russia’s reintegration into world sports is not a foregone conclusion.
“The potential reintegration of any Russian national teams poses a threat to the safety and integrity of competitions,” said Andriy Shevchenko, president of the Ukrainian Football Association.
The French, German, and English soccer associations have rebuffed Russian inclusion in any European or global tournaments, including Euro 2028, which will take place across the UK and Ireland.
“It’s really hard to get your head around them coming back carte blanche to competition,” said Travis Tygart, head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, which is preparing for the 2028 LA Olympics.
While FIFA and the IOC might be trying to take a mile, international sporting leaders must stop them taking the first inch toward the legitimacy the Kremlin craves.
Host nations should enact visa bans and withdraw funding and support from regional and local competitions that intend to allow Russian participation. They should also call out national sporting federations that allow athletes to travel to competitions that host Russian athletes.
Law enforcement must also act against the criminal networks behind Russia’s doping scandals, opening investigations into the supply of banned substances to athletes, bribery of officials, and the ownership of international sporting assets in violation of international sanctions.
Federations in Europe and North America will need to reach out to those in the developing world as part of efforts to counter Russian malign influence.
Infantino has built much of his political support in Africa and Asia, and sporting federations should highlight war crimes carried out by Russian mercenaries across Africa. This could be aligned with funding for sports diplomacy and civil society in the Global South.
It would not only weaken Russia’s propaganda efforts but also reduce the power base of those seeking to bring the Kremlin back into world sports.
Finally, the European Union, UK, and US must ensure the integrity of the 2028 LA Olympics, 2028 Euros, and 2030 World Cup and Winter Olympics. This means offering additional financial support to reduce FIFA and IOC leverage over these events and assisting national and international sporting federations to host events as they see fit.
The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) can block Russia’s entry to the World Cup qualifying rounds, and sources told the Guardian that it was determined to do so.
These major international events should also be used to highlight the courage and sporting prowess of Ukrainian athletes in the face of Russian aggression.
The IOC claimed it “remains committed to promoting peace through sport among people and nations.”
But letting Russian athletes compete means letting the Kremlin back onto the field, and putting the Kremlin back into the VIP boxes of world leadership.
Putin plays to win — and the world can be sure he will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
Michael Newton is the Director for Communications and Information Systems at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is the author of the 2018 World Cup: The Beautiful Game and an Ugly Regime, published by the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War has once again become the top concern cited by Russian citizens when asked to name the most pressing issues facing the country. In a May survey, the conflict was cited by 33% of respondents, followed by low wages (24%) and high prices (18%), more traditional concerns, but both linked to the four-and-a-half-year full-scale invasion.
The return of war to first place indicates a significant shift in public sentiment about the “special military operation” and its impact on everyday life. And it is especially important because respondents were asked an open-ended question about what worries them, with no prompt for possible answers.
It was unsurprising in 2022, the first year of the full-scale invasion, that war came to mind first for Russians, and the first wave of monitoring conducted by the Institute of Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia found that 50% cited the war as the main problem.
But by 2023, complaints about low wages, high prices, and other “traditional” problems began to increase as mentions of the war receded.
The war slipped from the top spot in early 2024, a trend that continued into 2025. This reflected the “routinization” of the war for most Russians, its limited impact on the majority of the population, and the lack of obvious physical consequences for them.
The Kremlin’s rejection of mass mobilization and use of cash to attract men to fight also played a role. They were lured with large payments for signing contracts, along with promises of freedom for those in jail. Participation in 2023-2025 was still a matter of choice for many Russians.
For the majority of society, their own financial capacity and the economic situation were far more pressing, so low wages and high prices occupied the top spots.
In late 2025, the war began to impact the daily lives of Russians in new ways. Ukrainian drone attacks led to widespread gasoline shortages, and restrictions on internet and social media use, justified by security concerns, affected the majority of people.
The discrepancy between the official discourse and the personal experiences of Russian citizens is not new, but with the growing impact of the war on ordinary people, this dissonance has become even more pronounced.
The war has moved from being a background event to playing an increasingly significant role in daily life. There are queues at gas stations, a lack of a stable internet connection, and accelerating prices in stores.
