Following a Russian strike on an air-defense system in Poland a week before, which Putin framed as retaliation for Nato involvement in the war in Ukraine, the alliance has sheepishly declared Article V. But, leaning on the North Atlantic Treaty’s legal technicalities, Donald Trump has refused to intervene, preferring to support European allies in “other ways”. Without American backing, only a handful of European states have deployed their armed forces to bolster Poland and Estonia. And with a second Russian army assembling in western Belarus, and the prospect of missiles flying at Warsaw from Kaliningrad, Poland’s large and robust military is mostly tied up at home. As American envoys arrive in Moscow to negotiate Putin’s terms on Estonia, and likely much of Nato’s east for that matter, British commanders aboard HMS Duncan train their guns on the Neustrashimy, a Russian frigate just appeared on their radar. With fighters screaming into action overhead, the Duncan’s crew hold their breath, as their ship enters the range of Russian guns.

I’m hardly the first observer to speculate on what war between Russia and Nato might look like — and, given the storm clouds gathering in Eastern Europe, I surely won’t be the last. After months of escalating Russian gray-zone attacks against Nato, ranging from drone incursions to stray missiles and attempted bombings at Leipzig airport, warnings about Putin’s plans for Europe have grown louder on both sides of the Atlantic. And now, just last week, Polish and Lithuanian leaders have both separately claimed to have intelligence that Russia is planning “accidental” rocket and drone strikes on pro-Ukrainian members of Nato, a conclusion corroborated by Emmanuel Macron. Together with CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit to Moscow last month, among other things to warn Putin off attacking Nato, the atmosphere feels worryingly similar to the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yet if a flashpoint on Nato’s borders appears increasingly likely, we equally shouldn’t expect a shooting war to start tomorrow. If he does indeed choose to throw his armies westward, Putin’s aim will first be to break the alliance’s internal cohesion, and to exploit its central weakness in an age of hybrid warfare: that the cost of actually honoring Nato’s self-defense clause is too much for most members to contemplate, until it’s too late anyway. It helps, here, that just like in Ukraine, Putin’s goal wouldn’t really be recovering lost territories. As always, rather, it’d be about control. Removing Nato as a cohesive bloc would allow Russia to once again dictate terms to its European neighbors, a generational shift in the balance of power on the continent, and marking the apotheosis of Putin’s decades-long political project. And, if all went to plan, the Russian premier could plausibly achieve all of this without triggering the world war many in the West have feared.

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The first phase of any Russian provocation campaign would likely start with a strike on a border crossing between Poland and Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has already warned of just such an attack, claiming that one has already been foiled via a joint Polish-Ukrainian operation. Russian forces have already been striking targets mere kilometers from the Polish border, and attacked a civilian Warsaw-Kyiv train not long after European officials including Boris Johnson had traveled along the line. Hitting border crossings would benefit Russia from several standpoints: Putin could plausibly claim attacks were accident; could make weapons shipments to Ukraine via Poland more logistically difficult; and crucially, could broaden the “acceptable” field of operations of the Ukraine war.

Now is where things would start to get really dangerous, with drones of the sort that were shot down by Nato jets over Lithuania this week finally starting to find their targets, striking critical energy or security infrastructure close to the border with Belarus. Such strikes may start innocuously enough, with drones “accidentally” hitting unmanned border watchtower or rural power lines. But then, one might damage an oil pipeline in Latvia; or a critical LNG terminal in Lithuania; or even a section of Poland’s Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which serves as a logistics hub for transferring Western arms to Ukraine.

Ultimately, though, the real aim of such attacks would not be material damage — but instead making low-level air assaults a regular part of European life. Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians alike have already become inured to headlines about Russian-sponsored arson attacks or drone incursions, and it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they’d do the same with this new wave of provocations. That matters: for despite the alliance’s tough talk, no one, including Putin, realistically expects that Nato would go to war with Russia over a damaged pipeline, no matter how important it might be. We already have clear proof of this: Nato failed to act even after a Russian drone struck a residential building in the Romanian city of Galați in May, injuring two residents. The trouble with the alliance’s intentionally defensive framework is that there is no clearly stated middle ground; war and peace are the only two options available. And, within such binary parameters, Nato will almost always choose an insecure peace over a highly disruptive total war.

All the same, European Nato states would have to send a message to Moscow sooner or later. Rather than striking at Russian soil directly, however, they’re more likely to give Ukraine the intelligence and hardware to hit drone-launching sites on their behalf. In the end, though, politicians in Nato’s east would still have to signal to their citizens that they were willing to take decisive steps to protect them and their infrastructure, and would finally take a leap into the unknown: shooting down Russian projectiles heading toward their borders. This is something Polish leaders have been discussing for years, and within such a volatile threat environment, it would be the obvious next step for the alliance short of full-scale war.

At this point, for Putin, all the pieces would be in place for the final step in the escalation ladder. The Russian leader, and the Russian public for that matter, have considered themselves to be in a de facto state of war with Nato for quite some time now. Not only would all of these developments make this even clearer, but would also fit squarely within the foundational push of Putin’s national narrative. Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2022, and the West in 2026 has always been justified by the politics of grievance — and, by becoming directly involved in Ukraine, Nato will have crossed a red line. Coming off the high of a record win in Russia’s latest State Duma elections, Putin’s party would gladly use these events as fuel for another, much-anticipated mass mobilization, adding some 300,000 new conscripts to his armed forces. Russian authorities would still face plenty of resistance, but much less than if the drive had been solely framed around the war in Ukraine.

With Europe besieged but complacent, Putin could then make his biggest gamble: a direct missile or drone strike against a Nato battery involved in aerial combat in Ukrainian airspace. Poland’s Small Narew surface-to-air missile system, stationed in the quaint city of Zamość near the Ukrainian border, would make a perfect target. And this time, there would be no beating around the bush: Russia would own the attack, framing it as a retaliation for Nato intrusion in Ukraine, and demanding that the alliance reverse course to safeguard Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”.

A tired Europe would finally consider Article V at Poland’s request. But the outcome would be a foregone conclusion: the appetite and social cohesion necessary for a war of this scale simply isn’t there, especially in Washington. What’s crucial to understand here is that, in a Nato-Russia shadow war, there wouldn’t be some single event, like the 1939 invasion of Poland, that suddenly snaps Europe from its lethargy. This is what lies at the core of Putin’s strategy: even if the frog finally realizes it’s being boiled, things will be too far-gone for it to gather the strength to jump out the pot.

Far from Nato’s frontline, meanwhile, publics in both Western Europe and the US would hardly be willing to leap headfirst into a conflict with Putin: the strike on Zamość would hardly be shocking at this point. More than that, Putin’s rhetoric of victimhood would play well with both MAGA and Left-wing campists, who’d probably see the circumstances of the Zamość strike as yet another reason to disengage from both Ukraine and Europe. With the Iran war still unresolved, meanwhile, Trump would see no reason to commit troops to a European theater he has long seen as marginal — especially if Pete Hegseth’s “force posture review” ends with the withdrawal of up to 25,000 American soldiers from Europe later this year.

Though the US might acquiesce to an Article V declaration, in short, it would likely also use the Treaty’s open-ended language around mutual-assistance obligations to weasel its way out of fighting. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has already stated he would do exactly that if Article V were ever invoked. Of course, no one will miss Slovak troops in the event of a conflict with Russia, but the lack of American involvement would surely dissuade many smaller countries from sending help. So Article V or not, make no mistake — American apathy would break the alliance, something Putin himself is well aware of.

Nato structures may remain strong on paper, in this scenario, but the organization would actually resemble a malleable “coalition of the willing” — far more than an all-encompassing defensive alliance. That would be a massive blow for the bloc’s frontline states, and with dramatically lower stakes and a broader field of movement, Putin would act accordingly. Any strike against Poland likely wouldn’t lead to an actual invasion, but it would keep its forces locked in a cross-border standoff. That leaves Estonia. Though Britain, France, Germany and Poland, perhaps alongside Denmark or Canada, are likely to send troops or ships to defend a threatened Tallinn government, US indifference precludes a broader campaign. Even nearby Sweden and Finland would likely be cautious about overextending themselves too early, mobilizing their populations but then remaining holed up for whatever comes next.

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What would come next? Certainly, whatever the limitations of the Russian military machine, victory for the new anti-Putin coalition would be far from guaranteed. Yet even if, to borrow our scenario, the Neustrashimy’s commander relented off Hiiumaa, or else engaged HMS Duncan, lost, and rendered Russia unable to enforce a blockade, Putin might still hope to carve a new European order from the chaos — especially if he felt he still enjoyed Trump’s good graces.

Alongside what we might call the “Belarusification” of Ukraine, that would surely include attempts to disarm the Baltics, while keeping heavyweights like Poland contained and self-interested. To be clear, Putin would likely be unsuccessful in meeting all of his goals here. Indeed, surrounded by sycophantic generals, he may well stumble. But like in Ukraine, after suffering an initial loss in Estonia, the Russians could yet regroup, adjust their strategy, and lock Nato’s rump in a fresh quagmire, turning border cities like Narva into Bakhmuts on the Baltic. Whatever happens, Putin will understand that, without America, the old equation in Europe has gone, while his new opponents will hardly have time to react.

Some might see these hypotheticals and conclude that the only way out for Nato is to disengage completely from Ukraine. But this would simply kick the can further down the road — Russia at this stage sees Ukraine as merely one theater within a much greater war over the future of Europe. Even if Trump decides to unilaterally welcome Russia back into America’s embrace, Putin’s steadily escalating gray-zone war with European Nato would anyway likely continue, regardless of events in Washington or Kyiv. The choice facing the Europeans, then, is not simply between peace and war, but between accepting Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe — and opposing it. Exactly how they do that remains the challenge of our time.

Yet despite these homages to the long arm of the Russian world’s spiritual and cultural influence, Moscow’s representatives here in Bulgaria are not as comfortable as they might seem. “For me, it was not easy to come here,” admits Father Vladimir Tyshchuk, the church’s archpriest, his stone-walled office surrounded by books and Orthodox icons. He came to Sofia from Vienna a few years ago, replacing a predecessor expelled from the country on national security grounds, much to Moscow’s chagrin.

Tyshchuk has had to live in the shadow of that event ever since. Just last month, an article in the Bulgarian press accused him of secretly meeting the ousted priest in Jerusalem: to receive instructions from Russian intelligence. The claims came without evidence, yet whenever Tyshchuk has crossed back into Bulgaria, he says he’s been held by the security services for extended passport checks. To him, these experiences stand in stark contrast to the treatment he’s received from many regular Bulgarians, for whom Russia is not an enemy — but something close to kin.

Bulgaria’s relationship with Russia is hardly straightforward. A member of the European Union and Nato for nearly two decades, its leaders have often taken an anti-Moscow line. Yet Bulgaria’s historical and economic ties to Russia run deep, arguably much deeper than any other EU state. Indeed, after seven parliamentary elections and several popular protest movements since 2021, Bulgaria’s electorate is now turning to yet another populist champion for Moscow: ex-president Rumen Radev, whose political alliance looks set to win the largest share of seats in snap elections this weekend, along the way making Radev himself Bulgaria’s prime minister.

While Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has been heralded as a sign of the decline of Russian power in Central and Eastern Europe, Radev’s probable victory presents another, more nuanced challenge to the Brussels establishment. Radev is hardly a Kremlin stooge like Orbán, and Bulgarian society, despite its connections to Russia, is growing increasingly hostile to Putin’s influence. All the same, Bulgaria’s experience offers valuable lessons about how Russia can still exploit popular sentiments to fill gaps left by the waning West.

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In practice, these attitudes ensure a kind of political schizophrenia. Over the past 20 years, after all, Bulgarian governments have pursued strong ties with Brussels and Washington while signing energy deals with Russia. More recently, they’ve sent weapons to Ukraine since 2022 while allowing Moscow to maintain several high-profile properties in Bulgaria — in violation of EU sanctions and despite security risks to Nato operations. As recently as this year, Sofia adopted the euro, even as its oligarch-dominated economic and political system continues to be based on the post-Soviet Russian model, with connections to Kremlin money everywhere.

While openly pro-Russian parties are restricted to the far-Right, Russophilia in the Bulgarian mainstream is much less overt — exactly where Radev has learned to shine. Having been elected to the presidency in 2016, allegedly with the help of a former Russian intelligence officer, Radev took a number of Moscow-friendly positions on Ukraine, opposing sanctions and defending his country’s dependence on Russian energy. But after resigning from his largely ceremonial post in January, following a spate of anti-government protests, Radev read the room keenly, de-emphasizing his pro-Russian credentials to settle instead on a broad, anti-corruption platform opposed to Bulgaria’s oligarchic elite.

“It’s really a candy bag,” says Professor Emilia Zankina, from Temple University Rome, of the coalition of voters Radev’s alliance has gathered together. “He gets nationalists, socialists, progressives, urban elite, rural disappointed people, and that’s because he’s seen as the new savior.” That alone is a notable achievement given Bulgaria’s notoriously fractured and chaotic politics, with Radev himself becoming something of an empty vessel for anti-establishment Bulgarians. His own background presumably helps too: as a former major general in the Bulgarian Air Force, who speaks calmly yet decisively, he enjoys a statesmanlike reputation.

That’s especially true now that Radev’s trenchant stance on Ukraine has been replaced by platitudes about reaching a “just and lasting peace”. Given that Putin’s invasion remains a polarizing issue, that may be intentional — but unlike elsewhere in Europe, the dominant historical narratives that underpin Bulgarian identity mean people here don’t always equate Putin with the Russian nation as a whole.

“I never had anything against Russia, because a long time ago Bulgarian people were together with Russians,” says Viktor Toshev on a dreary night on Vitosha Boulevard, a pedestrian street that stretches out toward the mountains past Sofia. Toshev works at a car wash, but gesturing toward the sky with frustration, he tells me he’d had to leave work early because the rain had robbed him of customers. “Russian people are innocent people, good people,” he adds, his voice husky, his hair mottled. “Only this war is no good.”

Toshev’s sentiments cut to the heart of the popular narrative Bulgarians have been sold about Russia: that the two countries have been bound by language, religion, and history since the dawn of Slavic Christendom. This logic served as part of the justification for Russia’s intervention in the Balkans following the Ottoman Empire’s violent suppression of a Bulgarian revolt in 1876. Following the Sultan’s subsequent defeat in the Russo-Turkish War two years later, the Treaty of San Stefano granted Bulgaria its independence for the first time in nearly half a millennium — under Russian auspices of course. An alternate plan for the new state ultimately divided it between the Moscow-aligned Principality of Bulgaria and the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, with the two eventually merging to form the modern Bulgarian state in 1908.

In the popular mythos of the fight for Bulgarian independence, Russia is an altruistic savior, an “older stepbrother” to quote one Russian journalist, to whom Bulgaria owes its very existence. And despite the fact that Bulgarians themselves also played a large role in securing their freedom from the Ottomans — and that Bulgaria far predated Russia as an independent entity during the Middle Ages, even introducing the Cyrillic alphabet to Moscow — many Bulgarians’ affinity for Russia as its guardian angel was solidified during the communist period following the Second World War.

“On the one hand it was a repressive regime, one party rule, no private property,” Zankina explains, describing Bulgaria’s experience as a Soviet satellite state during the Cold War. “But at the same time, the country was agrarian and rural before communism and during that period the country industrialized, so many people and families saw their lives change dramatically for the better.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the shock of the Nineties brought with it a heavy dose of Soviet nostalgia. According to Stoyan, a longtime activist-turned-techie, there was never even any desire for the communist years to end among regular Bulgarians. “When the wall fell, nobody gave a fuck,” Stoyan explains in his typically incisive fashion, adding a dash of the self-deprecation characteristic of so many Bulgarians. “The communist party here was never protested away, it was never taken down. Actually they won the first democratic elections.”

Perhaps for that reason, Russia’s influence continued uninterrupted as Bulgaria’s system transitioned from one regime to another. For years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the dominant party remained the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a rebrand of the communist party that had governed the country throughout the Cold War, and which continued to serve as a vehicle for Russian interests into the 2000s. As late as 2016, indeed, the party supported Radev’s initial run for the presidency. Nor was this influence merely political. As Stoyan explains, many of Bulgaria’s bureaucrats and economic heavyweights gained power with Russia’s backing; even today, adds Zankina, many members of Bulgaria’s security services received their training in Moscow.

Stoyan, who says he’s been active in protest movements since he was a teenager, leads me to a public fountain next to the Bulgarian Parliament. It was here, aged 13, that he was first arrested for arranging an unauthorized protest against a far-Right, pro-Russian party. (A far-Right, anti-Russian party also exists.) Unlike some of his countrymen, Stoyan, who asks me to only use his first name for his safety, says he saw early on that the prosperity provided by Russia and the Soviet Union was nothing more than an illusion. Despite the relative growth Bulgaria experienced during communist period, it came at a heavy cost — up to 10,000 people perished as a result of forced collectivization and persecution at the hands of the Soviet-backed regime between 1944 and 1989.

Such blunt displays of power are history, yet Russia’s reach has adapted to Bulgaria’s own changing fortunes, becoming less direct with each passing decade. Near the Bulgarian city of Burgas, Russian oil giant Lukoil today operates Bulgaria’s only oil refinery, providing the Sofia government with up to 80% of its fuel. If it weren’t for sanctions waivers from the Trump administration, which were renewed this past week, Bulgaria’s energy landscape would likely face catastrophe if forced to pivot away from Russian energy.

Bulgaria boasts more physical manifestations of Russian influence too. Perhaps most notable here is the Kamchia complex. Ostensibly a wellness resort, owned by the EU-sanctioned Moscow municipal administration, it was once envisioned by Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as a hub for spreading Russian soft power. Even Tyshchuk, the priest, admits that diplomats at the Russian Embassy, which he occasionally visits, have expressed a desire for the Church to play more of a political role in Bulgaria.

The Russian Cultural and Information Center in Sofia, also owned by the Russian state, is another brick-and-mortar example of the Kremlin’s footprint in Bulgaria. After several unsuccessful attempts to get in touch by email and phone, I visit the building one overcast afternoon in the hope of interviewing its director. As I walk up the stairs toward the center’s glassy façade, I’m immediately approached by a security guard who asked me what my business was. After a brief conversation in broken Russian, I’m allowed through a metal detector into the cavernous main hall. I’m ultimately unable to secure the interview — but, before leaving, I take the opportunity to have a look around. In the main entrance hall, next to a life-size replica of a Soviet space probe and a mural of two cosmonauts, one Russian and one Bulgarian, I find a propaganda exhibition about Crimea, organized for “the year of unity of the peoples of Russia”. The security guard initially gives me the go-ahead to take photos — only to change his mind and beckon me to leave.

Such heavy security is hardly a mystery. Less than two years ago, it was in front of this cultural center that Bulgarian activist Lexi Fleurs burned a Russian flag, writing “murderers” in large letters on the sidewalk. She was confronted by security guards and eventually detained for over 24 hours by police who attempted to charge her with petty hooliganism even though Bulgaria has no laws prohibiting the burning of foreign flags.

In the aftermath, her arrest inspired similar acts by other Bulgarians, who burned Russian flags and held signs in solidarity with Fleurs, though this time without triggering any confrontations. Just another example of Bulgaria’s muddled relationship with its giant stepbrother, something Fleurs herself says makes concerted activism that much harder. “We don’t officially have a pro-Russian government,” she tells me, sitting in a park as evening falls. “It’s so much easier to go against an enemy that clearly states ‘I am the enemy’ than to go against an enemy that you need to dig and prove and spend even months to understand how deep the problem actually is.”

Even so, Bulgarians opposed to Russia are beginning to take matters into their own hands, connecting the dots between the corrupt status quo and the Kremlin’s influence. In the lead-up to the anti-government protests in December, Fleurs attended a demonstration that, while ostensibly directed at Bulgaria’s then-general prosecutor, quickly turned into a chorus of chants like “this is not Moscow” — or else the cruder “Putin khuylo” (something like “Putin is a cock”).

Though support for Russia, Putin, or both continues to be found across Bulgarian society, the clearest dividing line, if any exists, is unsurprisingly age. Younger Bulgarians, who grew up in the post-communist period and didn’t learn Russian in school, find it harder to relate to the tales of Russo-Bulgarian brotherhood, whatever the continued pull of Bulgaria’s national mythologies.

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In a cozy high-rise apartment in western Sofia, decorated among other things with a taxidermized bird of prey, artist Antoaneta Quick epitomizes these complexities. “Bulgaria, and generally the Balkans, are always the victims, the fucked up ones, and it feels like Russia is equally fucked up,” she says, who despite her ex-husband’s Swedish surname is the great-granddaughter of a Russian officer close to King Boris III of Bulgaria. “This is the east. It’s almost like a feeling of safety in the already existing chaos, mafia, distrust, and alcoholism.” For Quick, this is the real reason for Bulgaria’s long, toxic relationship with Moscow — a familiarity that, despite being regressive, feels safer than change, especially at a time when stability always seems just out of reach.