The conclusion Russian society appears to have drawn is that most of its problems cannot be solved until the war ends. First, the fighting must cease, and only then can the authorities be expected to address their most pressing concerns.
The war is going nowhere and has dragged on, undermining the concept of the “Special Military Operation” as some kind of low-impact distant colonial exercise.
The surveys suggest Russians want the Kremlin to solve their problems, and it’s equally clear that all the tools the government has so far tried have been unsuccessful.
At the same time, the remaining tools — nuclear weapons, mass mobilization, or a full-scale war against NATO — have very little support, as they would create new challenges without solving the current ones.
The Kremlin is constantly at odds with itself and its population. While gasoline shortages have affected tens of millions of Russians from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, Putin seems to prefer discussing the tactical battles over the streets in an obscure village in Donbas,
He alludes to the fuel crisis in his speeches, but spends much more time emphasizing claimed advances at the front.
In another contradiction, Russian propaganda still refers to the invasion of Ukraine as a “Special Military Operation,” but Kremlin officials are increasingly using the word “war” when they talk about it.
If this is part of a softening operation to prepare the population for martial law and mass mobilization, the survey findings suggest it will be hard for the Kremlin to win over the people’s support.
Dr. Oleksandr Shulga is the head of the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia (IKAR), the only institution in Ukraine conducting monthly sociological monitoring in Russia. He has 20 years of advanced experience in the field of quantitative and qualitative sociological research. During these years, he has been a supervisor, consultant, and expert on a variety of projects, including areas of potentially escalating tension and instability.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
For many outside observers, momentum in war is measured by red and blue arrows moving across screens, or towns changing hands, where advances are counted in kilometers. Yet from Ukraine, where front line movement is more often measured in meters, it means something different.
Even on the morning after a Russian attack, many of my neighbors and friends in Odesa do not ask whether the front has shifted. Instead, they check their phones to see whether Ukrainian drones have struck an airfield in Crimea, a refinery inside Russia, or a military factory hundreds of kilometers from the battlefield. On July 6, for example, they will have read about attacks on the faraway Russian refinery in Omsk. On July 7, in Moscow and Belgorod.
In a war that has become one of attrition, the ability to impose costs on Russia far from the front has become an important sign of progress and irrefutable evidence — for both Ukrainians and Russians — of successful asymmetric warfare against a stronger enemy.
This difference in perception is often missed abroad. Western discussions frequently focus on territorial gains and losses, treating momentum as something visible on maps.
For Ukrainians, momentum can mean forcing Russia to move aircraft farther from the front, compelling Moscow to spend extra resources protecting domestic infrastructure, or demonstrating that ever more Russian territory is within reach of Ukraine’s weapons. It also means the occupying forces cannot relax in the lands they have temporarily and illegally taken from Ukraine.
One of the principal sources of this momentum has been Ukraine’s ability to innovate, which has been a necessity and a massive source of national pride. The widespread use of drones for reconnaissance, strike missions, and naval operations has allowed Kyiv’s forces to compensate for disadvantages in manpower and conventional military equipment.
Ukrainian engineers, military units, and private companies have developed increasingly sophisticated unmanned systems capable of reaching targets deep behind Russian lines. Some were bankrolled by cash donations from members of the public, who dug into their own pockets to fund their country’s defense.
The attacks have complicated Moscow’s logistics and increased the cost of sustaining military operations, particularly in Crimea and along critical supply routes. They have also shown ordinary Russians, as they sit in endless lines for gas, that their leaders have misled them about progress in the war.
Military assistance from Western partners has also enabled Ukraine to continue its resistance. Political debates in allied countries have sometimes created uncertainty, but Kyiv, through relentless and effective diplomacy, has succeeded in maintaining a broad coalition of support.
For Ukrainians living through the war, this support is not an abstract geopolitical issue, but a vital fact of everyday life. Decisions made in Washington, Berlin, or London can affect air defense, electricity supplies, and the safety of entire cities.
Ukraine has suffered devastating losses, but Russia faces mounting pressures of its own, with sanctions, technological restrictions, labor shortages, and the costs of prolonged war weighing on its economy. Long-range strikes against oil facilities and military infrastructure are intended not simply to destroy targets but to make Moscow’s war increasingly expensive.
None of this means Ukraine is clearly winning, and Ukrainians are fully aware of that. The front remains difficult and often static; Russia retains substantial advantages in population, industrial capacity, and available manpower, and its forces are continuing offensive operations across several sectors.
Yet momentum does not depend entirely on territorial advances. If Ukraine can continue to innovate, maintain international support, and force Moscow to devote more resources to defending its own territory, it can gradually improve its strategic position.
For many of us in Ukraine, this is perhaps the most important shift of the past two years. Victory is no longer just imagined as a rapid liberation of occupied territory — though that remains a strong wish and a stated priority. Increasingly, it means denying Russia the ability to dictate the course of the war.
Momentum is visible in Russia’s growing need to defend itself, Ukraine’s ability to strike back, and the continuing refusal of Ukraine’s people to accept that time automatically favors Moscow.
This is a vital notion for Ukrainians, but it should also be a moment of reckoning for their international partners. The time to build on this momentum, increase pressure on Moscow, and elevate assistance to Kyiv is now.
Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at CEPA. He has been working at the Odesa I. Mechnikov National University since 1992, as an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations since 1996, and has acted as the Director of the Center for International Studies since 1999.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Dmytro Ilin, a jewelry business manager, joined the army immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Just months later, he suffered severe head injuries and PTSD in a bomb attack that killed most of his comrades.
They had remained upstairs while he went to the basement. Now he has written a play about his experiences.
“School. Basement. Explosion. Death. No… alive. But what about the guys on the first floor?” repeats the voice in the protagonist’s head.
Pereshyvaka (“The Anxious One”) is the soldier’s military code name, and the play follows him after a devastating Russian attack on a school in Donbas. The paranoia and suicidal thoughts are Ilin’s own — as is the protagonist’s frustrating struggle to obtain psychiatric treatment.
Ukraine is confronting the challenge of reintegrating the vast civilian army created by Europe’s largest war since 1945, and civil society organizations, rehabilitation centers, educational initiatives, and veteran-led businesses are devising ways to help former soldiers rebuild their lives.
In a country where military service has touched nearly every family, veterans are seen not only as beneficiaries of social support but as vital to Ukraine’s future.
The Veterans’ Theatre, co-founded by playwright and veteran Maksym Kurochkin, describes itself as a “dramaturgical laboratory,” where wartime experiences are transformed into artistic expression.
Severely wounded soldiers — some with missing limbs, disfiguring injuries or lost sight — work for months to transform their memories into scripts. Ilin’s play was one of 11 new works performed by professional actors at a festival in Lviv’s historic Maria Zankovetska Theatre.
“The performances offer veterans a way to process trauma, find language for deeply personal experiences, and reconnect with society,” says Alina Sarnatska, a rising-star playwright and former combat medic who curated the Lviv project.
“Theatre is about finding a common language,” she said. “It’s all about strength and overcoming fear.”
Ukraine already has between 1.5 and 1.8 million veterans, according to support organizations. And that number could more than double.
Nearly 90% of Ukraine’s soldiers were civilians before Russia’s full-scale invasion, and its model of “total defense” rests on such citizen-soldiers. Their reintegration is therefore not merely a social policy challenge but a national task that will shape the country’s recovery and future resilience.
So far, demobilization has been elusive for most soldiers, and veterans formally remain part of Ukraine’s operational reserve.
“How can they integrate into civilian life if they fear being sent back to the front at any moment?” asked Olha Halchenko, who coordinates veteran programs at the Renaissance Foundation.
The uncertainty complicates employment, family life, and long-term planning and makes psychological recovery harder.
Defense Minister Mykailo Fedorov is working to reform the policies, and while changes are slow in coming, civil society is moving ahead. Halchenko estimates that 1,000 veteran-focused initiatives now operate across Ukraine, many founded or run by veterans themselves.
Among the most influential organizations is Pryncyp, which has advocated for reforms since 2022. “Legal Navigator,” its digital legal-assistance platform, helps soldiers, veterans, and their families find services and benefits.
Pryncyp joined others to present a comprehensive proposal for modern veteran policy at the end of 2025, including stronger support for families.
Veterans Minister Natalia Kalmykova has embraced the vision of reintegration. “Veterans are the strongest among us,” she said. “The state’s goal must be to help them realize their abilities.”