According to Krasimir Angelov, a Bulgarian software engineer who works in Britain, the appeal of this familiar safety is only amplified when it feels like the only satisfying choice available. “We do need strong leaders in times of crisis, and the West has generally struggled to produce them,” Angelov tells me by phone. “It has become a rather soft, politically correct society to its own detriment. That is seen in Eastern Europe as weakness.”

Radev has always existed in both worlds — Russia’s and the West’s — and his Bulgaria will doubtlessly exist in both too. Stoyan, the activist, suggests that Radev’s days as a Russian lackey are over, if nothing else because Kremlin cash has stopped flowing his way. Whatever the truth, his government, if he is able to form one, will likely try to recast the EU and Nato in its own image, much like other European populists. Learning the lesson of Orbán’s defeat, though, he’s also likely to be more subtle in his methods, adding amendments to EU proposals instead of rejecting them outright.

Despite hosting more corruption and Russian influence networks than perhaps even Hungary, Bulgaria has largely escaped the EU’s attention so far. If, however, the twin problems of graft and Kremlin influence are to be tackled, that’ll have to change, regardless of who rules in Sofia. Bulgaria’s integration into the eurozone and other European structures will surely help here, but for such a push to truly succeed, it’ll have to be led first and foremost by Bulgaria’s own civic society. Citizens have shown themselves disgusted by their rapacious establishment — and if figures like Radev have the capacity to challenge long-running political dynasties, other, less Kremlin-aligned leaders may one day do so too.

Yet even if the tide continues to turn, and future generations of Bulgarians find themselves increasingly alienated from Russia, the question remains whether they will actually be able to sever centuries of dysfunctional co-dependence without shocking Bulgarian political life to its core — even with the EU’s help. Much will, of course, depend on what happens in Bulgaria’s immediate neighborhood; on the outcome of the war in Ukraine; and on how well the country weathers the energy shocks that lie on Europe’s horizon. Yet it will also depend on what alternative vision the West is able to offer. Bulgaria has already shown that it doesn’t need to stay stuck in the past — even if its future direction remains in the balance.

At first glance, Hezbollah’s actions over the last week seem baffling. Despite having been bruised militarily by Israel — and politically marginalized by pro-American politicians in Beirut — the group fired several rockets and drones against a military facility near Haifa. Bolder still, if reporting from Cyprus is correct, Hezbollah also launched a drone against the RAF base at Akrotiri, marking a previously unthinkable expansion of its offensive operations. The way to understand these attacks, of course, is precisely as a mark of weakness. With the Ayatollah dead, the Revolutionary Guards scrambling, and Israeli warplanes operating essentially at will, Hezbollah’s strikes were a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant, an appeal to heaven to retain whatever remained of its “resistance” credentials.

The contrast with Israel couldn’t be clearer, with the IDF relentlessly hammering Lebanon’s south, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s suburbs. Then there’s Israel’s renewed ground incursion, leading to dozens of deaths so far. Just yesterday, meanwhile Israel warned all civilians south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon to evacuate, suggesting at best preparations for a wide-scale ground assault — but possibly also a broader occupation. Yet if all that’s grimly familiar to students of the region (Israel last invaded Lebanon less than two years ago), things today feel different. Unlike nearly all Israel’s previous campaigns, this one was triggered not by imminent, large-scale threats to its national security, but instead by pre-emptive opportunism. 

Right after the October 7 attacks, Hezbollah began sporadic bombardments of Israel’s north, leading to the mass evacuation of Israeli civilians and, the following October, an IDF advance towards Beirut. This time, the militant group’s attack wasn’t even in the same ballpark; indeed with only around 20% of its original arsenal remaining, Hezbollah was hardly ready for another war against Israel. But having developed plans for the group’s final destruction months ago, Netanyahu saw his chance and decided to take it. 

While Israel has all but neutered Hezbollah over the last few years — not least via Mossad’s pager-bomb annihilation of its senior leadership — this new campaign is yet another expression of Netanyahu’s maximalist logic. Buoyed by Trump, Israel and its prime minister are clearly willing to eliminate even potential threats to their interests, whatever the human cost. 

Yet more than Israel, what really matters here are political developments inside Lebanon. Channeling the rage of a people drawn into yet another war, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has declared all Hezbollah’s military activity illegal, ordering that the group finally give up its substantial stock of weapons. Against the odds, Salam’s move is already having real-world consequences. This week, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has reportedly arrested a dozen Hezbollah members, something unthinkable even a year ago. 

The appointment of Salam as prime minister — and Joseph Aoun, an anti-Hezbollah Maronite general, to the presidency — dramatically altered the political landscape in Beirut. At the behest of the Americans, and taking advantage of Hezbollah’s new weakness, Lebanon’s civilian politicians could finally begin to make progress toward replacing the group’s hegemony in southern Lebanon. In the first place, that meant bringing in the LAF, with the Lebanese government announcing in January that it had completed the first phase of a weapons control plan. 

Forced to reckon with this challenging new reality, Hezbollah played along with Lebanon’s government where it had to, while holding jealously to what remained to its political power and military arsenal. Indeed, despite the Lebanese state’s piecemeal efforts at disarming Hezbollah, the group may well have enjoyed a slow and gradual post-conflict decline — had it chosen not to martyr itself alongside the Islamic Republic. 

Now, though, not only has Hezbollah given Israel an excuse to finish it off entirely, it has also alienated its most ardent allies among Lebanon’s Shi’a electorate. The Amal Movement, another Shi’a party that had long provided Hezbollah with cover within Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian politics, have abandoned the militants. Just this week, two Amal ministers voted in favor of a cabinet resolution banning Hezbollah’s military activity. Given the broader context, that’s unsurprising. Shi’a-majority regions of Lebanon suffered more than anywhere else during the 2024 conflict. Lacking both funding and political stability, swathes of the country remain in ruins, even as a new war threatens to bring yet more misery. No wonder even Shi’a strongholds like the Bekaa are expressing open frustration with Hezbollah — perhaps the first time this has happened since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. 

Taken together, Nabih Berri, Amal’s leader and the veteran speaker of parliament, has clearly decided that Hezbollah now threatens his own political survival. Paradoxically, this means that only by meeting Israel’s demands, and allowing Hezbollah to be disarmed, can Berri give his constituents the space and support they need to rebuild their homes and lives. Over the longer term, this may also allow him to lead Amal into the political vacuum once Hezbollah leaves the stage.

Of course, Hezbollah won’t vanish overnight. The group still commands fierce respect among its diehard base, especially among Shi’a in the south. But if the Islamic Republic truly does collapse in Iran, whatever funds Hezbollah may have still been receiving from Tehran will quickly dry up, leading to an eventual collapse of not only its military procurement capabilities, but also its state-within-a-state network of clinics, food banks, and other social services. And with the central government in Beirut for the first time trying to confiscate its weapons, Hezbollah will be lucky if it emerges from Israel’s onslaught with even its electoral future intact.

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Yet as so often these days, Israel remains a wildcard. Despite proclaiming victory over the militants in 2024, Netanyahu and his war cabinet have always wanted more. Indeed, given American and Israeli pressure on Lebanon over the last year, their new campaign isn’t just about smashing Hezbollah, but also about forcing Beirut to normalize relations with Israel for the first time since 1948. Whatever Lebanon’s eagerness for going after the militants, this would be a hard pill to swallow. Regardless of the pro-US, anti-Hezbollah posture of the current Lebanese government, even they understand that they cannot afford to alienate a populace that nonetheless remains deeply opposed to Israel. Though they have signaled an openness to negotiations with Tel Aviv — itself a major step — a full-blown peace treaty, and all the Israeli demands that’ll accompany it, may be a bridge too far. That tension, it goes without saying, would set the stage for yet another destabilizing confrontation between Israel and Lebanon: and all at the worst possible geopolitical moment.

Given Israel’s current confidence, meanwhile, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t push its luck and demand a degree of security enforcement over Lebanon’s south as a corollary to its peace treaty, and perhaps even seek to manage Beirut’s military affairs too. While a new occupation is certainly possible, you’d hope that Netanyahu would have learned enough from decades of Israeli errors in Lebanon to know that such a move would only catalyze the rise of Hezbollah’s successor.

While Hezbollah’s downfall may be imminent, in short, it won’t happen smoothly — and when it does, new challenges will inevitably emerge. The future behavior of Lebanon’s Shi’a will be decisive here, as will the ability of the country’s newly assertive government to quash sectarian rivalries. Violence between the state and Hezbollah, once off the table, is now a very real possibility, but so is the sort of backroom maneuvering that is a hallmark of Lebanon’s bureaucratic politics. While Israeli power is very directly and violently on the minds of Lebanese today, a sectarian civil war could yet loom tomorrow. 

One thing, however, is abundantly clear — despite Trump and Netanyahu’s desire to carve out a new American-Israeli order in the Middle East, one where Iran is nowhere and they alone call the shots, Lebanon will hardly be a pliable vassal. With or without the Party of God, this country’s long-suffering people have long memories, and the wounds of the last two years won’t soon be forgotten.

But Belarus’s eager acceptance of Donald Trump’s invitation to be a founder member of his Board of Peace — “one of the most consequential bodies ever created in the history of the world,” apparently — tells a different story. Lukashenko has always been deft at playing Russia and Europe against each other for his own benefit and these skills ought to serve him well in any new Trumpian world order. Not only is America newly receptive to authoritarian leaders like him; the prospect of now playing America off against its former European allies and meanwhile assuming a key role within the new Russian world will play to the strengths of a leader who is a far cannier political operator than is commonly assumed.

It is, after all, no accident that Lukashenko, now 71, is the most enduring political survivor in the Russian sphere — no small feat in a landscape full of car bombs, plane accidents, and defenestrations. Indeed, in February 1997, while Boris Yeltsin was recovering from heart surgery, Lukashenko almost became leader of Russia itself.

Six years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had bid farewell to one political order, but had yet to give birth to the next. Yeltsin’s popularity was floundering. In a bid to exploit the wave of lingering Soviet nostalgia among the Russian masses — and to show strength as several former Warsaw Pact states joined Nato — Yeltsin made a play to pull Belarus even closer into Russia’s orbit. He set in motion the creation of the “Union State”, a confederation between Russia and Belarus that was supposed to inspire the likes of Kazakhstan and Ukraine to deepen their reliance on Moscow too.

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Lukashenko, who had quickly consolidated power in Belarus after winning the first (and thus far only) free and fair election in the country’s history in 1994, had other plans. He and his deputies drafted up a treaty that effectively gave Lukashenko perpetual control of the Supreme Council of the future Union State — a kind of reverse takeover that meant he would succeed Yeltsin at the head of Russia’s political hierarchy.

“What the drafters came up with essentially meant one thing: Russia was losing its sovereignty,” Yeltsin later wrote in his memoir. In a diplomatic flurry of existential proportions, the Russian leader dispatched his officials to Minsk to intercept the document and talk Lukashenko out of his plan. It took an entire night of negotiations — and according to Yeltsin, lots of liquor — to get the job done.

Lukashenko only truly gave up his designs on the Kremlin once Putin rose to power in 2000 — and the Union State treaty that he ultimately signed has mostly been used by Russia as a means to absorb Belarus rather than the other way around. However, Lukashenko’s ambitions of power and influence have persisted in other, more subtle forms. And as Trump has laid the groundwork for an American rapprochement with Moscow over Ukraine, the Belarusian strongman has found himself on the precipice of yet another generational inflection point. American interests are reorienting away from Europe; and the rise of a new transactional, Trumpian logic in international affairs is reshaping not only America’s role in the world, but Russia’s as well.

Naturally, Lukashenko has jumped at the chance to get in on the action. Belarus’s place on the so-called Board of Peace is the clearest evidence yet of a thaw with Washington — the first since 2020, when Europe and the US ousted him from their good graces following his brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in Belarus. Last year, through several deals with the US, Lukashenko traded 175 political prisoners for sanctions relief, most recently releasing 123 people including several high-profile activists and politicians in exchange for the elimination of American sanctions on the critical Belarusian potash sector.

The immediate benefits to his regime are obvious — an opening for renewed trade with the US and diplomatic legitimization on the world stage, with Lukashenko positioning himself a one-of-a-kind liaison to the Kremlin during any peace process between Russia and Ukraine. But despite his frequent chest-thumping, Lukashenko is no Trump, and his designs go far beyond short-term dealmaking. As a new world order is born out of the tragedy of Ukraine, Lukashenko understands that not only that Trump might end his ostracism from the West, but that this is his best shot to transform himself from Putin’s underling into his right-hand man.

And a Russo-American grand bargain would do more than allow Lukashanko to ride to freedom on Putin’s coattails — it would allow him to make deals with the Americans on his own terms. At the same time, by engaging with Trump and continuing to harass the EU, Lukashenko can drive an even deeper wedge between the US and its former European allies — thus creating the foundation for a new order. The EU, with its lofty goals of democratization and justice in Belarus, will be left out in the cold. An agnostic US will meanwhile build new ties with Lukashenko and a newly victorious, post-war Russian sphere.

Despite being a pariah on the continent for the better part of 25 years even before 2020, Lukashenko had been surprisingly effective at maintaining ties to liberal Europe — while doing comparatively little to reform his dictatorship in return. Time and time again, the EU allowed itself to be deceived by Lukashenko into thinking he could change — a naïveté that he exploited to keep his masters in the Kremlin far enough at bay to keep them from swallowing him whole. In 2008, having watched Putin’s tanks roll into Georgia, Lukashenko secured a window to the West for himself by freeing several political prisoners, leading the EU to lift a travel ban against him — only to spark Brussels’ ire anew by violently suppressing post-election protests in Minsk two years later. In 2015 the story repeated itself. Lukashenko came under pressure from Putin to establish a Russian military base on Belarusian territory, leading him to release more prisoners in exchange for the EU unfreezing his assets and eliminating other sanctions. While Belarus and Russia were in the midst of an oil and gas dispute in 2019, Lukashenko visited Vienna, marking his first visit to the EU in years.

The house of cards came crashing down in 2020 when Lukashenko’s crackdown on post-election protests transformed both Belarusian society and his regime. Feeling more threatened than ever by his own people, Lukashenko pursued his enemies with relentless fury, infamously forcing a Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk to arrest Belarusian activist Roman Protasevich who was on board.

For Europe, this was the final straw, and Lukashenko has found himself permanently locked out of the West ever since — more at Putin’s mercy than ever before. And while his 2020 crackdown allowed him to hold onto power in Belarus, he paid for it by watching his worst nightmares about Russian power in Belarus manifest before his eyes. Despite having broken with the Kremlin line on Crimea in 2014, calling it a “bad precedent,” Lukashenko now had no choice but to allow his country to be used as a staging ground for Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and thus a co-aggressor. Although he resisted pressure to conscript Belarusians themselves to join the war, in a major move, he allowed Russia to station nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missiles in Belarus late last month.

Of course, Lukashenko is hardly interested in the welfare of Belarus as a country — and only cares about the instruments of its state insofar as they allow him to achieve his personal goals. As a product of the Soviet bureaucratic machine, he has always ultimately seen Moscow as his center of gravity — and despite his distrust of Putin, he has played the part of his enforcer well.

Now that the Trump administration has arrived on the scene with offers that Europe is no longer willing to make, Lukashenko has bifurcated his policy toward a divided West. Washington, rather than Brussels, is now his insurance policy against Putin. Even while drawing closer to Trump, Lukashenko has continued to antagonize the EU, triggering a state of emergency in Lithuania last month after sending smuggler balloons over the border. In effect then, by courting the Americans, Lukashenko has been helping Putin articulate an ultimatum to the EU. Sanctions on Belarus and Russia and support for Ukraine will be met with gray-zone warfare and instability along Nato’s frontier. Legitimization, sanctions relief, and negotiation with the Kremlin via Minsk will be met with business opportunities, humanitarian releases of Belarus’s oppressed — and peace along Europe’s frontiers.

Meanwhile, like two lovers stuck in a bad marriage, Putin is nearly as dependent on Lukashenko as he is on him. The Belarusian leader has done everything in his power to underscore this fact since the start of the war in Ukraine — in 2023 after all, Lukashenko negotiated a deal between the Kremlin and Yevgeny Prigozhin during the latter’s march on Moscow, casting himself as Putin’s savior.

And within Trump’s imagined new order, Lukashenko sees a place for himself as an equal to the Russian leader. Moscow is hoping to reestablish its influence on its “near-abroad” after the dust settles in Ukraine — and as Putin’s most important international ally, Lukashenko already forms the lynchpin of the Russkiy Mir (that is, the Russian world). He has already done his best to support loyal regimes like Georgia’s and to corral wayward allies like Armenia and Kazakhstan back into the flock.

And despite thumbing their nose at him a few years ago — Kazakhstan’s President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev called Lukashenko’s suggestion that his country join the Union State a “joke” in 2023 — these states seem to have reluctantly come around to the notion that they will have to continue appeasing the Russian bully one way or another. Kazakhstan and Belarus strengthened their military ties in 2025 less than a year after Lukashenko chided his Kazakh counterpart for not being more involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan once said he would never visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko reigns; nevertheless the pair met and shook hands in Moscow last year.

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Of course, all of this is only made possible by Lukashenko’s Orwellian oppression of the Belarusian populace — which goes beyond even Putin’s authoritarian chokehold on the Russian masses. The prisoner deals with the EU and now Trump have taught Lukashenko that imprisoning his own people not only helps him stay in power, but gives him a bargaining chip. “We are basically goods for sale,” said the Nobel Peace laureate Ales Bialiatski who was freed as part of the most recent prisoner release in December. Moreover, with over 1,100 political prisoners (and counting) still behind bars in the country, Lukashenko still has plenty of human “goods” to sell the West. Once he runs out, he will surely arrest more to keep the train rolling.

Naturally, given its borders with three EU countries, Belarus still needs Europe. Trump’s recent removal of sanctions on potash means little if Belarus has no means to export them. And however desperate Putin may be, sharing power is not something he has ever been keen on — especially with a fair-weather friend like Lukashenko. But the world is changing and the Russkiy Mir is changing too. Putin is tightening his belt. The war in Ukraine has now stretched on for longer than the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. He will need a stable bulwark as he reconstitutes his forces and his political capital — and Lukashenko will doubtlessly be there to save him once again. Indeed, the Belarusian dictator will have secured the very balance he has always desired: power beyond his own borders, plus his own fiefdom, army, and intelligence services within them.

Whether this dream ever manifests is anyone’s guess — and it will depend enormously on what the world looks like once the guns fall silent in Ukraine. Moreover, it is hard to imagine Lukashenko could achieve this without further sacrificing Belarus’s independence. But Lukashenko changed his calculus after 2020 and he may be happy to do the same again, so long as he finds himself where he has always wanted to be — in the halls of power of the former Soviet world that molded him. Yeltsin may have stopped Lukashenko from taking over Russia back in 1997. But he was never able to stop him from trying to restore his place at the heart of the Russian world.

Such was the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian leader who fled to Russia following his ousting in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and who would likely have succeeded Zelensky if Putin’s forces had captured Kyiv in 2022. More recently, a comfy retirement was also the fate of Bashar al-Assad, who traded running one of the world’s most brutal regimes for playing online video games and brushing up on his ophthalmology.

Of course, Maduro, Yanukovych and Assad all led very different countries. But in comparing the fate of the Venezuelan strongman with his fellow ex-despots we can learn much about US power in the Americas — and the Kremlin’s willingness to cede it. Just last May, after all, Maduro visited Moscow for the annual Victory Day parade, with Vladimir Putin waxing lyrical about strengthening economic ties with socialist Venezuela. Yet in the end, Putin did nothing to save Maduro, and has remained tellingly quiet on his arrest by US commandos. The comparison with other erstwhile Russian allies couldn’t be starker.

This matters, for it shows how America’s foreign policy revolution dovetails with Russia’s own geopolitical recalibration. Just as Trump has signaled that he’s ready to wash his hands of Ukraine as quickly as possible — for mutual Russian and American enrichment — so too has Putin decided that Venezuela isn’t worth Moscow’s time. And while there may not have been any explicit deal between the White House and the Kremlin, when the dust settles, a Putin corollary to the Monroe Doctrine may likely emerge, with vast consequences across Eurasia.

Russian dominance over Ukraine is far from guaranteed, and Trump has lately been openly frustrated with his counterpart in Moscow. But with the Russians remaining steadfast as ever in their maximalist aims in their invasion, thumbing their noses at any Ukrainian proposal and driving a wedge between an increasingly Ukraine-skeptical Trump and Kyiv’s European allies, the mercurial Trump is unlikely to resist Russia’s ultimatums forever. And whatever form the Ukraine peace deal eventually takes, Putin is sure to come away with the understanding that Trump has taken from Venezuela — that military action in his corner of the world is not only an effective, but indeed a necessary, method of maintaining his sphere of influence in the so-called Russkiy mir, or Russian world.

Reacting to Trump’s attack, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was strikingly effusive. “He and his team are very staunchly defending their country’s national interests,” Medvedev said of Trump, adding that as a result of the operation, the US has “nothing to reproach our country for”. For Russian leaders, then, Trump’s actions mirror their invasion of Ukraine not just in form but also in strategic logic — that maintaining a regional sphere of obedient client states through force, and punishing those that step out of line, isn’t aggressive imperialism, but merely guarding a superpower’s legitimate national security priorities.

This logic has lain behind Russia’s geopolitical behavior ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, especially since Putin’s rise to power, and indeed has animated its opposition to Nato expansion and efforts by countries as varied as Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan to break free from Russia’s orbit. As far as Putin is concerned, the biggest problem with the Soviet collapse was not necessarily the end of communism, but the disintegration of Russia’s imperial sphere, and the subsequent lack of clarity over where Russia’s sphere ended and America’s began.

For Russia, the existence of such spheres of influence is as natural as the existence of national boundaries themselves — before the Soviet Union, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tsarist Russia held sway over Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Serbia, while also enjoying authority in Iran and China. Putin has long seen Trump and his Ukraine peace process as a vehicle to formalize a new division of the world, and regards Trump’s move in Venezuela to be a decisive step in that direction.

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He’s right to see it that way. For Trump, Venezuela is not a culmination of his policy in Latin America, but a new geopolitical beginning. While he has never shied away from coercive diplomacy in the region, his pressure campaigns had thus far been primarily economic — bolstering allies like Javier Milei in Argentina, while punishing critics like Colombian President Gustavo Petro with sanctions. Now, though, not only has he deployed the military to advance his interests, he’s unified his agenda under the banner of wholesale American domination of the New World, hinting at military action in Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico, not to mention ramping up threats against Greenland.

Combined with the US troop drawdown that is quietly but meaningfully underway along Nato’s eastern flank, all this looks like a fundamental recalibration of American priorities, and one that is duly being emulated by Russia. Putin has failed to match his words of support for Maduro with concrete actions — Venezuela’s pleas for military aid in the lead-up to the American operation were apparently met with shrugs by the Kremlin. Not that Maduro should have expected anything else. He may have invited Assad to Moscow, but Putin was nonetheless happy to abandon the Syrian regime as rebels conquered Damascus in December 2024. Why, then, would Moscow stick its neck out for a more distant, even less important partner halfway around the world? As in Syria, Putin is likely counting on the fact that regime change in Caracas will be much less transformative than hinted at by Washington, and that Russia will manage to salvage the bulk of its investments in the country’s oil sector without stepping on America’s toes.

It’s hardly lost on Putin that Trump was able to achieve in Venezuela in a matter of hours what his forces have failed to achieve over four years of war in Ukraine, and at the cost of over a million casualties. More than that, America’s victory in Caracas is likely to have sent a clear signal to Russia: what matters is less US power, but where Trump is willing to deploy it. Zelensky reacted to news of Maduro’s capture by hinting that the US should do the same against Putin. But though it’s entirely possible that the US could carry out such a mission, the new rules Trump and Putin are laying out mean that it never will, and nor will it intervene against lower-level Russian proxies in Moscow’s near-abroad either.

Of course, 19th-century-style spheres of influence are not created overnight, and despite Trump’s desire to dictate terms to his neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, a leader cannot steer the course of other nations through shock-and-awe alone. While Trump has clearly set the groundwork for an American counterpart to the Russian world, it’s likely it will fall to a more disciplined and strategically minded successor to finalize this new American empire. Though self-proclaimed isolationists like Tulsi Gabbard may well object to this seeming bastardization of America First, there are plenty others in the MAGA camp who’d be happy to take this mantle up. Despite their origins outside the movement, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are now both loyal Trumpists, and would have no qualms about cementing American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

But in opening the door for such a foundational reorientation of US priorities, Trump has given Putin the signal that a thoroughgoing division of the world is right around the corner. This remains true despite the cyclical back-and-forth over Ukraine — Trump’s on-and-off annoyance with Putin is based not on fundamental differences in outlook, but on the Russian leader’s unwillingness to meet Trump halfway, even though both of them understand, broadly speaking, how the conflict’s end will impact geopolitics. Regardless of who ultimately controls the northwestern part of Donetsk Oblast, Russia will carve out its own version of victory in one way or another, and will go on to force the Colombias and Greenlands of its own neighborhood to its will.

As in Iran a century ago, Russia may establish a partial sphere of influence in Ukraine while wielding less direct, coercive influence over Kyiv. That’s likely to be echoed by increasingly kinetic threats against the eastern Nato states, newly exposed to Russian pressure by the great American reorientation. While Russia has lately saved its most dramatic hybrid attacks for Poland, it’s unlikely to try to occupy the country as it seeks to rebuild its old sphere of influence. Estonia and the Baltic states are a different story — with the US retreating from Europe, and threatening to unravel the entire Nato alliance by considering military action against Greenland, a Russian assault on these countries, especially a hybrid one, is no longer the stuff of fantasy. Recent US intelligence findings have confirmed that Russia has never abandoned its dreams of reclaiming Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after losing them in 1991, and with the resurgence of multipolar spheres of influence where might is right, reestablishing some sort of control over them will naturally be high on Putin’s to-do list after Ukraine.

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Elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia and Serbia will be as ripe as ever for Russian retrenchment. Despite already being friendly toward Moscow, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has long sought to balance Putin against the EU, but with his political future looking shakier than ever, as the country’s youth turn against him, Russia may offer him a much-needed lifeline — albeit at the cost of Serbia’s European ambitions. Bosnia’s Serbs likewise have long relied on Moscow for support, and the twin earthquakes of declining American power in the Old World and Russia’s ascendancy in Eastern Europe may give them the opportunity to finally unite with Serbia proper.

Further afield, countries like Armenia, which have previously drifted away from Moscow toward Washington, could find themselves handed back to Putin on a silver platter. Yerevan has recently been warming up to Russia, after years of diplomatic backsliding, and in a tell-tale sign of things to come, Russia has been investing in disinformation campaigns in the country. With neighboring Georgia already firmly in Russia’s grasp, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shouldn’t be terribly surprised if he found himself Maduro’ed in future. In Central Asia, too, another corner of Russia’s traditional backyard, Moscow may have incentives to rein in nominal allies that have started to split from the herd — though with Chinese influence on the rise, Putin may have to establish the limits of his sphere of influence there not with Trump, but with Xi Jinping.

Outside of this near-abroad, much less is clear. Russia, for instance, has been able to weather the loss of Assad in Syria. That’s largely because the political transition there, under Ahmad al-Sharaa, like the one seemingly on the horizon in Venezuela, proved to be much more pragmatic than initially advertised. For one thing, Russia has managed to hold onto its bases in the country in 2025. Yet the question is: to what end? Russia’s Syria bases at this point serve mainly as logistical resupply points for warships and aircraft headed to Africa, where Russia continues to exert influence through mercenary groups like the Africa Corps, a rebranded version of Wagner. Even so, it remains unclear if Moscow will be able to have its cake and eat it too, as it rebuilds its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia while deepening its influence elsewhere. The answer is probably not, but with a caveat — like Trump, Putin will concentrate his attention much closer to his own borders, all while continuing to project economic and soft power into Africa and the Global South.

At the same time, something else will happen: the emergence of Russia as a wholesale diplomatic sponsor, offering its services as the anti-Western strongman of the world and providing political cover for dictators like it did for Assad until 2024. Already, amid growing protests in Iran, the Ayatollah has made plans to hightail it to Moscow if things get dire, and it’s likely Russia will provide the same service to other state and non-state leaders too. The reason Maduro didn’t get the same treatment wasn’t because Russia was too incompetent to provide it to him — rather, amid the geopolitical realignment underway, the Venezuelan leader was the sacrificial lamb Putin needed to bring his preferred international order into being.

In the days since the Venezuela raid, Eastern European opponents of Russia have sneered at the ousting of Maduro, viewing his downfall as a reflection of Moscow’s weakness. But while Russia may be happy to stay passive in some corners of the world, the country’s neighbors may soon see it toppling Maduros of its own much closer to home — and this time, it will have Trump’s precedent to back it up.

It’s tempting to blame these disruptions on Trump’s famously capricious style — but that would be a mistake. For the real shift of recent times came not from the Commander in Chief himself, but from a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which finally led White House officials to realize that Russia’s position on Ukraine remains as unyielding and uncompromising as ever. First in Alaska, and now ahead of Budapest, Trump has twice learned a truth that Ukrainians have always known — that Putin is not interested in concessions so long as the price of continuing the war is lower than the cost of ending it.

As a result, the Trump administration duly announced sanctions against Russian oil firms Lukoil and Rosneft, the first against Russia during his second term in office. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see this face-saving move as the end of his efforts to force a solution to the conflict that he can put his name on. After all, the energy giants have already been under American sanctions since 2014, and though some key buyers have started to back off from Russian oil and gas, the long-term efficacy of such sanctions largely depends on how aggressively the Trump administration enforces them.

That’s especially true when it comes to taking robust measures against secondary countries. And certainly, Trump’s record of upholding Biden-era sanctions against Russia leaves a lot to be desired. What all this means is that Trump’s latest moves won’t be nearly enough to sway Putin — and unless he is willing to go all-in on support for Ukraine, which is unlikely, the White House will eventually join forces with Putin to end the war on his terms, leaving Ukraine with only the hapless Europeans for solace.

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Despite his on-off embrace of Ukraine, what is easily and repeatedly observable is that, sooner or later, Trump always comes crawling back to Putin’s kennel, and after years of habit, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Though he understands that he has once again been played by his Russian counterpart, Trump also knows that he may be reaching the end of his window to bag his long-coveted peace deal — his ninth, apparently — which would open the door to the trade deals and investments he has discussed with Putin almost since his inauguration.

He may levy sanctions today, in short, but as his bile-filled meeting with Zelensky implies, Trump is ultimately likely to return to his default approach and force the Ukrainians to abandon the last battlefield advantages they have. Jaded by his own peace process, yet still driven by his ego, Trump’s move against Russia is best understood as a façade, a reaction that belies a much deeper, more cynical awareness: that only by forcing Ukraine to capitulate will Trump get what he wants.

What exactly is that? Beyond the prospect of a long-term economic bargain with Moscow, Trump stressed after his meeting with Zelensky that the best-case scenario would be a quick deal to end the fighting. That would allow him to parade a personal triumph, while leaving it to Putin, Zelensky, and the Europeans to figure out the details of a proper lasting peace. “Let it be cut the way it is,” he said aboard Air Force One, referring to Donetsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine that Russia currently occupies. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.” Now that Putin has made it clear this isn’t an option, Trump has found himself trapped — unable to secure a quick ceasefire, but still determined to secure Russian wealth.

In hindsight, Trump’s entire Russia-Ukraine saga has been leading up to this moment. Following the dud that was the Alaska summit in August, Trump tried on an all-in-for-Ukraine approach for size, offering Kyiv perhaps the most valuable asset in his toolkit — American intelligence support for long-range drone strikes against Russian energy sites. Though Trump’s threats to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine garnered much of the headlines, it was these strikes, which reduced Russia’s oil refining capabilities by 20% by September and slashed its oil export revenues, that ultimately played a larger role in pushing Putin to indulge the Budapest summit. For all its bluster, Russia would have likely weathered the limited Tomahawk strikes that Ukraine could have sent its way — but another few months of near-daily drone strikes might have been economically fatal.

Trump’s pro-Ukraine gambit was enough to bring Putin back to the negotiating table, but not enough to get him to actually negotiate. For that reason alone, the Commander-in-Chief is unlikely to “waste” more time on trying to meaningfully change Putin’s calculus in the long run. It may take another cycle of fruitlessly trying to get Putin to negotiate, but Trump will eventually return to what was always in his eyes a much more effective method for securing his goals: strong-arming Ukraine. Zelensky already got a taste of this during his meeting with Trump on Friday, when the US President told him that he should give in to Putin’s demands or get “destroyed”.

While Trump settled on advocating for a ceasefire along the current frontlines, there’s no guarantee he still sees this as a viable position, especially following the collapse of the Budapest summit. If he truly believes he can get Zelensky to surrender the Donbas, which could well be the case with Steve Witkoff constantly in his ear, the President may let his impulses get the better of him and embrace it as the fastest path to victory. Once he does, he will almost certainly cut off the intelligence support that has been so instrumental in Ukraine’s success against Russia’s energy sector, and possibly cancel Ukraine-destined arms shipments to Nato allies, leaving the country fully at the mercy of Putin’s war machine.

With a shaken Europe at his back, Nato chief Mark Rutte jetted off to Washington to meet with Trump this week, and though he downplayed concerns about the US President’s position on Ukraine, it’s clear the trip was an attempt at damage control. Europe, Kyiv, and Nato are now trying their best to band together and leverage the Trump-whispering techniques they’ve honed over the last eight months. Moving forward, they may try to sway Trump with economic and trade incentives of their own. Yet having already handed much of their bargaining power over to America during previous charm offensives, in the form of mineral deals, trade agreements, and security investment kickbacks, they will have few bones left for him to gnaw on.

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Moreover, European Nato leaders are aware that they must pick their battles carefully — and with a new era of gray-zone Russian drone incursions, provocations, and acts of sabotage already upon them, they may well choose to cut their losses and place their bets on American support for Europe rather than continuing to stick their necks out for Ukraine. And with Russia increasingly casting Europe as the spoilers of Trump’s grand plans, including the Budapest summit, they may soon find their influence in an increasingly pro-Russian White House dropping precipitously.

What of the future? The prospect of bilateral trade with Russia in rare earths and oil would certainly make Trump happy. But the price of such a deal would involve more than dollars: what Putin wants most from America is not just a free hand to impose his will on Ukraine, but an opportunity to halt and even roll back Nato’s expansion in Eastern Europe, refashion Russia’s old neo-imperial sphere of influence, and reach a new compact with the US on what our looming multipolar world might look like.

Whether Trump goes along with this plan remains to be seen, but imposing a dubious peace now opens the door for a whole range of geopolitical scenarios that at present seem unthinkable. As for Europe, which has spent an enormous amount of energy flattering Trump to get him onside, the President’s eventual turn to the Kremlin will force them into their own generational reckoning. And while they may initially redouble their efforts to support Ukraine, and win Trump back once more, it’s likely that, caught between Russia and the US, Europe may just cast Ukraine aside, as they scramble to find a place in this new, Machiavellian world order.

In the meantime, Zelensky is hoping that Trump’s ego won’t let him fall back into Putin’s lap. Ukraine has just conducted several successful strikes against a Russian gas processing plant, likely with American support, and he and the Europeans are doing their best to project calm, buoyed by the sanctions announcement. But as this chaotic week draws to a close, he and the Europeans will be dreading what comes next. Trumpology is an art, not a science, and a move in one direction is hardly ever a sure-fire bet for what comes next. Though the President may feel his self-worth bruised by Putin today, it is only a matter of time before his deeper self-interest wins out once more. Despite the wishful thinking of Europe and Ukraine’s supporters, The Art of the Deal has no chapter on righteous empathy.

Now in his 30s, Rasmus is a high-functioning opioid addict. He has a steady income, dresses well, and speaks with authority. There is little about him that suggests he has been using hard drugs for more than half his life. But even as a preteen, Rasmus was never like the other kids his age. Fascinated by the physiological effects and molecular structures of various psychoactive compounds, he soon started experimenting with everything from marijuana to MDMA and amphetamines. By age 16, his exploration had driven him to severe anxiety and depression that left him feeling like a shell of his former self.

To cope, he turned to opioids — first to painkillers like tramadol, but eventually to fentanyl. “Before it’s like you’re naked, you’re in the middle of snow, you’re freezing,” Rasmus tells me in a commercial parking lot a stone’s throw from the deep blue waters of the Baltic Sea, recounting his first experience with the drug when he was around 19. “Then some mysterious stranger appears from the woods and invites you with him, and in about 50 meters a bright wooden cottage appears, you go inside, and he offers you a warm cup of tea. I felt like a human again.”

But those days are now little more than a distant memory. Fentanyl and its analogs have been largely absent from the Estonian market for years, after the country’s police cracked down on the Russia-connected organized criminal networks distributing them in 2017. Since then, the drug has been replaced by something even more sinister. In 2019, traces of a new class of synthetic opioids started showing up in Estonia’s drug supply. These can be tens of times more potent than fentanyl — and much more deadly. But it wasn’t until 2022 that these new designer drugs, called nitazenes, began to truly wreak havoc on Estonian society.

“Fentanyl is bad but nowhere near ’zenes in how addictive it is and how hard it grabs your opioid receptors,” Rasmus tells me, his eyes concealed behind dark glasses despite the shade. “It’s basically the crack of opioids.”

Nitazenes have wreaked havoc elsewhere. Deaths have been reported across the US, the EU, and the UK. In Britain alone, the drugs have been linked to the deaths of over 400 people between June 2023 and January this year, even as thousands more opioid deaths may have been been missed from official figures. Already, nitazenes are being hailed as the harbingers of the next European opioid crisis. In the midst of this gathering storm, Estonia stands out as its unexpected epicenter. Since they arrived on Europe’s doorstep, 96% of nitazene seizures have taken place in the Baltic states, and between 2022 and 2024, Estonia likely had the highest nitazene use rate on the continent. And while the rest of Europe was only just starting to take nitazenes seriously, by 2023, the drugs had already been implicated in 56 drug deaths in Estonia, comprising nearly half of all overdose deaths in the country, pushing it into the EU’s top spot for drug-induced mortalities per million people.

Estonia’s experience offers many lessons for the rest of Europe. But the story of nitazenes and opioids more broadly in Estonia is about far more than just law enforcement crackdowns, and underscores that the epidemic is ultimately not a problem created by the mere existence of a steady drug supply, but rather one borne out of a persistent socially-driven demand for the drugs. Woven into Estonia’s decades-long struggle with opioids, and hidden behind its reputation as a technologically advanced, highly developed Baltic economy, lies a history of unequal post-Soviet economic growth, the impact of social marginalization, and the difficulties that state authorities and harm reduction workers alike have faced in combating a crisis that often dwarfs the resources their small country has at its disposal. Most worryingly, though, Estonia illustrates how once a robust base of addicts establishes itself within a society, not even rapid economic growth can uproot it — and that even if nitazenes can be eliminated, something worse will emerge soon enough to replace them.

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“Somehow despite the fact that we had 17 years of experience with fentanyls, we still struggled with nitazenes,” says Katri Abel-Ollo, a researcher at the Estonian National Institute for Health Development who studies nitazene use patterns and overdose deaths. “So I can imagine that countries that don’t have experience with fentanyls, it could be quite shocking to them if nitazenes appear out of the blue.”

In 2002, Estonia became one of the first European countries to face a fentanyl crisis, after heroin smuggling routes were disrupted following the American invasion of Afghanistan. To compensate, local dealers, in cahoots with Russian gangsters, sourced fentanyls from nearby St Petersburg, exploiting connections between the Estonian criminal underground and the country’s former imperial rulers that had endured after the fall of the USSR. Soon enough, Tallinn became the “fentanyl capital” of Europe, leading to a 15-year battle that finally ended when Estonian police put the main players driving the drug trade behind bars, effectively shutting off the country’s fentanyl spigot.

“For five years we had a very good spell for a while,” Rait Pikaro, the head of the crime bureau of the Estonian Police North Prefecture tells me. “We were a bit naïve thinking that for five years… the market was, so to say, dead, but in that sense we were mistaken.”

Though fentanyl itself became much harder to find, Rasmus explains, fentanyl analogs continued to float around in the Estonian drug world, while harm reduction specialists I speak to suggest that users and dealers also turned to home-brewed opioid varieties to get by. When nitazenes emerged to fill the void, they arrived not from Russia, but from China, entering Estonia through Latvia. And in a sign of the changing drug landscape, this time there was no centralized dealer network, forcing police to play a game of cat-and-mouse with users and dealers across a fragmented market, both in Tallinn and across the eastern Estonian hinterland where opioids are most prevalent.

A far cry from fentanyl they may be, but nitazenes are ruthlessly effective, providing a powerful remedy for the withdrawal symptoms that are many addicts’ worst fear. “Potency does not equate to euphoria,” Rasmus tells me, recounting how nitazenes don’t even give him 1% of the same high he once got from fentanyl, despite how strong they can be. “Metonitazene [one of the earlier nitazenes to hit the Estonian market] for example was really good and pleasurable,” he says, “but some are just like you’re shooting up water.”

According to Abel-Ollo, nitazenes have a sharper come-up, but often a shorter duration — something that can be frustrating for users like Rasmus. “You inject it, it lasts maybe a minute, some last a few seconds, some last an hour, at best,” he says, describing some of the more recent nitazenes on the market. That was clear enough just looking at him: he was visibly more anxious during the latter part of our conversation as he felt his withdrawal symptoms set in, glancing around, breathing more shallowly, and becoming less focused in his answers.

To make matters worse for addicts, nitazenes are often so potent that they don’t respond like other opioids to naloxone, a medication that counteracts an opioid overdose, requiring several doses to work — something that contributes greatly to nitazenes’ lethality. For these and other reasons, Artur Kamnerov, a former investigator who heads the drug and organized crime bureau of the North Prefecture police department, predicts that if nitazenes become as prevalent elsewhere as they have in Estonia, countries can expect horrifyingly similar consequences. “If nitazene starts taking over the market,” he says with a resigned look in his eye and a heaviness in his voice, “there’s no stopping the overdose death rates.”