Her words reflect a wider shift in thinking. Many civic organizations argue that reintegration should focus less on traditional benefits than on education and empowerment.
Rehabilitation centers such as Unbroken and the Superhumans Center, in Lviv, have fused advanced medical treatment with psychological support and practical life-skills training.
Patients receive surgery, prosthetics, physiotherapy, and counseling while participating in activities designed to rebuild confidence and independence, including art classes, aquatic therapy, and learning to cook and shower with severe injuries.
“Our goal is for soldiers to be able to manage their lives,” said Olga Rudnieva, head of the Superhumans Center.
Tetiana Fishchuk, CEO of the Projector Foundation, believes veterans possess skills Ukraine will urgently need. “Soldiers are our most important human capital,” she says. “They have learned responsibility and leadership under extreme conditions.”
The foundation, which offers training programs in technology and creative industries, has developed special courses for veterans and their families. The aim is to prepare as many as possible for new leadership roles.
“If we invest in their potential today, many of them will become our new elite and role models tomorrow,” Fishchuk said.
Veterans already enjoy high levels of public trust, and surveys show the military is Ukraine’s most trusted institution. Veterans consistently get far higher approval ratings than political parties, parliament, or government.
Veteran hubs are springing up, providing legal advice, social services, psychological support, sports programs, and community events, increasingly with the backing of local government.
Many veterans are also creating their own opportunities, opening cafés, restaurants, bookshops, workshops, IT companies, and agricultural enterprises. One has even founded a dance school.
To showcase these businesses, the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation has developed an interactive map of veteran-owned enterprises across the country, highlighting entrepreneurship as another pathway to reintegration and economic recovery.
Despite these achievements, many veterans continue to struggle with poverty, PTSD, and addiction. Former prisoners who joined the armed forces under special wartime arrangements will also need tailored reintegration programs.
Foreign volunteers who fought for Ukraine, including people from Belarus, Georgia, Colombia and even Russia, face particular difficulties, as many lack access to established support structures and institutional assistance.
Ukrainians know that rebuilding society is ultimately the task of every citizen, and veteran reintegration may be one of the defining tests of their country’s much-vaunted resilience.
Barbara von Ow-Freytag is a German journalist, political scientist, and expert on civil society developments in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
The episode has sharpened Europe’s dilemma over digital sovereignty. Instead of accepting a false choice between depending on US AI software or building an independent European AI capability, policymakers on the continent should follow the example that is already being set by industry and mix and match different AI models to reduce dependency on any single supplier.
The Trump administration told Anthropic to cut off access to Fable after it grew worried the model could be manipulated into sharing dangerous cyber capabilities. Anthropic restored access to Fable after the US government signed off on new safeguards.
Although everyone shares an interest in making sure dangerous cyber capabilities don’t fall into the wrong hands, the Fable episode demonstrates that the US can block access to a powerful American AI system. European officials must ask what might have happened if European companies had spent months building critical systems on top of Fable before Washington flipped the switch. The fear that such a kill switch could be fired again has strengthened European calls to reduce dependence on American suppliers.
But the growing clamor for digital sovereignty will not change the fact that Europe is poorly placed to build its own frontier AI. The US produced 59 notable AI models in 2025, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, well ahead of China’s 35. European labs produced only a handful. France’s Mistral, seen as Europe’s most capable model developer, trails the leading American and Chinese models.
The gap is widest in advanced reasoning and the ability to autonomously perform multi-step tasks, which can find hidden cyber-vulnerabilities and string together the steps needed to exploit them. Mistral’s models score well behind the leading American and Chinese models on graduate-level reasoning benchmarks like GPQA Diamond, for example. Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models currently lead the field in working through complex, multi-step tasks, solving general problems with minimal guidance and simulated hacking exercises.
Europe’s disadvantages are structural. The continent hosts just under 5% of the world’s large GPU clusters — used to train and run advanced models — compared to roughly 74% for the US. European companies’ electricity costs are roughly double those of their US counterparts.