To explain what he means, on an unseasonably dreary and rainy summer morning, Kamnerov takes out his phone and opens up a Russian-language group on Telegram. Boasting 4,000 members, users can order Xanax, tramadol, and other painkillers. Another group has user-friendly menus where people could buy MDMA or amphetamines using cryptocurrencies. “This is the reason why no one really needs to go to the dark web anymore,” Kamnerov says. “It’s a hassle.”

Such ease of access is hardly limited to Estonia, of course. Narcotics, including nitazene class opioids, are sold this way to users and dealers alike in the UK and beyond. But what this means is that, at least in Estonia, easily accessible nitazenes shipped directly from overseas have bifurcated the opioid user base in the country, with two distinct cultures emerging. The older, more conservative community continues to rely on the more traditional street-based distribution networks, where a more hardcore culture of injection composed mainly of Russian-speakers reigns supreme. For their part, younger users source their drugs from online vendors and are predisposed to the less intimidating, more accessible pill forms of the drug.

For the moment, it is the former, Russian-speaking group that still dominates Estonia’s opioid landscape, and which has long formed the backbone of the country’s sky-high demand for these drugs. This community has its roots in the country’s decades-long occupation by the USSR, when Russian immigrants to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic moved to Tallinn, Narva, and towns in Estonia’s northeast. These new settlers initially came to work in reconstruction after the Second World War, but additional waves later arrived when new housing projects like the Lasnamäe district were erected by Soviet authorities in Tallinn in the Seventies and Eighties. Russians were often given preferential treatment in housing allocation, crowding Estonians out of these much-coveted new apartments: once seen as beacons of Estonia’s bright socialist future.

Today, Russian speakers make up about 21% of Estonia’s population, but in stark contrast to their place at the top of the social hierarchy during the Soviet years, they emerged from the USSR’s collapse as an economically disadvantaged underclass. Great strides have been made to integrate Russian speakers into mainstream Estonian society, and Russian speakers now have access to the same social benefits as ethnic Estonians — but the baggage of years of socioeconomic hardship weighs the community down, and in many respects, their marginalization persists. Russian speakers continue to make up 60% of prison inmates in the country, as well as nearly two thirds of homeless people in Tallinn. And with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has pummelled Russian speakers in Estonia with political disinformation: resonating with many, but further widening the gap with the Estonian majority.

That’s clear enough in Lasnamäe today. A world away from that long-dead communist ideal — let alone the charming and cosmopolitan center of Tallinn — these suburbs are filled with monotone housing blocks, stretching out toward the horizon. The wide, sparse, avenues that separate them from each other give the area a liminal feel, a place that is neither in the past nor fully in the present. Their walls are adorned with Cyrillic graffiti: while many parts of Estonia have bilingual Estonian and Russian signs, here Russian predominates.

Fundamentally, Lasnamäe’s plight can be understood as a function of the end of communism. The collapse of the Soviet system brought with it major economic shocks, leading to a sharp decrease in Estonia’s GDP that affected everyone. In 1994, the country’s life expectancy dipped below that of Ukraine and Moldova.

By the following year, however, the economy started growing again, albeit unevenly, leaving many Russian speakers, most of whom voted against Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, stuck in the post-collapse era, reeling from their loss of status — not forever, but long enough for patterns of social stratification and self-sabotaging nihilism to burrow deep.

“That time, in the Nineties, was a time of gangsterism, very anxious times,” says Nikolai, a former addict and current harm reduction worker at MTÜ Convictus, an NGO working with drug users. Arms covered in tattoos and with a tired look in his eyes, he asks me not to use his last name: he has a long history with drugs and has spent time in prison. “When these drugs appeared, it was a coping strategy,” Nikolai explains. “It was better than drinking alcohol, and many Russian-speaking people followed this and started to use drugs. It was fashionable.”

Back in the fentanyl days, places like Lasnamäe, and Estonia’s Russian-speaking society in general, held the keys to the country’s opioid market. Rasmus, who is ethnically Estonian, learned Russian explicitly to purchase opioids from local dealers. “In the poorer regions of Tallinn, like Lasnamäe, Kopli, and so on, you could say that in every [housing project] there was a dealer,” he explains, adding that fentanyl was easy to get, but only if you spoke Russian.

Soon enough, even though he once told himself he would never shoot up, Rasmus was injected by a dealer not long after he got hooked on the drug. His first such experience was overwhelming, and he overdosed as soon as the fentanyl entered his body — but in doing so, he finalized his initiation into the hardcore, Russian-led Estonian drug culture that has driven the country’s opioid epidemic for so long.

Indeed, at MTÜ Convictus’s base in downtown Tallinn, while most of the clientele are still Russian speakers, more and more ethnic Estonians are showing up as well, pointing to the expanding reach of the crisis’s long tentacles. Regardless of linguistic or ethnic background, Convictus provides users with a place to exchange used needles for clean ones, get food, obtain naloxone, meet with social workers, or even just drink some warm tea. Yulia Rõbalko, another harm reduction worker at the center, exchanges biscuits for used needles.

Harm reduction, she says, has two sides: one for the person, and one for the rest of society. “It works like a cycle,” Yulia Rõbalko. “You help him, he doesn’t spread disease with used needles, and so on. Normal people don’t see that.”

This blindness is part of the reason why harm reduction NGOs like MTÜ Convictus, which receive public funds from the Estonian state, are increasingly at risk of budget cuts, as peer-led services are being outsourced to organizations that don’t have as strong a connection to the community. If you ask Mart Kalvet, an activist with LUNEST, a drug policy group, building robust, grassroots support networks for drug users is only the first step in creating a long-term solution to the cycle of alienation, addiction, and suffering that has perpetuated the opioid crisis in Estonia for over a quarter century.

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To secure real change within a context where a user base has already become entrenched, the state must implement a regulated, safe supply of drugs all while giving users access to the resources they need to live their lives as healthily as possible. That means not only providing sustainably funded rehab services, but also getting to the root of the problem and investing in places like Lasnamäe as real, evolving parts of country, rather than mere relics of its Soviet past. It also means treating the opioid epidemic like the public health problem it surely is, rather than an exclusively criminal one. “The harder you come down on the people who use drugs and sell drugs, the more problematic drugs appear on the street,” Kalvet says. “It’s an iron law.”

Already, Kalvet’s prophecy appears to be coming true. According to Abel-Ollo, there have been no new drug death cases in the country since May, indicating to her that there may be fewer nitazenes on the market. But if you ask Rasmus, who keeps a close eye on reports about drug arrests and court cases, even newer synthetic opioids, called brorphines, are already coming from China to replace them. Estonia’s game of whack-a-mole with opioids, it seems, will continue.

“This is where the somewhat dark-natured Scandinavian culture collides with the dark-natured, but in another way, Eastern Europe and Slavic culture,” Kalvet suggests, musing about the reasons for Estonia’s long dance with opioids. “We are affected by both, and not in a good way. It may be a cultural yearning for some warmth that our history has not provided us with.” From roaming Swedish armies in the 17th century, to Nazi and Soviet occupation in the 20th century, it’s easy to see what he means.

Yet whatever impact Estonia’s cultural proclivities may have on its drug appetite, the implications of its battle with nitazenes for larger and even more socially divided countries across the West are enormous. As markets in the UK, the US, Europe, and beyond continue to experiment with nitazenes as a more lucrative replacement for fentanyl and heroin, all signs suggest that long-time users will embrace these new drugs, creating a festering social wound that will persist so long as it has lives left to destroy. More ominously still, as Estonia’s case vividly illustrates, alienated segments of society — of which the West has plenty — can act as a fertile crucible for an opioid epidemic to not only take hold, but also spread. And in a world where thoughtful, nuanced drug policy reform is hardly on any government’s radar, the outlook is truly bleak.

After years of living at the mercy of his addiction, Rasmus tried to get help. On two occasions, he checked into the only long-term detox clinic in Tallinn that uses substitute therapy. But now, government funding cuts have quadrupled the cost of treatment there, leaving users like him with nowhere to turn. When I asked him how he sees his future in a follow-up conversation on Signal, his response was stark: “Most likely dead.”

A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.

Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.

While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signaling for the better part of a year.

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“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-skeptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.

Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defense has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defense systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.

That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defense architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.

Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.

The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realize: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.

With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.

Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbors to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.

Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.

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The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defense is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.

Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-skeptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.

Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defense or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbors will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarization, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbors.

And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.

Long the dominant force in parliament, successive national governments, and on the streets, Hezbollah is now adrift, its organization shattered, its surviving leaders fearful of the next Israeli airstrike. Lebanon’s civilian leaders, for their part, are keen to seize the moment, defanging the militants while finally building a truly viable Lebanese state. But if Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun are ready to make their move after years of political deadlock, the schedule is hardly in Lebanon’s best interest — while any miscalculation could soon bring chaos.

As I wrote last month, Hezbollah understands that it’s no longer the formidable, hegemonic force it once was. In this new Lebanon, its options are few and far between. To that end, the group has itself considered shrinking its once-renowned arsenal in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the border regions they continue to occupy in southern Lebanon. But in a sign of just how earth-shattering the latest cabinet resolution was, Hezbollah and its allies abandoned the meeting in question, stating it would “deal with it as if it does not exist.”

As things stand, a renewed civil war in Lebanon remains unlikely, at least for the time being. Despite its recent battering, Hezbollah is still part of the Lebanese government and retains a great deal of bargaining power within the state. It is therefore more likely that, for the moment, the current dispute will remain confined to behind-the-scenes dealings. But if the US continues to push the Lebanese cabinet to go on the offensive — without respecting the delicate political dynamics at play in the country — that may well change.

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Of course, it is now quite obvious that the Trump administration’s agenda in Lebanon is about much more than just Hezbollah’s weapons: it’s about a fundamental realignment that includes Iran, Syria, Gaza, and more, and which will serve to put the finishing touches on the new Middle East envisioned by Benjamin Netanyahu. Tom Barrack, the US envoy who had been facilitating the Trump administration’s contacts with Beirut over the last few months, made this abundantly clear in comments in mid-July. “If Lebanon doesn’t hurry up and get in line,” he warned, “everyone around them will.”

In a sense, of course, that’s already happening — the region’s epochal transformation holds great promise for people from Damascus to Tehran. But as the recent massacres in Syria vividly prove, this transition can only succeed with forethought and care, and that any mistake can quickly spiral. Consider, for instance, that Hezbollah supporters lately took to the streets across Lebanon, both a show of force and warning of what would happen if the army took action. Even more worryingly, meanwhile, groups of protestors have gathered in front of a church in Beirut’s southern suburbs. That openly sectarian tinge is not necessarily new, but it still raises eyebrows, as does the fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces were deployed to confront pro-Hezbollah demonstrators in the Beqaa Valley town of Brital.

In the event, the Brital confrontation fizzled out. Tires were burned and car horns honked, but the protesters had dispersed by the following day. For its part, a senior Hezbollah official said the group would use only peaceful methods to deal with the cabinet decision, claiming it would “not be dragged into internal strife with the army or any Lebanese side.”

That all makes sense. Hezbollah’s position today is a world away from when it last engaged in armed clashes — violence sparked by the port blast investigation — let alone when it sparked a 2008 mini-civil war after the government tried to curb its communications network. Today, Hezbollah is a shadow of the behemoth it once was. Since the start of last year’s war with Israel, it has lost five of its most important leaders, notably its iconic Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. More than that, it has suffered over 10,000 total casualties and has seen perhaps half its arsenal destroyed. As a result, working within the state is the only realistic option Hezbollah has left. Even so, that doesn’t mean it would unilaterally lay down its arms without a fight, or at least without first securing some sort of politically advantageous deal.

The problem with the government’s gung-ho approach is that the Trump administration isn’t interested in the kind of dealmaking this situation requires. If the last six months have taught the world anything about the President’s approach to international diplomacy, it’s that he cares first and foremost about optics, securing wins for America, and making sure he is viewed as a kingmaker by allies and foes alike. And though Trump has recently had his fair share of spats with Netanyahu, his administration has been nonchalant about Israel’s latest plan to (temporarily) take control of the entire Gaza Strip, making it clear that it wants the entire Middle East to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

In this context, then, American policy toward Lebanon is not about the well-being of the Lebanese people or their political system — just as in need of reform as Hezbollah — but about stamping the new Middle East with Trump’s personal trademark. The same can be seen in neighboring Syria, where less than a year after Islamist rebels overthrew the Assad dictatorship, the White House has mostly been concerned with the country’s relationship with Israel, even as Syria itself continues to face political and sectarian upheaval.

Despite removing sanctions on Damascus, the White House has placed 41% tariffs on Syria, the highest in the world, for no apparent reason — other than to blackmail the new government into making peace with the Jewish State. That’s despite the fact that Israel has occupied portions of southern Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, something also true of southern Lebanon, and that it has become deeply embroiled in the Syrian government’s conflict with the Druze minority, among other things striking government targets around Damascus. While Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has signaled his willingness to join the Abraham Accords in exchange for carrots from the West, Trump’s unsubtle arm-twisting ignores the other, much more existential battles Syria is currently facing, including the role of non-Sunni Arab minorities.

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Like in Lebanon, therefore, the US could well have a constructive role to play in Syria, but as long as it remains focused solely on advancing its own, and Israel’s, narrow objectives in both cases, it might as well kiss that role goodbye. These days, and as the recent church protest implies, sectarian tensions lurk down every street in Lebanon. Though the Lebanese themselves often downplay such divisions in everyday life, the threat of communitarian strife remains a tool of politics, especially in moments of instability. Certainly, Hezbollah has previously invoked the possibility of sectarian warfare as a cudgel to protect its powerbase during protests. Now, facing another existential crisis, it’s happy to play the sectarian card once more, knowing that its war-ravaged Shi’a support base, feeling disenfranchised and marginalized, may well be desperate enough to erupt into populist anger — especially if it fears being locked out of the political process altogether.

In other words, then, pushing too hard on Hezbollah without a requisite plan to support its base may yet again turn the country’s religious communities against each other. In Syria, for its part, the post-war sectarian balance remains incredibly delicate, and could yet be derailed altogether.

There is no question that Hezbollah’s weapons are a detriment to Lebanon’s stability and the health of its civil state. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the US is both speaking loudly and carrying a big stick, leaving no room for the Beirut government to find a genuine path toward disarmament. If Trump really was serious about helping the embattled Lebanese state, he might allow them to disarm Hezbollah in a way that is suitable to Lebanon’s incredibly sensitive political realities.

This could take a variety of forms, including a gradual, step-by-step reduction of Hezbollah’s arsenal that would be coupled with reciprocal withdrawals by Israel. Or else, the group might agree to de facto disarmament without giving up all its weapons, allowing it to maintain its mantle of defiance in a more ceremonial fashion. Details aside, though, the central facet of any workable solution must be giving the Lebanese government, as beleaguered as it is, the chance to define the conversation.

As it is, the great powers are once again using Lebanon as a pawn in their regional chess games, believing they’re better placed to handle the country’s problems than its own people. That’s frustrating, not least given the US is actually quite close to getting things right. All it needs to do is step back and let the Lebanese work out the details. Sadly for the Middle East, however, patience is not a word that often appears in Donald Trump’s vocabulary.

Combating human trafficking is all the rage in Europe these days, and for good reason — but while Germany, along with the rest of the EU, might be eager to cooperate with external neighbors such as Britain on the issue, internally, the challenge of irregular migration has produced bitter division, a resurgence of hard borders, and localized frontier policies that together threaten the unity of the Schengen Area itself.

Earlier this month, Poland became the latest Schengen state to reintroduce border controls along its frontiers, both in the west with Germany and in the northeast with Lithuania. The reason? Partly to combat people smuggling, but also the involuntary return of individuals across internal EU borders — by member states themselves. Unimaginable in the End of History days when Schengen was first devised, Poland is far from alone in subverting the zone. The Germans themselves, after all, are increasingly conducting their own border checks, with Poland and Czechia, along the way rejecting thousands of migrants trying to enter the country. In one especially surreal incident, vividly underscoring the contrast between how Berlin treats countries like the UK and its eastern neighbors, German police effectively abandoned an Afghan man in Polish territory, under cover of darkness, making their escape before Polish authorities could arrive.

The revival of European borders is nothing new. Several countries have restarted controls since the 2015 migration crisis, and then during the pandemic. What is new, however, is a growing sense that Schengen was always built on a false premise: that the countries of the zone share a common approach to territorial sovereignty, and can therefore function like a uniform state. This has never been true of course, but only in the last few years has it become so clear. And with its cross-border antics into Poland, Germany has demonstrated that even the EU’s prime mover no longer approaches Schengen in the spirit it was intended, and that what happens just beyond its own borders is no longer its concern. It all speaks, with shocking vividness, to how migration continues to haunt Europe, even if ultimate blame lies less with migrants themselves than with the continent’s bickering, bloviating leaders.

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Border security in a structure like Schengen only works if everyone is on the same page — and over the past decades, Europeans have made it abundantly clear that they are not. For years, this core paradox at the heart of how the system works has been written into the so-called Dublin Regulation, the system governing asylum applications in the EU. Under this regime, asylum claims may only be adjudicated by the country in which an asylum seeker is first fingerprinted by authorities, usually the first EU or Schengen country they step foot in. 

But because asylum seekers by definition arrive on the external borders of Schengen, this naturally puts enormous pressure on so-called “frontline” migration states, which by default are burdened with handling all the asylum cases for the entire bloc. For years, this piled pressure on Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. But, starting in 2021, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia found themselves in similar straits, with the start of the migration crisis engineered by Lukashenko’s Belarus.

On the surface, Belarus’s antics were an attempt to weaponize migration, putting pressure on the external borders of the EU. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Minsk’s strategy strained the internal structure of Schengen too. Just as during the 2015 migrant crisis, when Syrian refugees made use of Schengen’s open borders to reach Germany and its generous immigration system, few migrants and refugees crossing into the EU from Belarus wished to stay in Poland — once again making their way to the social democracies of northwest Europe. For them, the fiction of Schengen as a single unified political entity is obvious, even from within its theoretically borderless expanse. The fact remains that certain countries are more attractive as destinations not just for economic reasons, but for policy reasons too.

Here, the Dublin system made it necessary for states to either refuse entry to migrants wishing to cross internal Schengen boundaries, or deport them back to their first country of entry — precisely setting the stage for the crisis underway today. Though Germany’s forcible transfer of that Afghan migrant made news in Poland, eliciting sharp words from officials in Warsaw, many similar returns were undertaken under the auspices of Dublin and thus were entirely legal.

Ultimately, though, Germany came to the same conclusion as Poland did when it came to dealing with asylum applicants on its own soil: if migrants are stopped from even entering its territory, then the whole asylum farrago can neatly be avoided. Poland took this approach to its logical conclusion when it suspended the right to asylum altogether in late 2024, swiftly copied by other EU states. And after Warsaw’s move was approved as legal by the bloc’s officials in April of this year, Germany’s new government decided to formally enshrine its practice of turning migrants back at the Polish border — something that, in an ironic twist, likely led to the very rise in migrant returns that convinced Poland to enact its own border checks.

If, however, Dublin isn’t working, the EU’s solution looks doomed too, albeit for basically the opposite reason. Passed in April 2024, the EU Migration Pact tries to bring order to the continent’s migratory Wild West. It implements a whole host of provisions, from streamlined asylum processing to expedited deportation procedures, but its most controversial element is the burden-sharing mechanism: requiring all EU member states to host migrants entering the bloc, or else to make financial contributions towards them elsewhere.

This kind of solidarity is all well and good in theory. Yet in the way it mandates a unified set of migration rules and procedures across the EU, while also asking states to take on responsibilities not directly on behalf of their own citizens, the Pact butts up against the precious autonomy that so many EU states have sought to carve out in this, the current age of independence-minded nationalism. While Dublin erred in making migration an exclusively local issue, subject to the whims of national governments, the Migration Pact errs in dramatically misreading the room.

Yet having rejected the Migration Pact, countries such as Poland and Hungary now believe they can engage in a spot of cakeism — preserving their sovereignty, and avoiding hosting migrants from other parts of the EU, while also continuing to bask in the warming sun of Schengen. In a sense, this approach is the essence of the new European Right’s vision of a Europe of sovereign states, where the EU exists as a weaker, purely economic union, while ties between individual members are constantly negotiated and renegotiated according to national interests.

But while the temporary border controls erected by countries across the EU may today seem like a compelling solution for filtering out illegal migration — while letting trade, tourists, and intra-EU labor flow with minimal hassle — such protocols would finally squeeze the ease of movement that has allowed Schengen to revolutionize European life since the end of the Cold War. Over time, it would kill the common visa policy too, and amid the constantly shifting geopolitical relationships of such a Europe, instability would inevitably soar, making border policy ever more fraught and complex.

Poland and Germany’s ongoing spat has already strained their relationship, while Austria, Germany, and Italy have pursued unilateral migration policies that have hurt their relations not just with Brussels — but also with each other. Despite not being a member of the EU, Turkey’s years-long confrontation with Greece over migration, which has at times spilled over into dangerous geopolitical posturing, presents an extreme case study in what may await Europe if states continue to dig in.

Where does all this leave Europeans? As bleak as it may seem, the answer is that there is no good way of bolstering the sovereign liberty of EU states on migration matters without also undermining the foundations of the Schengen Area itself. Conversely, crafting a continent-wide migration policy that actually works is impossible so long as Schengen members behave like fully independent states. Seeing as there is likely to be little appetite for a federal Europe anytime soon, the current border regimes are a shadow of the Europe that lies ahead — a divided, multi-polar continent, where realpolitik rules and where everyone is out for themselves.

While this may not seem like such a bad outcome for European conservatives tired of Brussels overreach, the truth is that countries like Poland and Greece would still need to deal with the same migration problems they face today. Now, though, they’d be going it alone, without recourse to any of the international laws or bodies that have given them support in their current struggles, however limited that may have been in practice.

Socio-cultural concerns about foreigners would also be moot here. With only one minor post-pandemic uptick, in 2021, the continent’s birth rates have continued to fall every year since 2016. With little hope that things will change course anytime soon, legal workers will regardless have to fill gaps in the labor force of this newly splintered Europe, changing the face of the continent with or without illegal migrants. Just this month, Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy announced it would issue 500,000 visas for workers from outside the EU; for years, Poland has led the EU in issuing residence permits for non-EU immigrants.

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Policies like these show that, on some level at least, European politicians understand that the current status quo of border checks and chest-thumping, absent any new ideas, is fundamentally untenable for the continent’s long-term future. And yet, trapped by a continent-wide attitude that favors retreat into a familiar yet narrow view of national interest, they have abdicated any sort of thinking about what European identity, and its place in the world, will look like in this new historical age. However naive the Europe of the Nineties may have been, it was nevertheless ambitious, imaginative, and boundary-pushing in its way. Today, that ambition, to imagine something better, has been replaced by a politics of fear, not just of migrants, but of what might come after the end of post-historical Europe.

While Euroscepticism is at an all-time high, very few actors on the continent actually want to leave the EU — they just want to rebuild it in their own image. The central question that Europeans need to ask themselves, then, is how committed they actually are to the European project, assuming they cannot cooperate enough to solve a problem like migration. Are European national identities really so fragile that they can’t survive collective action? Are they really willing to sacrifice something as groundbreaking as Schengen for short-term gains?

The unfortunate answer European leaders seem to have given is “yes”. Though some Schengen states may sooner or later be forced to band together, clarifying their open-border relationships in the face of threats like Russia, the truth is that there is little evidence that EU states will mature enough to solve their fundamental border problems.

For the moment, of course, Schengen isn’t dead — nor should it necessarily be dismantled merely because national leaders seem unwilling to coordinate. The benefits it offers Europeans continues to dramatically outweigh the costs. But keep stumbling and it might all count for nothing, as Schengen falls and Europe’s walls only continue to rise.

Over dozens of strikes against Iranian military infrastructure and nuclear facilities, Israel has truly done the unthinkable, decapitating swathes of Iran’s military and strategic leadership, and even establishing superiority in the smog-laden skies above Tehran. The regime, clearly, has been shaken to its core. But if Israel may ultimately overreach, with the ferocity of its campaign already pushing secular Iranians towards the patriotic fold, it’s also clear that Tehran’s humbling will remake the Middle East — which it has tried to mold in its own image for the better part of four decades.

Since the Eighties, Iran’s greatest assets have been oil exports, the Revolutionary Guards — and its network of proxies across the Middle East, threatening Israel and the Sunni Gulf states, all while creating a buffer between Tehran and its enemies. But the positions of these proxies carried with them the seeds of their own demise. Having entrenched themselves in the political landscapes of the Arab world, their allegiance to Iran often put them in conflict with the national priorities of the societies they’d cannibalized. That, in turn, rendered their positions deeply fragile.

One good example is Hezbollah, which, despite being inextricably linked to Iran’s mullahs, must increasingly cope with the vagaries of Lebanon’s complex sectarian politics. After dragging the country into war with Israel last year, the Shi’a militants duly earned the ire of Lebanese Sunnis and Christians alike. Since January, meanwhile, Lebanon has named a new president and prime minister, both of whom are seen as Hezbollah opponents. Worse still, in the wake of Israel’s assault, the Lebanese state has all but dismantled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon — reportedly using Israeli intelligence passed on via the US.

There are broader strategic problems for Iran too. Its foreign proxies can be compared to nuclear weapons: far more useful as theoretical deterrents, waiting ominously in the wings, than as actual tools of war. Indeed, after Israel called Iran’s bluff in September last year, unleashing the full weight of the IDF on Lebanon, Hezbollah duly crumbled — as did Iran’s ability to frighten its foes. In neighboring Syria, and without Hezbollah to act as an enforcer, the Assad regime collapsed to the rebels too. In hindsight, then, it should have seemed inevitable that the road from October 7 should have ended in Tehran. Hamas didn’t inform Iran of its plans in advance, but as a crucial pillar of its proxy network, Netanyahu and his ministers would always use the massacre to strike at the regime.

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What happens next in Iran itself is hard to guess: perhaps an internal power struggle, maybe a revived liberal opposition. What’s clear, anyway, is that just as fracturing Tehran’s proxy network led to Israel’s attack last week, the degradation of its military capabilities and top brass has changed everything for the country’s regional allies.

Once again, consider the example of Lebanon. For years, Hezbollah boasted that it would shortly destroy the “Zionist entity”. These days, though, the group is rather more concerned with its own survival. In Iraq, meanwhile, the Kata’ib Hezbollah has done nothing other than call Israel’s strikes “deeply regrettable.” So far only the Houthis, Iran’s most committed attack dogs, have directly engaged Israel. But as they have in the past, they too may soon choose to cut their losses and reckon with the new political reality.

And no wonder. Israel’s war with Iran will reduce what was once a river of weapons and money to a trickle — having once supplied a total of around $300 million overall to the Houthis, and up to $1 billion per year to Hezbollah, Iran’s capacity for generosity has been decimated, especially after the mounting losses at home.

All this will expose Iran’s former proxies to challengers in their respective national arenas. What’s happening in Lebanon is now repeating in Gaza, with the battered remnants of Hamas threatened by popular protests and a parade of Israeli-backed thugs. At the same time, the decline of Iran will force the country’s erstwhile proxies to redefine their mission, facilitating a wholesale reorientation in political Shi’ism across the region.

As Shi’a groups across the region struggle to find a new political lodestar over the years ahead, the influence of these figures will only grow. No less important, Shi’a militant groups from Lebanon to Iraq appear to be doing something that few such groups have done before — embracing a more Arabized vision of Shi’a political activity, one bound by their respective national borders. Though the desire to wage a collective regional battle remains, groups like Hezbollah and Kata’ib Hezbollah seem to have realized that, having become tied to state institutions all around them, they too aren’t immune to nationalist impulses.

What is clear, anyway, is that the Middle East of tomorrow will be one where Iran will be much less influential. And, of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum. For if the mullahs cower in the face of Netanyahu’s bombs, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, and the UAE will be more than happy to take up the slack. Turkey, too, is in a strong position: with a new set of proxies in Syria, its influence in Damascus gives it a privileged seat at the geopolitical table. What that means in practice is yet more challenges for the former “Axis of Resistance”: with the power of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States on the rise in Lebanon, formerly marginal Sunni politicians are making a comeback. Even more dramatically, the new Syrian government is both hunting the remnants of Assad’s loyalist base, and taking a realpolitik approach towards even Israel.

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Of course, the Shi’a sphere will hardly be irrelevant here, playing the new kingmakers against each other. The impact of a more nationalized, local vision of political Shi’ism could alter the calculus of Sunni powers, making regional dynamics much more multipolar. But disunited and disenchanted, Arab Shi’a will have little in the way of a true political home, regardless of what happens in the Islamic Republic itself. To be sure, the urge to find a new Khomeini for the 21st century will be strong. But having learned the price of relying on a single, corrupt power structure for political backing, the urge for genuine political emancipation may prove equally powerful.

What form this will take remains to be seen — from pro-democracy protests to Arab nationalism, the options for the next generation of Shi’a are varied, especially given the growing divide between the Shi’a elite, previously enriched by Iran, and the destitute Arab masses. Having once been at the top of the social hierarchy across the region, certainly, their arrogance has won them few allies among local populations. As one Lebanese Shi’a recently told a Palestinian: “We are going to take Jerusalem for you. You are not up for it.”

But despite the idealism of many young people across the Middle East, this remains a region where politics is seen as a zero-sum game. That means losses for Iran won’t be seen not opportunities for peace, but rather as an existential threat for Shi’a everywhere. Emergent leaders who do seek the mantle of Shi’ism won’t do so to emancipate Shi’a of all backgrounds from political exploitation, but to “save” them from domination by Sunnis, Israelis, and Americans, thus keeping the cycle of sectarian competition alive and kicking. Even al-Sistani, hardly a friend of Iran, backs a political vision centered on protecting Shi’a identity first and foremost — something that, given the broad reverence he commands throughout the Shi’a world, is a clear bellwether for the community’s future direction.

Nor will Iran itself will vanish from the scene. As the largest Shi’a-majority country in the world, it’ll remain the faith’s epicenter with or without the ayatollahs. Even before 1979, Iran had a clear geopolitical identity. And despite the fantasies of Israeli leaders, a post-Islamist Persia will hardly be an obedient satrapy — nor will it be a wholly secular society where Shi’ism is a spent social force. To quote Ferdowsi, a medieval forebear of Nizami Ganjavi: “Do you not know that Iran is my dwelling place? The world from head to foot is under my command.”

The defacement of Kropka was not an isolated incident. Around the same time, similar graffiti appeared in front of the office of an NGO providing assistance to Belarusian refugees, even as a Belarusian cultural center in Vilnius was vandalized, and an air gun was fired at a Belarusian Orthodox chapel in the Lithuanian capital, leaving bullet holes in its grill-guarded glass windows. If, however, Furmanaŭ was momentarily terrified as the assault on his shop, recalling the ethnic cleansing and genocide that devoured the Baltics in the Second World War, the former Belarusian political prisoner soon realized what he was really looking at, realizing the assault was a “provocation” by the Lukashenko regime.

In April, Lithuania’s State Security Department (VSD) confirmed what Furmanaŭ had suspected — that this string of incidents had indeed been the work of Putin and his Belarusian stooge Alexander Lukashenko. Yet according to the agency, Belarusian and Russian intelligence services have now gone even further, and had started recruiting individuals to ambush and assault Belarusian students living in Lithuania, and to film themselves carrying out other violent attacks elsewhere in the country.

Three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, and four since the beginning of Lukashenko’s manufactured migration crisis along Belarus’s borders with Nato, such activity might seem hardly surprising. In March, to give one example, Lithuania accused Russia’s GRU of conducting an arson attack on an Ikea in the country. But while these local, socially incendiary, and much less high-profile actions might seem innocuous by comparison, there is much more going on in Vilnius than mere vandalism. Attacks like the one against Kropka are the real-world manifestation of a long-running fight over identity. Increasingly stoked by Moscow and Minsk, it’s now playing out on a potent historical battlefield: the legacy of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The multi-ethnic and pluralistic character of the Grand Duchy, which endured for centuries until its destruction in the late 18th century, has since given rise to a uniquely Eastern European problem. Despite its name, the fact that the state encompassed not only modern Lithuania but all of today’s Belarus means it does not easily fit into the rigid boxes of 20th century nationalism. In a region where history bestows legitimacy, the battle over who owns the inheritance of the Grand Duchy carries implications not just for how Lithuanians and Belarusians see themselves, but what territory they have the right to control.

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It is no surprise, then, that this niche corner of history has become fertile soil for geopolitical manipulation by the Kremlin and its allies, whose campaign of hybrid attacks in Vilnius aims to provoke an ethnic conflict between Lithuanians and Belarusians. In this, however, Lithuania is just the tip of the iceberg. Putinist efforts to use history to foment chaos in Vilnius are a hallmark of the Kremlin’s playbook elsewhere in the region, and a means of extending Putin’s soft power at his rivals’ expense. “These attacks are a blow not only to the safety of Belarusians in Lithuania, but also to the trust and unity between communities,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the head of the Belarusian democratic opposition tells UnHerd. “Attacking its history, its democracy, its role in the EU and Nato — it’s all part of the same imperialist playbook.”

At the core of Putin and Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare lies an ideology called Litvinism, whose most radical fringe claim that modern Lithuanians are in fact a different people entirely than the ones who dominated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and that therefore Vilnius should rightfully belong to Belarus. To that end, graffiti with slogans like “Vilnius is ours!” began appearing in the city last year, while in late 2023 a video even surfaced of self-described Litvinists threatening Lithuanian politicians.

“Historical conflict and historical misunderstandings offer very good ground, especially in Eastern Europe for hostility among nations,” says Vadim Vileita, a Lithuanian political scientist and linguist with Belarusian roots. “This situation with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the legacy of this old state is one of the examples of how a common heritage can not unite, but divide nations, especially in difficult geopolitical situations.”

Certainly, the Grand Duchy itself was a place of contradictions. Led by largely pagan Lithuanian leaders, in the 13th century they dramatically expanded the polity’s borders. Soon enough, their borders stretched across modern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine into Russia itself, with many of their subjects Orthodox Slavs. After the Grand Duchy and Poland fell under the sway of the same royal house, in 1386, laying the foundation for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth two centuries later, pagan Lithuanian leaders adopted Roman Catholicism and were crowned as Polish kings. While the Lithuanian language continued to be spoken on the territory of Lithuania proper, the dominant language of literature and administration in the Grand Duchy became Ruthenian, an East Slavic language similar to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. As if this multicultural maelstrom wasn’t enough, the Lithuanian nobility was increasingly Polonised, even as the country’s laws were drafted in Latin.

None of this would survive the convulsions of nationalism. By 1918, indeed, it would be the Poles who weaponised Litvinism, as they fought to establish the northeastern borders of the Second Polish Republic. In their view, it was Polonised inhabitants of Lithuania, who called themselves Litwini, who were the real heirs of the Grand Duchy — distinct, they claimed, from the Baltic Lithuanians trying to use the mantle of this history to carve out their own modern state. It was under this pretext that Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski captured Vilnius in 1920 and annexed it to the new Polish Republic. Never mind that Żeligowski considered himself to be a Polish Lithuanian, and indeed grew up speaking a dialect of Belarusian.

In its more modern guise, however, it is Belarusians who have assumed the mantle of Litvinism. Though adherents today hold a spectrum of views, the most extreme believers see the modern Lithuanian state as a usurper of the Grand Duchy’s legacy. By extension, that means Belarusians have the right not just to the duchy’s heritage — but also to cities like Vilnius. Just like in the past, these ideas didn’t spread organically. According to Nerijus Maliukevičius, a political scientist at Vilnius University, Litvinism remained “marginal” in Lithuanian discourse until around 2020, when an influx of Belarusians into Lithuania provided Minsk with a chance to sow mischief.

That’s ironic. For though 57,000 Belarusians live in Lithuania, most of them loathe the Lukashenko regime and indeed fled Belarus for their own safety. Yet if few Belarusians have ever even heard of Litvinism, let alone support seizing Vilnius for themselves, that hasn’t stopped Lukashenko from using history to instrumentalise elements of the Belarusian diaspora, alongside other Russian speakers in the country, to carry out his dirty work. It’s unlikely that these saboteurs-for-hire are political hardliners. Rather, they’re mostly cash-strapped individuals eager for work, providing Lukashenko with a fertile base for exploitation. “He’s a huge opportunist, that’s not a surprise,” says Hanna Liubakova, a Vilnius-based dissident who fled Belarus and now serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

As so often, though, history rushes in to complicate things once more. Lukashenko, for his part, is an undiluted product of Soviet Belarus, viewing his country’s history through a distinctly Russian lens. In this Sovietised historiography, Belarusians, as Moscow’s long-lost Slavic brothers, were rescued from oppression first by the Tsar and then by Stalin.

In other words, then, Minsk’s embrace of Litvinism in Lithuania is less an ideological position than a cold, calculated cudgel of realpolitik. Even so, it is precisely Lukashenko’s Soviet heritage that has made connections to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania so appealing in the eyes of many opposition-minded Belarusians, a minority of whom have sometimes embraced Litvinist ideas themselves. Figures like Zianon Pazniak, who fled Belarus out of fear of arrest by Lukashenko in the Nineties, have made statements denouncing the modern Lithuanian state — in their eyes, Litvinism distances Belarus from Russia, but also twists Lithuania into a usurper of stolen Belarusian glory.

As Liubakova says, such people are a small minority in the Belarusian opposition. But as the Litvinist threat continues to rise, Belarusians in Lithuania are increasingly seen as a menace. The Lithuanian state last year revoked the residence permits of around 600 Belarusian on national security grounds, while the country’s spies have increased screenings of Belarusian residents. And while Lithuania’s leaders have largely welcomed the foreigners in their midst, some politicians say it’s better to be safe than sorry.

“We have no problems with Belarusians if Belarusians respect our country,” Laurynas Kasčiūnas, an MP and former defense minister, tells UnHerd. “Not all Belarusians in Lithuania are democratic, we have economic migrants, we have other people who could be used by the regime for different reasons.” Kasčiūnas recently introduced a law that will allow the state to revoke the residency of Russians who travel to Russia or Belarus over three times a month without clear reasons. Though he stresses he doesn’t have the political backing to do so, he tells UnHerd he’d have liked to extend the law to Belarusians living in Lithuania too. Though such moves by the Lithuanian state would potentially make it easier to weed out Belarusians susceptible to Lukashenko’s schemes, they could conceivably also play into his propaganda, making it easier for him to drive a wedge between Lithuanians and Belarusians.

Amid the bickering over Litvinism, meanwhile, Lithuania has much bigger fish to fry. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently wrote a foreword to a book arguing that modern Lithuania is an artificial state built on “pro-Nazi” ideology. According to Lavrov, meanwhile, the Vilnius government has “elevated the use of falsified historical narratives to the rank of state policy to stimulate anti-Russian and Russophobic sentiments.”

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Though such narratives are hardly new, it’s hard not to be reminded of Putin’s infamous 2021 essay about Ukraine. Through a selective reading of history, it makes the case that Ukrainian national identity is actually just a Westernized version of Russianness promoted by Nazis, serving as a prelude to his invasion of the country. Lithuania isn’t taking any chances — in addition to unveiling plans for a wholesale evacuation of Vilnius in the event of a Russian invasion, Lithuania is also upgrading its military transport routes to Poland via the strategic Suwałki Gap. Led by Kasčiūnas, lawmakers in parliament have also proposed following Poland’s example and building a line of fortifications along the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus.

Nor, of course, is Lithuania the only place where Russia has combined historical revisionism with hybrid attacks to make a real impact on national politics. Aside from the extreme example of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has also claimed that Moldova is an artificial state bound to Russia, undermining the security of this increasingly pro-Western state. Though the Kremlin has long organized acts of hybrid warfare and spread historical disinformation in Poland, it has yet to combine the two. But just like segments of Lithuania’s Belarusian community, Moscow may eventually encourage Poland’s large Ukrainian population to undermine the state there too, inspired by the bloody legacy of the Second World War. “The genius of this strategy, in a sense, is that you don’t need to artificially create these divisions,” Maliukevičiuss says. “They objectively exist in each society, and you just work hard on them.”

Not that the situation is hopeless. Despite Putin and Lukashenko’s best efforts, and the Lithuanian state’s countermeasures, Belarusians here mostly feel at home. For her part, Liubakova underscores how much Vilnius is doing to support Belarusians at home while putting pressure on Lukashenko’s regime abroad — something Furmanaŭ, the co-owner of Kropka, was “pleasantly surprised” to experience himself. Though the assailants remain mysterious, local politicians expressed full-throated support for the Furmanaŭs in the aftermath of last July’s attack.

Though Litvinism therefore exists on the sidelines of the Belarusian community, both in Lithuania and elsewhere, what many Belarusians ultimately crave is a new perspective on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — with a historical legacy that can be shared by Belarusians and Lithuanians alike. As Belarusians continue refining their own national self-image, after all, the Grand Duchy not only gives them an anchor to a shared regional past, it also helps them escape the Kremlin’s shadow. Whatever their varied historical grievances, that’s something most Eastern Europeans today can surely understand.

Since Nawrocki’s win, commentators of all stripes have been eager to pigeonhole the election as a win for Russia, as the MAGA-fication of Poland, or as the nail in the coffin of Poland’s warm relationship with Ukraine. In truth, it’s none of those things — politics here is never so simple. The razor-thin margin of Sunday’s election, and indeed the divided, hamstrung government that has existed here for the last 18 months, is emblematic of a deeper fight about the nature of Polish identity in the 21st century. Caught between a future at the heart of the EU, and the familiar, reassuring hearth of traditional Catholic values, Poland is scrabbling for its future, even as it faces the old security challenges Piłsudski knew so well.