The European Commission’s answer to this conundrum is the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), proposed in June and yet to be negotiated with the European Parliament and national governments. CADA sorts workloads into tiers with different sovereignty requirements: the most sensitive applications would have to run on a full sovereign European stack, while less sensitive ones would face fewer limits. Defining the different tiers and who can participate in them will be the subject of lively debate, but Henna Virkkunen, the Commission Executive Vice-President overseeing the effort, has said the aim is to ensure that no provider holds a “kill switch” over European services.
CADA contains a paradox, however. If European AI models continue to lag behind American ones in cyber capabilities, which seems likely, the most sensitive workloads facing the strictest buy-European rules would end up running on weaker models, with weaker cyber defenses. Europe would be trading insulation against a potential US AI “kill switch” for another vulnerability.
Away from Brussels, the AI market may have stumbled onto a partial solution. The industry has spent the past two years reducing single-model dependency. Companies deploying AI are increasingly turning to multi-model systems, in which an orchestrating program routes each task to whichever model handles it best. A system running inside a law firm might send document summaries to a small, cheap model; more complicated searches to a capable open-source model; and the final legal brief to a frontier model, for example. The system design relies on numerous models rather than one.
Companies started adopting this approach to save money. In 2024, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley showed that routing between a powerful AI model and a cheaper one could cut the cost of answering a query by more than 85% on general tasks and 35–45% on hard reasoning problems, with only a 5% performance gap on the former.
The idea is catching on, and even inspiring new businesses. OpenRouter, a US-based commercial routing platform, offers access to hundreds of models from dozens of providers. It says it now processes about 100 trillion tokens (the units of text that models read and generate) per month, a five-fold increase over six months ago. This capability doesn’t necessarily need to depend on a foreign service provider. Open-source tools such as LiteLLM let organizations run routing on their own machines.
This accelerating shift in the way AI systems work may have an unintended benefit for Europe. Multi-model systems are built to be model agnostic. They can switch from one model to another as prices and capabilities change. It’s not a huge stretch to think that the same design idea could be used to build systems capable of swapping one frontier model for another, or to degrade gracefully when a model becomes unavailable, instead of failing outright. European companies are already moving in this direction. At a startup conference in Paris last month, as the Fable situation was unfolding, Siemens, Renault, and Orange talked about how using US, Chinese, and European models could help them avoid depending on a single model provider.
Admittedly, the multi-model approach does not represent a complete solution to Europe’s sovereignty conundrum. Although it would expand options and reduce single points of failure at the model and application layers, it would not answer questions about how to best address data access issues and other sovereignty concerns related to cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
Multi-model systems would require extra upfront investment and testing to understand how systems behave when different models are swapped in and out. If routing simply swapped one US frontier model for another, it would still leave Europe exposed to Washington’s extraterritorial policy toolkit. And while Chinese models account for a large and growing share of routed traffic worldwide, they are unlikely to be an acceptable option for sensitive European workloads.
This is where public European money could make a difference. The EU already supports open-source projects such as the OpenEuroLLM consortium, which trains open-source models on European AI infrastructure.
Public funding for multi-model approaches and greater investment in open-source projects would be far cheaper than pursuing a European frontier model. This kind of engineered failover strategy is already used in the banking and energy sectors. Extending the idea to sensitive AI systems would preserve access to cutting edge AI. A shift towards multi-model systems will not make Europe self-sufficient. But it represents a smart, if partial, solution to Europe’s sovereignty conundrum.
Kevin Allison is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Technology Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is the Founder and President of Minerva Technology Futures, a geopolitical intelligence and policy advisory firm specializing in artificial intelligence and its associated technology stack.
Venesa Rugova is a Senior Analyst at Minerva Technology Futures, where she specializes in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity policy.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Tech 2030
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
The Supreme Court issued two seemingly unrelated decisions: one limiting the power of police to track phone records, and the other stripping away the legal protections that shielded regulators’ independence.
Read separately, each ruling represents a notable legal story. Read together, they show an American privacy regime being tugged in two opposite directions that could end up torpedoing transatlantic data transfers.
The first case, Chatrie v. United States, began with a bank robbery. In May 2019, a man held up a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, and vanished. Detectives had no suspect. They asked a Virginia magistrate for a “geofence warrant” — an order to compel Google to search its records for every phone that had been within 150 meters of the bank around the time of the crime.
Google complied in stages. It anonymized data from 19 phones. Then it narrowed the list to nine phones. Finally, it found names and numbers for three phones. One belonged to Okello Chatrie. His location history placed him near the bank ten minutes before the robbery, then heading toward a residential neighborhood. That evidence proved enough to convict him.
Chatrie argued that the search itself was unconstitutional — not because of what it found, but because of how it found information. To identify a single suspect, police searched everyone’s movements. No warrant named him. No probable cause pointed to him. He was found because he happened to be nearby, one data point alongside 18 other individuals who had nothing to do with the crime.
By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s argument that Chatrie had forfeited his privacy simply by owning a smartphone and letting Google track it. Using a cell phone is not consent.
The Court did not go so far as to ban geofence warrants. It sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether this particular warrant met the Fourth Amendment’s demands for probable cause. But it affirmed the underlying principle that police need real justification before going through everyone’s location data.
However, the ruling may have little practical impact. In 2025, Google shifted location history storage from centralized servers onto individual devices, telling courts it could no longer technically comply with bulk geofence requests. Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting, used this development to describe the majority’s opinion as “advisory.” He has a point. Constitutional law had arrived to bless an outcome that the tech giant had already delivered.
The second ruling has nothing to do with location data, bank robberies, or Google. It concerns something more abstract: who gets to fire the people who watch the watchers?
Trump v. Slaughter arose from President Donald Trump’s March 2025 decision to remove two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) without citing any legal cause — despite a 1934 statute stating that FTC Commissioners may be dismissed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Fired Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter sued, citing a precedent that had long shielded commissioners of independent agencies from being fired for holding the wrong politics.
The Supreme Court, in the same 6-3 alignment, sided with the president. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that the FTC “unquestionably exercises executive power” and must answer to the president. Commissioners at dozens of other independent bodies, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, previously insulated from politics, can now be dismissed for policy disagreement.
Although this is a separation-of-powers case, not a privacy case, a connection exists. It runs through the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which allows companies to legally move Europeans’ personal data onto American servers. That $9.8 trillion of transatlantic trade survives only because Brussels has certified that American oversight of government surveillance is “adequate” — meaning independent enough, in practice, to check abuse. Twice before, under different names, Europe’s courts have torn-up agreements after finding that certification wanting.
The current framework depends on assurance that US oversight bodies operate with genuine independence from whoever occupies the White House. Trump v. Slaughter eliminates that presumption. Within days, the European Data Protection Board announced it would “carefully assess” the ruling’s implications for the framework’s oversight mechanisms.
This is the complication that makes the two rulings inseparable. Chatrie narrows what the government can compel technology companies to hand over about ordinary people. It is a privacy victory. Slaughter, on the other hand, weakens the independence of the very bodies meant to police how the government behaves with whatever data it still obtains.
European anxiety about the Data Privacy Framework centers on US authorities accessing personal data. Chatrie cuts against that fear, making it more difficult for governments to gain access to such data. If Slaughter counts as evidence against US oversight, intellectual consistency demands that Chatrie count as evidence for it.
American privacy protection is not a coherent regime, built deliberately and defended as a whole. It is an accumulation of separate legal skirmishes — a Fourth Amendment case here, a removal-power case there, a corporate liability calculation somewhere else — that happen to intersect, sometimes reinforcing each other and sometimes not.
Europe built its privacy framework by statute, in advance, applied uniformly. The US is discovering its framework retroactively, case by case, sometimes strengthening it and sometimes gutting its foundations — often on the very same day, by the very same Court.
Foreign regulators noticed the connection within forty-eight hours. It would be a mistake for Americans to miss it.
Elly Rostoum is a Senior Resident Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Tech 2030
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
In summer 2022, months after the full-scale invasion, Russia began replacing military casualties with prisoners, a practice not used on such a large scale since World War II. In exchange for fighting, convicts were offered the chance to pay for their crimes and return to society as heroes.
While exact numbers remain unclear, estimates suggest tens of thousands, and possibly as many as 200,000 prisoners have so far been mobilized as mercenaries for the Wagner Group and, later, for Storm Z units. By offering the opportunity to swap military service for release, the Kremlin has made signing up the only way out of jail and social marginalization.