In the first place, Nawrocki’s win has crystallized the resurgent ascendancy of the country’s Right, this time with a new anti-establishment cadre of Gen Z acolytes at its back. It’s true, of course, that the guiding star of this quintessentially Polish brand of nationalism lies not in Europe: but in Trump’s America. Not only do its true believers take a “Poland First” approach on immigration and security, but their views on taxation, government regulation, and gun ownership are much closer to Trump’s than those of the PiS. Having posed with Nawrocki during his visit to the Oval Office in May, Trump hailed him this week as an “ally” whose victory had shocked “all in Europe”. But regardless of what Poland’s populists do next, what the country has achieved over the last three or four years cannot be undone. Behind Nawrocki’s win lies the simple fact that this country has left its mark on Europe, becoming indispensable to the very stability of the continent no matter who’s in charge.

The seeds of Poland’s modern-day dualism were sown long before Donald Tusk, the country’s embattled centrist prime minister, took power in 2023. Rather, they stretch back to the twilight days of communist rule. In 1989, after years of chaos and martial law, the country’s Soviet-backed regime agreed to sit down for discussions with Lech Wałęsa and other Solidarity leaders. The talks were ostensibly to diffuse tensions — but in practice ended up setting the stage for the collapse of communism right across Eastern Europe. Alongside Wałęsa, Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński also attended the meetings, with the twin brothers going on to form the PiS in 2001.

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The PiS emerged from the ruins of Solidarity Electoral Action, a diverse coalition of parties created as the political wing of Solidarity in the mid-Nineties. Civic Platform, led by Tusk and supported by Wałęsa, was another party to emerge from the ashes of Solidarity Electoral Action. Though Tusk and the Kaczyńskis had common roots in Poland’s anti-communist center-right, in other words, by the early 2000s their paths had diverged. Civic Platform set its sights on EU membership, while the PiS defended the Polish social conservative tradition.

Over the next two decades, both parties led governments in Poland, while drifting further and further apart. After joining the EU in 2004, Poland reaped enormous economic benefits, not only becoming the fastest growing economy in Europe, but also gaining the rare distinction of being the only country on the continent not to experience recession in 2008. But in the eyes of the PiS — and the growing number of Poles who saw traditional Catholic values as central to their identity — the boom came with trade offs. Like other conservatives in Europe, they felt that on the road to European integration, something deep within the national soul had begun to slip away. Soon enough, they began to castigate Tusk, Civic Platform, and all liberal-minded Poles, dismissing them as foreign interlopers intent on selling the country out to the old German nemesis. For their part, Poland’s liberals returned the favor. Centered in the cities and more Left-leaning areas in western Poland, they characterized the PiS as the party of backward, provincial cultists, holding the nation back from fulfilling its ambitions.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when the PiS won a majority in both houses of parliament and secured the presidency for Andrzej Duda, giving the party broad control over the country’s institutions. In the name of completing decommunization, the PiS reordered Poland’s courts, stacking the constitutional tribunal with loyal judges, all while tightening abortion laws, politicizing state media, and cracking down on LGBT rights. Amid the battles with Brussels that followed, Poland’s liberals no longer saw themselves merely as pro-EU advocates fighting to pull their country out of the prejudices of the village — they were now freedom fighters trying to save Poland from a hostile internal takeover.

Into this tumult stepped Russia. In 2021, when with Russian backing Belarusian dictator Lukashenko began luring migrants to the border of the EU, before forcing them to cross into countries like Poland, the PiS was catapulted into the European spotlight. The party was now not only defending Poland’s national character from the scourge of liberalism, but Europe itself from Putin’s hybrid warfare. The fact he chose migrants as his weapon of choice made things even more convenient — its fight against European multiculturalism had become intertwined with Poland’s ancient struggle with the Kremlin.

The start of the war in Ukraine further enhanced the PiS’s role on the European stage, taking Poland as a whole along with it. The party’s leaders became the face of Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, and the facilitators of Ukraine’s defense, as Warsaw got its first real taste of international prestige. But the moment also gave Poland something else — an opportunity to merge its EU aspirations with its traditional anti-Russian animus. Now, rather than challenging the European order, Polish nationalism was something the EU and NATO not only commended but actually demanded. In other words, then, the PiS had got the best of both worlds, and for a brief moment had bridged the divide that had been growing in Poland since Tusk and the Kaczyński brothers went their separate ways.

Yet before long, things fell apart once again, this time with help from a new brand of populist Rightists — for whom the PiS was an inadequate guardian of Polishness. Fueled by farmers’ protests over Ukrainian grain imports, anger over perceived preferential treatment of Ukrainians refugees, and a good dose of historical grievance over the unresolved massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, the Polish far-Right, led by the Confederation Party, pushed the PiS to adopt an ever-harsher line on Ukraine. Not that Ukraine is the only issue these new nationalists care about. Worries about immigrants from non-European countries do too, even as Confederation also calls for economic libertarianism and continues the familiar refrain that Poland’s business interests and political future are being outsourced to Brussels insiders.

Even so, Ukraine has risen to become the essential issue of Polish politics. To be sure, rearming at home and backing NATO abroad are still causes that unify almost everyone from Warsaw to Wrocław. But for Confederation, and increasingly for the PiS too, they are no longer the Europeanist projects they once were — even as they have increasingly begun to see Ukrainians in Poland as an impediment to Polish sovereignty rather than a boon.

The pivotal moment in the PiS’s shift took place late last month, after the first round of voting, when Confederation’s candidate Sławomir Mentzen came third behind Nawrocki. That led Mentzen to invite his PiS rival to appear on his YouTube channel and make his case to Confederation’s voters ahead of the runoff. Without hesitation and on camera, Nawrocki signed a document in support of Confederation’s agenda, notably pledging to oppose Ukraine’s NATO membership. The PiS’s fellowship with Confederation was sealed, and the tactic largely worked: over 88% of Mentzen supporters in the first round voted for Nawrocki in the second. Whatever happens over the weeks ahead, it seems clear that Poland is headed for a PiS-Confederation coalition in 2027, with Tusk’s fragile coalition probably splintering.

For now, though, Poland will remain in stasis, with political gridlock set to continue. It’s ironic, then, that the very voters who ended up delivering Nawrocki his victory were those who’d once yearned for a more dynamic political landscape — and for more options outside the PiS-Civic Platform duopoly. Driven by frustration with the establishment, Mentzen’s effective and direct social media presence, and a desire to return to traditional Polish roots, a slim majority of young people voted for Right-wing populist parties in the first round of the election, subsequently supporting Nawrocki in the runoff. By embracing their desire for more radical ideas and aligning itself with Confederation in the long-term, the PiS may well reinvent itself too, ensuring the tug-of-war with Poland’s liberals remains as energetic as ever.

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For its part, Civic Coalition has had to adapt too. Despite his reputation as an urban progressive, Trzaskowski ran a more conservative campaign than expected, even going so far as criticizing some social programs for Ukrainians in Poland. Though it clearly didn’t help him, he won’t be the last liberal to appeal to the increasingly conservative masses before the decade is out. Having already moved Rightward on migration, Tusk is also flexing his conservative muscles on the European stage, for instance rallying against the Green Deal earlier this year by framing it as a threat to European competitiveness. In a testament to how much Poland has moved the needle on the continent, meanwhile, many other countries are now following Tusk’s lead.

We shouldn’t exaggerate here. Though his own days as prime minister are numbered, Polish liberals are unlikely to wholly cave to the rising Right anytime soon. The record turnout of Sunday’s vote proved that despite the country’s polarization, and despite the obstacles in their way, pro-EU Poles will continue to be a force to be reckoned with so long as there remains space for Poland at Europe’s top table.

Cliché though it may be, Poles are capable of overcoming their differences and banding together in the face of adversity. Back in the interwar years, Piłsudski shaped the country’s trajectory as he saw fit, but the Poles themselves were never able to get over their indecisiveness until the Nazis and Soviets came knocking in 1939. In today’s Poland, though, waiting that long may not be an option — a synthesis in national identity will necessarily have to emerge, not only for Poland’s own national security, but if Europe wants to defend itself against whatever Russia has in store for NATO’s east.

Poland’s longtime political divisions haven’t hampered its rise so far, but as it enters a new arena of geopolitical competition, the rules of the game have changed. If it hopes to expand its influence in Europe, solidify its brand — and resist Russian imperialism all at the same time — it will have to break through the glass ceiling currently limiting its rise. Once it does so, a vision that unites forward-looking Europeanism with a positivistic nationalism will be Poland’s only ticket in town. Even in the interwar years, Piłsudski understood this well. “Poland will be great,” the marshal once said, “or it won’t be at all.”

But unfortunately for Rutte, it is likely too late. In the two months since the last major blow-up between Trump and Zelensky, that infamous Oval Office fight, almost no progress has been made in the Trump administration’s talks to end the Ukraine war. And though the contours of the current standoff are slightly different than they were in February, the crux of the problems remains the same. The only terms Russia is willing to accept amount to the neutering of Ukraine as a sovereign state, something Kyiv is unlikely to ever accept.

For Trump, that leaves just one alternative: abandoning Ukraine to its fate and rushing ahead to reconfigure the geopolitical map with Putin unilaterally. The real question, then, is what’s next for Kyiv’s hapless European partners — whether they’re ruthless enough to finally take the continent’s defense into their own hands, and whether they’ll even be able to focus on Ukraine now that other new threats emerge much closer to home.

Spirits had been high going into last week’s talks, where European leaders were finally given a seat at the negotiating table. But shortly before flying back from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted the truth: that if no significant progress is made in the coming days, the Trump administration may walk away from the talks altogether. A week later, the funeral dirge duly sounded. The Ukrainians have rejected Trump’s “final offer”, which apart from handing Crimea to Moscow, included a “de facto” acceptance of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Ukrainian territory, a pledge that Kyiv would never join Nato, and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.

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Given these concessions would effectively extinguish Ukraine as an independent state, and leave it deeply vulnerable to future Russian aggression, it’s little wonder that Kyiv promptly dismissed them. It’s also unsurprising that, after Rubio refused to attend, planned talks in London were hastily downgraded to meetings between minor diplomats, and that the European leaders who were beaming in Paris are now panicking.

Of course, understanding the failure of the talks goes far beyond the Ukrainians themselves. Trump’s entire approach was colored by domestic political concerns, a warped understanding of the nature of the conflict, and his own personal agenda. Certainly, the President misunderstood his counterpart in the Kremlin. One mistake was imagining Putin would accept a post-war European peacekeeping force in Ukraine. Another involved dispatching separate envoys to Kyiv and Moscow, which not only led to contradictory messages being sent to both sides, but also made it easier for Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Russia envoy, to buy Putin’s narrative on the war hook, line, and sinker.

That all hints at a broader strategic failure. By jumping haphazardly from preliminary ceasefire agreements to an overarching peace deal, both were doomed to fail, as fundamental disagreements between the Russians and Ukrainians on issues large and small never had space to be resolved. Despite its frequent and determined shuttle diplomacy, the Trump team was never willing to undertake the subtle, painstaking work that conflict resolution of this sort requires, attempting instead to force through particular outcomes rather than figuring out if they actually made sense.

Putin himself also underestimated the role of Trump’s narcissism in the negotiation process. Though he succeeded in getting Trump and his clique to swallow much Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine, Trump’s willingness to regurgitate Russian talking points was superseded only by his desire to feel in control. Zelensky, with few other options, was forced to bend to Trump’s will, while Putin, negotiating from a position of strength, never felt compelled to offer Trump anything more than diplomatic flattery.

Even so, the Russian leader has on several occasions made gestures to appeal to Trump’s ego, including most recently offering to “give up” his aim to annex the parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts that Russian troops don’t currently occupy — a performative “concession” that European diplomats believe may be just another ruse. Putin knows that any negotiated settlement would have likely ended with a freeze of the conflict along existing frontlines anyway, making it hard to read his offer as a genuine attempt at compromise. That’s especially given he has continued to refuse to budge on every other major issue at play in the peace talks.

Nevertheless, the move was a retreat from Putin’s most maximalist aims, and clearly signalled that he would prefer to reach a deal on Ukraine under Trump’s auspices if at all possible. All the while, the Russian president is clearly aware he has other, less elegant, ways of reaching his goals, as Russian forces have so brutally demonstrated throughout three years of war. Unlike Trump and Zelensky, then, Putin not only has no incentive to end the conflict. He also has the added luxury of time. Failing to understand both of these facts has been Trump’s mistake from the start.

So if the talks have failed, what next? What the Americans want is clear: unilaterally normalizing ties with Russia. Both Trump and Putin would have much preferred to settle the issue of Ukraine diplomatically before moving on to the grand bargain on Europe’s future, something that the Russian leader has wanted to pursue for years. Putin has long seen Trump as the ideal partner through whom he might finally be able to end Russia’s international isolation from the West, establish new rules of play between Russia and the US in Europe, and at last clarify what sort of relationship Moscow will have with Washington on the world stage. Ever the businessman, Trump’s goals are slightly less lofty — opening up trade and gaining access to Russia’s wealth of rare earth metals top his agenda, as does driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.

Yet without the easy end to the war that Trump had promised, he’s characteristically likely to sidestep the problem instead, moving to remake the US-Russia relationship and establish the limits of American involvement in European affairs — leaving Ukraine and its neighbors to deal with Russia alone.

Based on progress so far, that’ll be challenging. For one thing, the continent has struggled to develop a comprehensive plan to support Ukraine. In summit after summit, well-intentioned proposals have fallen flat on their face. That’s most stunningly last month when, during a session of the European Council, a €40 million aid plan for Ukraine was whittled down to just an eighth of that, before further divisions led the idea being abandoned altogether. The Europeans have equally found it hard to develop their own defense industries since Trump’s election. Though they’ve taken several notable steps here, for instance exempting defense spending from EU budget caps, creating a unified security industry across the continent is difficult precisely because the bloc continues to be an amalgamation of different governments and economies. Whatever the EU’s detractors may say about Brussels overreach, the truth is that Europe is still far too disunited to build a single defense sector — without significant bureaucratic hand-wringing anyway. Even so, as hope for any additional American weapons shipments is effectively nil, the long-running pressure on Europe to fill at least some of that void is only growing.

To be fair, there are bright spots amid the litany of failed summits. One is the Danish model of using frozen Russian assets and other sources to fund domestic weapons production in Ukraine. That might make it easier for Ukraine to get desperately needed ammunition and artillery to the frontlines, while European militaries are increasingly moving away from American suppliers to domestic ones. Giving Ukraine the cash it needs to arm itself might also prevent a looming EU schism, with countries like Hungary increasingly unwilling to fund the Ukraine war. By funnelling aid for Ukraine’s domestic arms production through individual EU states, rather than the bloc itself, European countries can let Hungary have its cake and eat it too.

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Even so, there are only so many ways that European military aid can replace America’s. The US, after all, has the power to dictate life and death on the Ukrainian battlefield beyond merely cutting off weapons shipments, as it so cynically demonstrated in March when it turned off the targeting systems of the Ukrainian army’s HIMARS, Patriots, and other missile batteries. Without such basic capabilities, which Europe would hardly be able to replicate, it is very possible that Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian advances, even in its current limited capacity, would be greatly jeopardized.

Not that Ukraine is the only calculation here. There’s already an unspoken logic taking hold among some states in Nato’s east that, if push comes to shove, they too may have to abandon Ukraine to protect themselves. The departure of American troops from a key base in Poland only heightens these worries, as do Pentagon proposals to withdraw up to 10,000 soldiers from right across Eastern Europe. Despite working with its regional partners to build a wall of fortifications along Russia’s border, and strengthen itself militarily, Lithuania for one is not taking any chances — its capital city Vilnius has just unveiled a sweeping plan to evacuate its entire population in the event of a Russian invasion.

Regardless of how unified Europe ultimately becomes on defense in the years to come, countries with the most to lose from an unrestrained Russia — from Poland to the Baltics — are already coming to the conclusion that acting unilaterally will be the only way to protect themselves. Latvia’s recent exit from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mine deployment is only one example, with more European states likely to take matters into their own hands as Brussels keeps prevaricating. With competing agendas weakening the EU and NATO at this pivotal moment of crisis, regional alliances that act independently of both are likely to arise. There are already clear precedents for this. In 2020, after all, Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine created an alliance called the Lublin Triangle, which has remained active throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine. Though its function is currently diplomatic, it isn’t hard to imagine the Lublin Triangle, or alliances like it, taking on security functions too.

Nor can you blame the Europeans for such frantic action. After all, they may soon find themselves facing a resurgent Moscow — for the first time able to act with impunity on the continent with the tacit blessing of the world’s premier power. Another D-Day is obviously unlikely anytime soon, indeed, but the Europeans may eventually need to consider the US itself as a rival power. And just as the US has increasingly abandoned them, the Europeans may need to face the fact that there may come a day when they too might have to abandon Ukraine — not out of selfishness, but out of cold, hard necessity.

I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.

Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.

Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.

Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”

To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.

Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.

It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.

Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.

To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.

There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-meter tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.

These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.

“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasizes he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.

Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologize, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.

Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.

Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasizes he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavor for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”

Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.

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In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”

And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.

Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.

Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honoring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centers for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.

But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbor, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.

Yet amid this spontaneous outpouring of fraternal affection, there was something else. You saw it on the graffiti, spattered on the walls of small Polish towns. “Banderites go home!” they read, a reference to the infamous Second World War-era Ukrainian militia leader Stepan Bandera, who Poles associate with a dark period of ethnic violence. You heard it, too, in whispered disapproval as sportscars with Ukrainian number plates glided by. Last year, Polish farmers blockaded the border, unhappy at how imported grain hurt their fragile bottom line. These motivations were hardly just economic, with allusions to expelling Ukrainians from Poland a regular refrain.

What started as a trickle has now become a flood. Surveys now find that a slim majority of Poles oppose sending additional weapons to Ukraine. There’s something else too: Poland’s ultranationalist Right, formerly on the country’s margins, has barrelled to the mainstream. According to two separate polls, Sławomir Mentzen of the Confederation Party has overtaken the Law and Justice Party (PiS) candidate to take second place in Poland’s presidential race. Even polls that show Mentzen behind PiS’s man show his support growing, and the difference between the two is now less than the statistical margin of error. If the numbers hold, May’s election could be the first without a PiS candidate in the top two spots for 20 years.

This result is far from guaranteed. As the longtime party of choice for Poland’s Catholic traditionalists, PiS commands a robust political network that won’t be upended easily. Yet having lost to a coalition of center-left parties in 2023, and with looming financial troubles biting at their heels, PiS is increasingly looking like the sick man of Polish politics, ripe for a challenge from the Right. More than that, and as the ominous references to Banderites imply, history is also ripe for a revival of anti-Ukrainian nationalism — even as the past hints at other futures for Poland and its people too.

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“There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” So goes a quote from Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, who ruled the country during the interwar period. The line has frequently been repeated by Polish leaders explaining why defending Kyiv is in Warsaw’s national interest. But this adage also speaks to something deeper within Piłsudski’s philosophy. Called Prometheism, the project aimed at weakening Russia by encouraging ethnic minorities in its empire to establish independent states of their own — much like Prometheus had uplifted humanity with the gift of fire. As for Poland itself, Piłsudski was a believer in pluralism and envisioned a multi-ethnic state that, supported by newly erected buffer states like Ukraine, would form a powerful bulwark against Moscow.

Of course, not everyone saw things that way. Roman Dmowski, Piłsudski’s chief political rival, advocated for a much less internationalist and diverse national identity. Rather, he envisaged an ethnostate for Poles, and only Poles, created by Polonizing or expelling minorities like Jews, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. Though Dmowski held little real political power in interwar Poland, his National Democracy movement was a force to be reckoned with. Piłsudski pursued them relentlessly in his later years, arresting many of its members and leading the movement to effectively vanish by 1945.

Not that the Second World War brought understanding between Warsaw and Kyiv. Those references to Stepan Bandera remain so evocative because of what his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists did as they tried to carve out an independent, ethnically Ukrainian state free of Polish interlopers. Allying themselves with the invading Germans in 1941, with the Nazis offering Bandera a measure of autonomy in their new world order, his followers massacred as many as 100,000 Poles living across what are modern Ukraine’s western fringes. Their actions, along with Russian population transfers at the end of the war, ultimately resulted in the wholesale expulsion of Poles from the area around Lwów, a city which had been part of Poland during the interwar years. By 1947, Polish Lwów had been redubbed Ukrainian Lviv — and at least 100,000 Poles had been driven from their homes.

The long decades of Soviet tyranny were unsurprisingly fallow for the Polish far-Right, while the early post-communist years were focused on building a new capitalist economy. Yet in the 2010s, a new far-Right party emerged in Poland. Called the National Movement, it branded itself the spiritual successor to Dmowski’s National Democracy. Among its founders was Krzysztof Bosak, who having been elected to the Polish Parliament at the age of 23, was then the second youngest MP in the body’s history. In 2019, Bosak’s National Movement entered into a coalition with another Right-wing party, and the Confederation Party as we know it today was born.

In those early days, Confederation was considered too extreme to pose a serious challenge to Poland’s political duopoly, with the PiS battling the centrist Civic Platform. Its ranks were filled with sexists, Russophiles, and anti-Semites. Perhaps the most notorious example here was Grzegorz Braun, who in 2023 used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles of a menorah in the Polish Parliament. Since then, and much like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Confederation has tried to “detoxify” its image, expelling the likes of Braun and focusing instead on liberal economic policy, libertarianism, and a Poland First strategy on the international stage.

Instead of fielding dreary ideologues like Bosak, who gained a mere 7% of the vote when running for president in 2020, the party also found a new champion in Mentzen, who holds a PhD in economics and enjoys the largest following of any Polish politician on TikTok. With his no-holds-barred, unfiltered diatribes against rival politicians, Mentzen knows how to whip his online crowd into a frenzy, and even Poles who don’t support him often find his viral content popping up on their feed. If the latest polls are to be believed, Mentzen has more than tripled the party’s support since Bosak’s campaign.

Mentzen is certainly not without baggage. In 2019, for instance, he infamously stated that Confederation wanted a Poland without “Jews, homosexuals, abortions, taxation and the European Union”. He later claimed he was joking — at least about the Jews. His 2025 campaign website outlines an assertive agenda that includes cracking down on illegal migration; lowering taxes; combating “Leftist ideology”; continuing to build up Poland’s armed forces; opposing any Polish troops in post-war Ukraine; and standing up to the EU, among other provocative ideas.

Yet despite not being mentioned in his platform, a core part of Mentzen’s appeal has been his uncompromising language on Ukrainians. “They treat us like suckers,” he said in a TV interview this month. “We are sending weapons, money, social benefits to Ukraine, we are treating Ukrainians in Poland for free. In return we get slander, they insult us and show absolutely no gratitude.” Mentzen certainly is not calling for the forced assimilation or expulsion of Ukrainians. Yet in an echo of Dmowski nearly a century ago, his central message is that the Polish state must prioritize the wellbeing of ethnic Poles above all else. Mentzen personally alluded to the dark history between Poland and Ukraine last month when he visited Lviv, where he condemned the city’s numerous statues of Bandera. In response, Kyiv branded him an “enemy of Ukraine” and accused him of “inciting ethnic hatred”.

The distinction Mentzen therefore makes is not one of citizenship or residency — but of blood, culture and spirit. And, in the eyes of Confederation, this is where PiS got things wrong. Though the party took a hard line on illegal migration while in power, it not only welcomed millions of Ukrainians, but also encouraged the arrival of thousands of legal immigrants as cheap foreign labor. In fact, Poland under PiS has led the EU in granting first residency permits to foreign workers from outside the bloc since 2017. The party was also implicated in a visas-for-cash scandal shortly before the 2023 elections, ultimately costing the party its grip on power.

Karol Nawrocki, PiS’s candidate in this election cycle, has scrambled to align himself more closely with Confederation’s position on immigration. But Polish populists apparently aren’t buying it — at least not enough to keep Mentzen at bay. Yet if Rafał Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform’s candidate, will almost certainly win the election, his party’s government has also shifted its policies. That’s clearest around its approach to a post-war Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has repeatedly refused to commit Polish soldiers to any future peacekeeping force, the subtext being that Poland may find it needs its troops at home instead.

As the best-armed state in the region, Poland will likely be forced to deploy its soldiers to Ukraine sooner or later. But the fact Tusk feels compelled to temper his party’s platform speaks to Confederation’s rising soft power. This is likely to only continue. Poland remains much less diverse than the multi-ethnic nation inhabited by Piłsudski and Dmowski, to say nothing of Western European states like France or Britain. All the same, this is a country whose national makeup is indeed changing, especially in urban areas, inevitably fueling Confederation’s ultranationalist vision.

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Though it won’t replace PiS anytime soon, then, it’s only a matter of time before Mentzen becomes the primary force on Poland’s Right. Yet here, again, history may make itself felt. Forget Dmowski or the Banderites — the country’s past encompasses an even broader paradox. Despite Piłsudski’s efforts, after all, modern Poland is unaccustomed to being a regional hegemon, let alone an empire, and has resisted several opportunities to become one. Even at the height of its power, in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe, the country’s potential was squandered by a self-interested nobility.

Today, Poland once again finds itself wobbling between narrow isolationism and a leading role in Europe, one that would require it to become a guarantor of security far beyond its own borders. This, it goes without saying, would encompass many more people than simply ethnic Poles. Confederation’s rise is at least in part a response to this geopolitical moment and aims to force Poland’s leaders to make a choice between two futures that’ll dictate the country’s future for decades to come.

Aside from certain details, this choice is the same one that Piłsudski and Dmowski offered Poles a century ago. Though Piłsudski eventually emerged victorious, his plans were cut short by his own death, by the annihilation of Poland in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and by the country’s long domination by the Soviet Union. Now, though, Poland may finally have a chance to revisit the matter and settle it once and for all. Because while history doesn’t repeat itself, it certainly rhymes — in Poland more than elsewhere.

This, then, is the Europe that Putin has worked for over a quarter century to realize. And with Donald Trump soon due to leave the White House, he knows time is short to return Russia to the geopolitical position Putin thinks it deserves. Yet just across the border, the Europeans are ready too. With the American geopolitical order dead and buried, even countries that once treated the security blanket as a safety blanket have become shell-shocked realists. And so it proves: as the Russian attack finally starts, Poland’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System springs into action. It’s joined by hundreds of Himars, which together rain Polish hellfire down on advancing Russian troops.

Polish fighters are now in the air too. Supported by Sweden, Finland and their Baltic allies, they deny Russia air superiority above the battlefield. There are drones, too, thousands of them, autonomous bringers of death over five countries. At sea, the Swedish and Polish navies engage the Russian Baltic Fleet as it pours across the Baltic into the Gulf of Gdańsk, with Poland’s port cities in its sights. And all the while, Russian troops advance, swarming to attack weak points in their enemy’s border defenses while using artillery to cut off the highways linking the Baltics to the rest of the continent. War, in short, engulfs Europe’s east once more, even as Paris and London threaten nuclear strikes if the Russian assault persists.

This scenario isn’t a prediction. But nor is it a fantasy, for it’s exactly what security experts across Nato have long urged Europe to prepare for. It’s easy to imagine such warnings flashing before the eyes of European leaders as they watched, uninvited, from the sidelines as the US pledged to normalize bilateral relations with Moscow. Over the course of the past two weeks, certainly, the prospect of a war on Nato soil has gone from nightmarish hypothetical to an entirely conceivable possibility — if certainly not an inevitability. Admitting that is mere realism, especially from here in Warsaw.

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For while Europeans have scrambled to plan for an impending post-American future, the unspoken truth remains that there exists no viable defense model that doesn’t have Poland squarely at its heart. For years, after all, Warsaw has been planning for exactly the sort of chaos precipitated by Trump, growing its army and bolstering its industrial strength. More to the point, the country’s geography means it will have little choice but to act as the continent’s shield against whatever comes next — even though it clearly has some way to go, both logistically and strategically, if it hopes to fend off the looming Russian threat.

In the first place, Poland’s importance can be understood by its rising military prowess. With over 200,000 men under arms, it boasts the largest army of any Nato state in Europe, even as it will also soon become the continent’s premier tank power. It’s clear, moreover, that this technology is effective in the field. Back in 2023, at Nato’s Amber Lynx exercises in Orzysz, less than 100 kilometers from Poland’s border with the Russian enclave at Kaliningrad, I witnessed a simulated attack on Polish territory. On a grey April morning, troops from six Nato states used tanks, artillery, fighter jets and anti-aircraft guns — alongside PT-91 tanks and W-3 Sokół helicopters from Poland — to repel the imaginary invaders.

As that local machinery implies, Poland has the added advantage of being a relatively robust industrial power. As the fifth largest economy in the EU, and one of the fastest growing economies in the continent, Poland has invested heavily in its already sizeable industrial manufacturing sector — especially since the start of the war in Ukraine. The Huta Stalowa Wola steel mill, one of the largest machinery manufacturers in the region, has already doubled its production of military hardware since 2022, while Poland’s shipbuilding sector has also worked to modernize the country’s fleet.

Of course, having a strong army in theory still leaves the question of how to use it — and here there seems to be some disagreement. That 2023 drill imagined Nato taking on Russia inside Polish territory. But speaking after the event, a Polish general dismissed the idea that a hostile force would ever be allowed “one meter” inside the country’s borders. To that end, Poland, together with Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, have started building an interconnected network of fortifications along their borders with Russia and Belarus, together meant to compensate for the region’s lack of geographic obstacles. In Poland, these fortifications are known as “The East Shield” and will encompass everything from simple earthworks and concrete anti-tank barriers to satellite-augmented surveillance technology. In the event of an imminent Russian attack, controversial anti-personnel mines would likely be deployed too.

All of this sounds good in theory, and has a good chance of holding Russia back for a while. In the 2028 invasion scenario I sketched out above, the first part of the conflict would involve an air war, with aircraft, missiles, rockets, and drones flying in all directions. The East Shield would be a major impediment to the advance of Russian ground forces, not least given the local environment. Though Poland lies on a flat plain that has historically acted as a highway for invaders — another reason why it’ll be obliged to fight come what may, especially given it’s the only Nato member to border Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — the frontier regions to the northeast are thick with hills, swamps and forests.

But just as in Ukraine, time ultimately would not be on Warsaw’s side. After months of grinding battles, and wave after wave of the high-casualty assaults that have become Russia’s trademark, Moscow’s armies would eventually break through the fortifications. Yet Polish forces on the other side would not be able to hold them off forever. Sooner or later, then, Nato’s “not one meter” strategy would collapse. In its place, like the Zelensky government has grimly discovered, Poland would be forced to tactically retreat from battlefield to battlefield, praying that the Russians don’t find a way to break through their lines.

It would certainly help if Poland could degrade the enemy before they broke the East Shield: not just close to the border but deep within Russia itself. Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, a Polish military analyst, Warsaw isn’t doing enough here. “I have an impression that in Poland limited-scale tactical thinking has won,” he explains, noting that most of its artillery investments still only have a maximum range of 300 kilometers. “However,” Kucharski adds, “direct attacks on the territory of the enemy have the largest deterrence value.”

In the past, Poland would have relied on US support to get the kit it needs — but that doesn’t seem a sure bet these days. After the chaos of recent weeks, Polish officials have done everything in their power to play it cool, touting the Trump administration’s supposed pledges not to withdraw US forces stationed in the country. But read between the lines and things start to look much less certain. Despite calling Poland a “model ally” during his visit to Warsaw earlier this month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned his country wouldn’t be around forever. And when Polish President Andrzej Duda met his US counterpart on the sidelines of the CPAC on Saturday, Trump arrived late and left early.

No wonder Warsaw is looking for new backers. In practice, that unsurprisingly means its fellow EU members — who obviously have far more skin in the game than Trump. A case in point came last July, when Poland embarked on the so-called European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA) with Germany, France and Italy. Meant to stimulate the production of long-range missiles across the continent, the ultimate plan is to designed to hamper Russian forces before they ever menace the East Shield.

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That’s clearly a step in the right direction, but challenges remain. As Kucharski puts it: “As a country we have the potential to create armed forces that would be able to at least temporarily stop Russia, but currently several years of work remain ahead of us.” Quite aside from the lack of long-range missiles, there’s domestic politics to contend with too. With an eye on upcoming presidential elections in May, Polish leaders have lately refused to deploy troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers, or to commit forces to a broader pan-European army. Despite Poland’s strong industrial base, meanwhile, shifting political agendas have often made it difficult for the country to take full advantage of its manufacturing potential, with MPs struggling to think holistically political, military and industrial priorities. That’s frustrating: as analysts have long noted, the capacity to further expand the military certainly exists in Poland — the only question is whether politicians can cough up the necessary cash.

Yet if immediate political concerns may hamper flexibility in the short term, no one in Polish politics can seriously imagine their country won’t be forced to play a decisive role in regional defense, both domestically and in post-war Ukraine. Regardless of the diplomatic squabbles Poland has recently had with France and the UK over the nature of Europe’s new security architecture, moreover, everyone understands that Warsaw is a partner they must count on.

All the while, Polish officials are doing everything they can to project calm, confidence and strength. And why not? Especially given its long tradition resisting Russian imperialism, this is not a nation that’ll go down without a fight. But behind the scenes, the politicians and generals are surely alarmed. What’s most horrifying for Poland about the fantastical 2028 scenario is that, even if it were to reach the peak of military preparedness, expand its manufacturing sector, and build a European coalition — in the end Russia could still triumph. As history has often proved, both in Poland and elsewhere, there are some things even the fiercest fighting spirit cannot easily overcome.

Through the lens of Putinism, the global stage in 2025 looks remarkably similar to 1945. Russia’s sphere of influence, and even its heartland, is under threat from forces to its west. But like 80 years ago, in the eyes of Kremlin ideologues, Russia is pushing back the tide, militarily and civilizationally too. But think again to that picture: and who Stalin is slouched with. Not some lackeys from the Politburo, but his two rivals, who both, in their way, would help dictate his country’s imperial ambitions for decades to come. That, for me, is the real lesson of Yalta eight decades on — not that Russia was naturally destined to dominate Eurasia, but that it can only succeed with help from the West.

Even before Russia really existed, its rulers leaned on outsiders. Consider the early 17th century, the so-called Time of Troubles, when Muscovy was beset by succession crises, civil wars, and foreign incursions by the Swedish Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the popular version of history most Russians know, Michael Romanov, the first tsar of Russia’s most storied house, was crowned in 1613 only after collaborating with foreigners. Nationalist epics, notably the 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, have paraded him as an austere hero, who fled the invading Poles instead of submit. In truth, his uncle supported Polish efforts to put a foreigner on the Russian throne, while Michael himself even lived for a time in the Polish-occupied Kremlin.

It’s a thread woven through the long centuries of Russia’s history, as it struggled to overcome the geographic prison that is Eurasia. Despite giving Russia ample space to expand, its geographic position leaves it vulnerable to land invasions from both the east and the west. Flanked, moreover, by mountains to the south, the Arctic ice to the north, and European competitors to the west, it traditionally had scant opportunities to develop its naval strength — vital for any modern superpower. Getting creative about securing sea access, and acquiring plenty of colonial possessions to act as buffers, was crucial if Russia wanted to be anything beyond a backwater outpost along the Moskva River.

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In practice, this could only happen through collaboration with outsiders, something clear enough far beyond the Time of Troubles. In the final decades of the 18th century, for instance, Russia had no qualms about flexing its military muscles. Yet when it came to vanquishing its old rival Poland-Lithuania, it relied on deal-making to carve up the Polish state alongside Austria and Prussia. In the process, it drew up a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, finalized at the Congress of Vienna and which mostly endured until 1914. It was a similar story at sea. Snatching windows on the Black Sea and the Baltic would have meant very little if Russia hadn’t equally secured passage through the Bosphorus (from the Ottomans) and the Kattegat (from Denmark) into the seven seas beyond.

Not, of course, that this heritage has stopped Russian rulers from parading their would be independence. All nationalisms are, to an extent, based on narrative-building and historical erasure, and just as A Life for the Tsar lionized Tsar Michael for the St Petersburg nobility, so too have these themes endured into the 20th century. That’s clear enough from Russian narratives about the Great Patriotic War, which describe how 20 million Soviets gave their lives to defeat the German invaders.

That sacrifice is indisputable: but Russia’s victory in Berlin would have been meaningless had it not been accepted by the Western superpowers. For if Nazi rule in Europe was undone at Stalingrad and Kursk, what came later was decided between 4-11 February 1945, at Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill gave Stalin their blessing to establish a new European order. In the space of just a week, Stalin convinced his allies to let him extend his reach right across Eastern Europe, annexing the Baltic States and adding a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to his sphere of influence.

For Russian elites accustomed to thinking in historic cycles, a revised geopolitical compact, a Yalta 2.0, is therefore unsurprisingly long overdue. Not that we should think Putin is keen on just another power-grab. His famous 2005 quip that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” has been interpreted as a glib expression of Soviet nostalgia — but beneath the surface lurked a deeper fear. A new age had indeed arrived, but an updated balance of power to replace the Cold War order was never established, leaving Russia rudderless in wild geopolitical waters.

To an extent, then, Putin has long felt America’s unipolar moment was simply a delusion, an aberration of history that stubbornly denied the geopolitical realities of Russian power. And with American dominance now sliding, Putin can equally point to the revival of multipolarity, with great powers from Beijing to Delhi establishing geopolitical centers. To rephrase, then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about that country alone. Rather, it was Putin’s attempt to force America and the West to confront what it sees as its natural rights, to settle the destabilizing ambiguity between where Russia’s sphere of influence ends and where America’s starts, and to finally restore balance on Moscow’s terms — the wishes of the locals from Kharkiv to Aleppo be damned.

But just as it always has, Russia cannot set up this new international system alone — despite what he might claim, Putin relies just as much on the West as his precursors in the Kremlin. One good example is that perennial quest for warm-water ports, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria forcing Moscow to pursue good relations with its revolutionary successor. In an irony of history, and thanks to Ankara’s influence in Damascus, Russia is again forced to bargain with Turks to keep its empire afloat. On the far side of its territory, meanwhile, Russia must reckon with the presence of NATO states like Norway and Canada, as they race to establish facts-on-the-water while the ice caps melt. Faced with America and China, certainly, brute force alone is not a realistic option.

Putin will also be conscious of what happens when Russia tries to act unilaterally. Following the October Revolution, in 1917, communist fervor compelled the Bolsheviks to spread their revolution westwards. Eschewing the diplomatic waltzing of the tsars, they rejected dialogue with Europe’s bourgeois states. Following some initial successes — against newly independent Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — they were stopped by the Poles at the gates of Warsaw. After defeat in 1920, Lenin was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, delineating the Soviet Union’s boundary with Poland. The young USSR thus had little to show for this brute display of force, and had failed to regain much of the territory Nicholas II had lost through the First World War.

Stalin’s approach two decades later took vital lessons from this historic mistake, combining the military might of the Red Army with clever diplomatic maneuvering at Yalta. Through tough negotiating and sleights of hand, Stalin convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to accept a dramatic expansion of Soviet territory, alongside a bevy of buffer states from Bulgaria to Hungary. In exchange, Stalin promised to hold free elections in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, a vow he never had any intention of keeping. The results of this maneuvering spoke for themselves: Russia extended its power further than it ever had under the tsars, and governments as far west as Berlin answered directly to Moscow.

These days, there are signs that Putin is ready to talk once more. Even before he attacked his neighbor, he had effectively demanded that Nato expel all new members since 1997. That was clearly unrealistic — but nonetheless hinted at an awareness, somewhere behind that inscrutable facade, that negotiations with the West were necessary. That’s doubly true now there’s someone new in the White House. An instinctive dealmaker, ruthless and transactional, Donald Trump may be the partner Putin needs to formalize the bounds of Russia’s new empire, establish a new balance of power in Europe, and ultimately lay down the ground rules of international relations for the rest of the century.

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The President’s other foreign ventures speak vividly to this shift. With Trump on the verge of launching a trade war with the EU, and pushing to construct a new geopolitical pole stretching from Greenland to Panama, Putin’s threats, once fantastical, now seem eminently achievable. And if all this clearly has significant implications for Ukraine — American recognition of Russian sovereignty over swathes of the country beckon — a range of far-reaching issues are also on the agenda for a future Trump-Putin meeting. Among other things, that includes nuclear arms control and energy prices. Worryingly for the Europeans, meanwhile, it’s becoming ever clearer that any such summit will exclude Ukraine, at least at first, and that Trump won’t merely represent the United States, but rather personify Nato and the whole Western world. Putin certainly sees him that way: with the precedent of Yalta at his back, he’ll view the talks as a generational opportunity to clarify the global playing field from the Pacific to the Danube.

That still leaves the question: what exactly might Putin try and secure from his negotiations with Trump? Once more, Yalta is a guide. Trump himself may see Europe as a sideshow, but for Putin, like Stalin before him, it will always be ground zero for the country’s ambitions. Ukraine may have replaced Poland as the primary object of Russian geopolitical maneuvering, but like in 1945, conversations about its future will form only the backdrop for wider questions about Russia’s sphere of influence. Moldova and Georgia are two obvious candidates here, even as Hungary and Romania, both firmly within the Nato orbit, could yet be up for discussion.

In other words, then, whether or not Ukraine is eventually included in the talks will ultimately be irrelevant. For Putin, the country is little more than an American puppet, and for Trump, it’s a burden. Like Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in 1945, Ukraine’s fate will be decided by Russia and the United States alone, and any subsequent involvement by Kyiv will be little more than window dressing. Once again, we’ve seen this play before. Harry Truman wholeheartedly disagreed with the terms Roosevelt had reached with Stalin — but by the time he took office after FDR’s death, it was too late, and he had no choice but to rubber-stamp Yalta at the Potsdam Conference five months later.