Moscow has devoted significant resources to legitimizing the policy, and, drawing on speeches, state-controlled media, and legislation adopted between 2022 and 2025, I found military service consistently presented as the only meaningful path out of imprisonment. The battlefield is the place where violence can be used to exchange guilt for redemption, marginality for social recognition, and prison for freedom.
Vladimir Putin’s regime clearly drew inspiration from its predecessors. When the Soviet Union recruited prisoners during World War II, it framed combat as a way to “atone for crimes with blood,” in the words of Stalin’s “Not a Step Back” Order No. 227 in 1942.
It established penal units and permitted executions for violations of discipline, but Putin’s Kremlin has gone further. Rather than treating prisoner mobilization as an exceptional expedient, it has built an entire public narrative around it, promoted by political elites, lawmakers, and state-controlled media.
Russia’s political and religious elites have promoted war-as-redemption through different lenses. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, provided religious justification in 2023 when he said that anyone who dies at the front “sacrifices themselves for others” and that such a sacrifice “washes away all the sins a person has committed.”
Evgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group until his murder in 2023, translated the same idea into the language of Russian prisons. Instead of promising forgiveness, he offered a transformation from social outcast to hero.
Convicts were encouraged to exchange their “criminal talents” for money, status, and a new social identity. His recruitment speeches repeatedly presented military service as the only meaningful escape.
“Do you have anyone who can get you out of here?” Prigozhin asked inmates at one colony. “There are two who can get you out. They are Allah/God — in a wooden box — or me. And I take you away alive.”
Putin has routinely described former prisoners as heroes rather than criminals, dismissing their offences as “mistakes” that “could happen to any of us.” He argued that “they made those mistakes at one time, but they gave their lives for their country and have fully atoned for their guilt.”
Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov went further, arguing that they “atone for their crimes with their blood,” following the language of Stalin’s 1942 decree.
State-controlled media reinforce this narrative by presenting redemption as the lived experience of former prisoners themselves. Rather than telling readers that war transforms convicts, state-controlled newspapers invite the “transformed” soldiers to tell their stories in their own words.
A 2023 Komsomolskaya Pravda interview, for example, featured a former prisoner describing how military service remade him. “The war transformed me to the core. I’m a completely different person now,” he said. “More prepared, more responsible, more honest. Previously, I was just Dima, a bit of a slacker.”
Similar stories portray enlistment as a voluntary choice offering purpose, belonging, and a second chance, rather than a response to the realities of Russian prisons or the limited alternatives after release.
The same outlets reinforce the message by contrasting Russian and Ukrainian prisoners. While Russian convicts are presented as redeemed heroes who have overcome past mistakes, Ukrainian prisoners on the frontline are labeled as “felons” who “make poor soldiers.”
Redemption is portrayed as a distinctly Russian moral achievement rather than simply a consequence of military service.
Between 2022 and 2024, the narrative was incorporated into the Russian Criminal Code, and prisoner recruitment was formally embedded into Russian law. State Duma Defense Committee chairman Andrey Kartapolov, one of the architects of the legislation, explained the underlying logic when defending the reforms.
“Having served their sentence, criminals return to society anyway,” he said. “But if he has to go into battle every single day… he will return as a different person. And who knows how many days they have left.”
He presented combat as a more effective form of correction than prison itself. Prisoners either die in battle, in line with the exceptionally high casualty rates in penal units, or return to society as supposedly transformed citizens. The Russian state has made the idea of redemption into official policy rather than simply political rhetoric.
Seeing prisoner recruitment solely through the lens of military necessity misses an important part of the story. The Kremlin has not simply offered prisoners a way out of prison; it has constructed a narrative in which war itself becomes the path to redemption, social acceptance, and freedom.
By embedding that narrative in elite rhetoric, state-controlled media, and legislation, Putin’s regime has recast prisoner recruitment as a politically and socially legitimate policy and changed the way it talks about the war.
Nikita (Mykyta) Vorobiov is a political analyst focusing on Russian and Eastern European politics, security, and information campaigns. He is currently completing an MSc in Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Oxford and holds a BA in Ethics and Politics from Bard College Berlin, where his research focused on Russian visual propaganda. For the last four years, Nikita has been publishing articles on politics and security for CEPA, VoxEurop, JURIST, and others.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.