In the end, the green light Moscow received from America was a more powerful tool for its expansionist ambitions than any tank or bomb. Even so, Soviet leaders saw no hint of irony when they played the orchestral finale of A Life for the Tsar at their victory parade in June 1945, a musical retreat to a Russia that never truly existed. Eight decades on, if Yalta 2.0 does indeed come to pass, it will be curious to see if Putin goes for the opera once more. Either way, Michael Romanov would surely be proud.

Enjoying the backing of both the US and Saudi Arabia, Aoun certainly has more hope of success than his predecessors, even as the Lebanese themselves are desperate for change after years of political sclerosis. In the end, though, Aoun will likely be judged on one policy alone — his implicit promise to finally disarm Hezbollah, integrating it into the Lebanese military infrastructure. It likely won’t happen as quickly as Aoun would like. But if the political environment truly begins to shift in that ambitious direction, even with outside help, Lebanon’s exhausted people may finally have something to be optimistic about after all these years.

Given Hezbollah’s long dominance of Lebanese politics, Aoun’s plan would have seemed like a pipedream mere months ago. There’s a reason “The Army, the People, and the Resistance” remained a maxim here for generations. But having been forced to accept an embarrassing ceasefire with Israel, even as its Baathist allies are ousted in Syria and its masters in Tehran are floundering, Hezbollah now has no choice but to accept bad deals like Aoun’s presidency.

Other parties have more reason to cheer. For starters, the Gulf States have gained a foothold in the upper echelons of Lebanese politics. They’ll inevitably use this influence to nudge Beirut away from Hezbollah, and its Iranian paymasters, and toward their own spheres of influence. This process is already underway: Aoun’s first overseas visit as President will be to Riyadh, while the United Arab Emirates has announced it will be reopening its long-shuttered embassy in Beirut. After the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990, the wealthy Sunni oil monarchies of the Arab Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia, started pouring billions into developing Lebanon’s financial sector while propping up powerful proxies in the country’s Sunni sector like the once influential Hariri family. Yet as Hezbollah and Iran’s influence grew and Lebanon’s economy became increasingly toxic, the Gulf states decided to cut their losses — which makes their apparent desire to re-engage now all the more telling.

Especially on the eve of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, meanwhile, the US will gladly use this momentum to pursue its own goals. Washington had been pushing for Aoun’s election even before the November ceasefire that silenced the guns, and his ascension to the presidency is an implicit part of the ceasefire arrangement. As the Biden Administration had rightly perceived, the Israel-Hezbollah war was a rare opportunity to flex its muscles in a Lebanon where the militants had long precluded US influence.

While Iran and its proxies have historically benefited from gaps in formalized state authority in Lebanon, the US and its allies have projected power by centralizing governance. With Aoun now at the helm and a tacit new political compact among the Lebanese elite in the making, the US may be able to push the country’s politicians to actually govern — expanding America’s avenues of influence in the process. The impact of this shift is already becoming apparent as, a mere four days after Aoun’s arrival in office, Lebanese parliamentarians have already coalesced around a candidate for Prime Minister, International Court of Justice chief Nawaf Salam, whom Hezbollah had opposed. In the words of one Hezbollah lawmaker, the group had “extended its hand” by allowing Aoun to rise to the presidency, only to find that “hand cut”.

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Israel, for its part, has opportunities here too. Though Aoun, the scion of a Christian family from war-ravaged south Lebanon, has spoken passionately about deterring the Jewish State, his words about reinstating the government’s monopoly on violence were music to Tel Aviv’s ears — which sees his closeness to the US as a vital insurance policy against Hezbollah. Tel Aviv also likely views Aoun’s elevation as a prerequisite for any arrangement that would end its ongoing occupation of southern Lebanese towns, and its continued one-off strikes against alleged Hezbollah targets, potentially opening the door for a longer-term settlement after the ceasefire runs out later this month.

Both Hezbollah and Israel are continuing to drag their feet on fulfilling their ends of the deal by withdrawing north of the Litani River and south of the Lebanese border respectively. And with less than two weeks to go before the ceasefire deadline, tension is rising. But Aoun, with his deep connections across the Lebanese Armed Forces, may be exactly the right person to convince Hezbollah to keep the peace, allowing the LAF to continue moving into areas formerly governed by the militants.

Certainly, it would be in Hezbollah’s interest for Aoun to succeed — and it knows it. One of the main reasons the group’s politicians ultimately felt compelled to give him their blessing, after all, was because his foreign backers are their only path toward funding for reconstruction works in the war-battered Shi’i south. With Iran retreating across the region, Hezbollah can hardly rely on Tehran to help rebuild shattered towns and villages in its strongholds to Lebanon’s south and east, making Aoun’s connections to Gulf financiers absolutely critical. With over 99,000 homes destroyed or damaged and around $2.8 billion in looming reconstruction costs across the country, the task before the group is monumental — but just as it was after its war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah’s ability to facilitate the recovery of its community will be central for its political future.

Hezbollah had to make a deal with the devil to keep its reputation as a protector of its base alive and well. It’s a pragmatism that seems likely to continue. Quite aside from the eclipse of its Iranian sponsor, its entanglement in Lebanese society means that it can no longer afford to let the country suffer under the combined weight of economic disaster and the ravages of war. Bowing to Western demands, at least in part, has paradoxically become Hezbollah’s only means of survival. Refuse to bend, and Hezbollah’s fundamental promise to be a guarantor of economic and political security for Lebanon’s Shi’a world may start to come apart at the seams, potentially leading some its most weary supporters to turn away from the group in disillusionment.

Nor is it merely the geopolitical runes that seem to be falling in Aoun’s favor. Internally, too, the new President’s sway seems substantial. In addition to projecting power through an emboldened LAF, he’ll have considerable power over what the next Lebanese government actually looks like — especially now that Salam has been all but officially confirmed as the country’s next Prime Minister yesterday in yet another blow to Hezbollah. Though the group is almost certain to hold seats, it and its allies are likely to be outnumbered and outgunned, especially with another leader alongside Aoun who has made a career of earning Hezbollah’s ire. With power of this sort, Aoun and Salam together may finally have the luxury of shaping Lebanon’s politics not at Hezbollah’s behest, but despite it.

Hezbollah clearly won’t wither overnight. That’s clear enough from Aoun’s recent trajectory: the President’s rise to power couldn’t have happened without the militant group’s acquiescence. Hezbollah MPs grudgingly voted for Aoun in the second round of voting, but not before sabotaging the first by submitting blank ballots. Their message was clear: however diminished, our power remains. Hezbollah may also seek to paralyse any new government formed under Salam’s auspices if it doesn’t get what it wants — notably around securing enough posts to maintain veto power — just as it has numerous times before. And even in the (unlikely) best case scenario, a strong government will not be enough to disarm the militants. The group’s weapons remain a golden calf among the group’s base, and even Aoun understands that confiscating them would almost certainly provoke civil war.

But as Hezbollah finds itself with fewer and fewer options, and as US influence continues to grow through the expansion of the LAF, it may find it harder to rebuild its arsenal and prevent the regular army from imposing its will. With the LAF steadily expanding its patrols and permanent presence in Lebanon’s south and along its frontiers, Hezbollah itself will understand that the days when it could treat the LAF like a subservient younger sibling are over, and that it will by necessity need to keep its diminished arsenal far from any areas of LAF operation.

Given how long Hezbollah has dominated Lebanese politics, and the unpredictable ways that its decline could encourage other sectarian groups, predicting the future is challenging. One obvious possibility is that Lebanese Sunni forces muscle ahead, bolstered by Riyadh’s renewed engagement in the country. Even then, there’s the question of whether Hezbollah can fully be disarmed (probably not), and whether Iran can recover from its current weakness (perhaps).

But if Aoun and the LAF do finally succeed in bolstering state authority in the south, and create a defense policy that meaningfully guards against future Israel’s violations of Lebanese sovereignty, Hezbollah may find its arsenal increasingly difficult to maintain — let alone justify politically. With Trump’s maximalist policy of support for Israel on the horizon, meanwhile, there’s hope that Aoun’s presence will guard Lebanon from his worst impulses too.

Even now, of course, disaster could still strike. Aoun’s state-building efforts may finally presage the country’s political, infrastructural, and economic recovery — but on the other hand, Lebanon’s oligarchic system could also unleash the republic’s old fratricidal demons. Change has never come easily to Lebanon, and this time will be no different, no matter which foreign forces call the shots.

But now, suddenly, the Assads are gone, scuttling off to Moscow in disgrace. The Syrian Arab Army, which had occupied Lebanon in some form for decades, and which had fought viciously against Syrian rebels for 14 long years, melted like the Lebanese snow in springtime, fatally weakened by violence and wrecked by pitiful salaries. Yet if this revolution obviously means the most to Damascus, Lebanese too could see their lives change. The end of the Assads, after all, leaves vast economic and political opportunities — if, that is, foreigners avoid meddling in Lebanon once more.

With Syria stumbling into a new era, Lebanese political leaders are struggling to grasp what that means for them: especially given they are already reeling from Israel’s assault on Hezbollah and the not-so-final ceasefire that followed. What they have done, at least, is bolster the country’s security, deploying more troops to the Syrian frontier. To quote the office of Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, his government is working to distance “Lebanon from the repercussions of the developments in Syria”.

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In practice, of course, that’s impossible. Assad may be gone, but Lebanon remains joined at the hip to Syria, just as it always has. Certainly, that’s clear when it comes to Hezbollah. As the militia itself has apparently conceded, Assad’s demise represents a “dangerous” new transformation both for Syria and itself. To understand this, you only need to look at a map. Though it was created as an Iranian proxy, Hassan Nasrallah’s former group always needed help from Syria, with the Assads representing a logistical bridge from Tehran to Beirut. The rebel takeover in Damascus has decisively severed this link, and though Iran may still funnel weapons to Hezbollah by sea, it’ll no longer be able to provide the heavy equipment that made the group so formidable.

Nor do the consequences for Hezbollah end there. As the Syrian economy crumbled, the Assad regime effectively became a narcostate, financing both itself and Hezbollah through the captagon trade. Now though, that funding has gone, even as the ceasefire with Israel has squeezed the group north of the Litani River. Dovetailed with persistant IDF strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure, and the group is weaker than ever, especially when you recall that forces hostile to Hezbollah surround Lebanon on three sides. Even the militia itself has begun to see the light, releasing a statement saying it “supported” the aspirations of the Syrian people — a ludicrous claim after helping Assad butcher civilians for years.

Where Hezbollah falls, meanwhile, other forces may rise to take its place. Already, there are signs that Lebanese heavyweights outside the militia’s circle are breathing more freely. Consider Walid Jumblatt. The leader of the Druze, his father was assassinated by Syrian operatives during the Lebanese Civil War. And though Walid himself remained deferential to Assad for much of the last decade, he nonetheless welcomed the dictator’s expulsion. As he wrote after the regime’s collapse: “I greet the Syrian people after a long wait.” He isn’t alone. Gebran Bassil, a Lebanese Christian politician, recently stated that Hezbollah should now focus on domestic affairs, and end its adventures abroad.

Whether this more open atmosphere translates into action will become clearer as Lebanon approaches its presidential vote on 9 January, with lawmakers hoping they can finally appoint a head of state after two years of gridlock. The Americans, for their part, see an opportunity here too: Washington is pushing the Lebanese parliament to appoint a president not aligned with Hezbollah. For the first time in years, this seems possible. One obvious candidate would be Joseph Aoun, the head of the Lebanese Armed Forces. And though his election is far from guaranteed, Aoun’s ascension to the presidency would be a major blow to Hezbollah’s influence at the top of Lebanon’s politics.

Beyond the parlour games in Beirut, the fall of Assad could soon have vast consequences for the Lebanese themselves. No longer running the risk of an extended stay at Sednaya, many of the million or so Syrian refugees in Lebanon will return home. Their departure will transform Lebanon’s embattled economy, creating much-needed work for locals while throwing industries like agriculture into crisis. For a large segment of the Lebanese political establishment Syrians as a group have long been a convenient political scapegoat, unfairly blamed for political murders and the country’s economic crisis. Their return home won’t solve Lebanon’s problems — but may remove a lightning rod social issue from Lebanese discourse, helping mitigate social tensions at a time of unprecedented uncertainty.

Much could still go wrong. With Hezbollah weakened, and Assad gone, Lebanon’s sectarian politicians are now likely to compete among each other for power. That, it goes without saying, could potentially usher in more instability, or even actual bloodshed. That’s what happened back in 2008, when Hezbollah’s rivals tried to constrain the group following an earlier war with Israel. More to the point, there are plenty of factions ready to take Hezbollah’s place. One is the Amal Movement, another Shi’a organisation, others, such as Christian groups like the Lebanese Forces, could jockey for position too.

Nor are Lebanon’s internal dynamics the only worry here: with Israel one obvious fly in the ointment. In an ideal Middle East, Hezbollah’s growing isolation would encourage the Jewish State to sit back, allowing its old foe to founder. But given the upheaval in Syria, Israel may decide that now is the time to destroy Hezbollah once and for all.

Israeli behaviour certainly seems aggressive. Netanyahu’s first impulse following the rebel takeover of Damascus was to attack Syrian weapons depots, preventing them from falling into militant hands. No less striking, Netanyahu has “temporarily” moved his troops beyond the Golan Heights, illegally annexed by Israel in 1981 — and into Syria proper. The prime minister justified this move by pointing to the collapse of a border security agreement Israel had signed with the Assads back in 1974. Be that as it may, with the IDF’s capture of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, the tallest peak for miles, Israel has gained a strategic point from which to monitor both southern Syria and Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Lebanon. If Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah indeed restarts in the coming months, both Syrians and Lebanese may find themselves dragged into the quagmire once more.

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The new Syria could also cause more direct problems for Lebanon. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) leader, is presenting himself and his forces as moderate Islamists interested in preserving a genuinely pluralistic Syria, but it’s unclear if he’ll stick to this agenda. Though HTS seems unwilling to launch incursions into Lebanon for now, a resurgent Hezbollah could change that. No less worrying, HTS has form here. Under its former guise of Jabhat al-Nusra, it launched several forays across the border. The Syrian war even sparked a micro-conflict in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where Sunni militias fought their Shi’a rivals for years.

An Islamist regime in Damascus, then, could quickly reopen Lebanon’s own religious wounds. And that’s not the only Syria threat. Between Syrian Kurdish forces, clashing with groups backed Turkey, to the competing foreign ties of other rebel factions, renewed violence is likely. And as reports now emerge of pro-Assad Syrians fleeing over the border to Lebanon, there’s a risk that Beirut gets dragged back into its neighbour’s political fights — especially if the new rulers in Damascus choose to hunt down their newly exiled enemies.

As with so much else in the Levant right now, it’s too early to know how things will go. Yet Lebanon now faces its most significant movement of flux since the end of the civil war in 1990. With Iran and Hezbollah on the decline, the US resurgent, and the Gulf States and Turkey poised to return to Lebanese politics, there’s plenty to play for. Let’s just hope the country’s long-suffering citizens don’t yet again lose to other peoples’ games.

This is important: and not merely for the militia itself, or the 1.4 million civilians displaced by violence. For 35 years, Lebanese and foreigners alike have battled to build a genuine Lebanese state. Every time, they’ve failed, stymied by Hezbollah and its allies. This time, though, Hezbollah may have little to say in the matter, even as its own future depends on strengthening the civilian political order. Not that Lebanon’s hapless politicians should necessarily be making plans just yet. For while Hezbollah is surely weakened, there are still forces eager to hamstring Lebanese democracy — both among the country’s bickering sects, and in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lebanese politicians were quick to grasp the ceasefire’s implications. Just hours after the deal was inked, Prime Minister Najib Mikati vowed to “assert the state’s authority over every inch of the homeland”, adding that the Lebanese army must be “at the forefront” of any such move. To be sure, Mikati isn’t the first Lebanese premier to make a dash for sovereignty. Fouad Siniora faced a full-scale rebellion by Hezbollah after moving to dismantle its influence in 2008. Three years earlier, the group assassinated Rafiq Hariri for trying something similar.

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Almost two decades on from Hariri’s killing, however, Hezbollah is far weaker. The fact it’s been forced to accept America’s ceasefire terms speaks volumes, especially when the deal includes provisions that had once seemed impossible. That notably includes the long-awaited implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed at the end of the 2006 war with Israel, and which requires Hezbollah to withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. In fact, Wednesday’s deal is even more far-reaching, with Hezbollah also obliged to retreat from a mountaintop that overlooks northern Israel. The area’s strategic value has been known for centuries: crusaders built a castle on the peak back in the 12th century, and its ruins attract tourists to this day.

In Hezbollah’s place, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will be deployed to the country’s south instead. They’ll be in charge of security, and preventing any violations of the ceasefire. Among other things, that could include attempts by Hezbollah to smuggle weapons into the country. As part of the agreement, meanwhile, the US, France and other countries will raise funds to train the LAF, helping it fulfil its new mandate. There are reasons to be sceptical of such an arrangement: it failed spectacularly in 2006. This time, though, the ceasefire includes the creation of a new committee, led by the US and France, to monitor the situation in southern Lebanon and ensure the ceasefire holds.

Nor is this merely a theoretical plan. So far, in fact, things mostly seem to be proceeding smoothly — in terms of the LAF’s deployment anyway. Columns of Lebanese military vehicles have started trundling south, while LAF troops have already entered several towns, much to the relief of exhausted locals. It hasn’t all been easy: Israel has already claimed that Hezbollah is ignoring the ceasefire in several places, leading to limited but deadly clashes with the group at several spots along the border. Hezbollah, in turn, has accused Israel of firing in the direction of civilians returning to their homes. Yet at the same time, Hezbollah missile launchers have been spotted moving northward, and the group has said it’s cooperating with the LAF as it assumes control in the south.

What does all this mean in practice? At the very least, Hezbollah’s monopoly on violence in the south has decisively ended: a monumental shift in itself. For a generation, the group had branded itself as the only organisation in Lebanon capable of acting as its “resistance” to Israel, using this title to justify its extensive arsenal and its domination of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and much of the Beqaa Valley. Though Hezbollah supporters have claimed that their northward withdrawal changes nothing, the fact is that the organisation’s image is now tarnished. How, to put it differently, can Hezbollah act as the “resistance” to Israel now that it’s retreated almost 30 kilometres from its enemy’s border? The humiliating demise of Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders is hardly good optics either.

As for Lebanon itself, Hezbollah’s moment of weakness is an opportunity. For the first time in decades, the Lebanese government and its military might just have enough political capital among Lebanon’s war-weary public to assert themselves, finally dragging their country back from the prospect of total state failure.

Especially if they can secure genuine backing from the West, Lebanese leaders may be able to use their present momentum to create the foundations for a fully functioning state. Yesterday, one day after the start of the ceasefire, the country’s feeble government announced that it had agreed to finally hold presidential elections in January: a goal that had eluded it for more than two years.

Naturally, Hezbollah and its allies will continue to hold sway. But with the stick of Israeli guns, and the carrot of American diplomatic and financial support, the government that emerges from the ceasefire will be forced to claw back at least some power from Hezbollah — and will, by default, be more pro-Western than before. Lebanon’s infamous corruption and sectarian infighting will doubtlessly persist. Yet with an increasingly tangible partner, Lebanon’s international friends may finally see an opening to forge a path forward toward not only a new security reality in the country, but also a new economic one as well.

It’s a good sign, surely, that Lebanon’s embattled civilian politicians have received tentative support from an unlikely source: Hezbollah itself. Already, the militia’s relatively passive public statements reflect a willingness to work with the suits — a sign, perhaps, that they know their legitimacy is bruised. Though Hezbollah’s MPs were quick to claim that the “resistance” would continue, meanwhile, they’ve also stated that they would help “people to return [home] and to rebuild”. No less striking, Hezbollah’s new Secretary General has claimed his organisation would work within the framework of the Taif Accords. Ending the Lebanese Civil War, in 1990, they called for the dismantling of the country’s militias. Hezbollah, it hardly needs saying, has ignored that particular clause for decades.

All the same, it would be wrong to bet the house on a new Lebanon. The government in Beirut does have a great opportunity to assert its strength: but that’s partly because it has got so much space to fill. As it stands, the Lebanese state is little more than an abandoned husk, occupied by a myriad of sectarian political parties. To put it differently, then, the post-war order offers ample opportunities to several other partisan groups — certainly not Hezbollah, but no more democratic for it.

Hezbollah’s Shi’a allies in the Amal Movement, and who have challenged the group’s position in the past, may well view this moment as an opportunity to present themselves as a less risky and volatile party for Lebanese Shi’a. Among Christians, parties that once tacitly backed Hezbollah have already moved away. And if that creates the potential for a more unified anti-Iranian bloc, Sunni parties like the Saudi-backed Future Movement may well re-emerge too.

As I wrote last month, then, this maelstrom will doubtless lead to renewed chaos over the years ahead, especially if Mikati and his deputies fail to exert power over their country’s borders, or else fail to restrain a resurgent Hezbollah.

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And certainly, just such a scenario is possible. The militia, after all, is far more than a domestic Lebanese outfit, with its masters in Tehran remaining crucial. Hezbollah’s troubles have severely damaged Iran’s position in the region, and not simply in terms of men or materiel. For one thing, the ceasefire deal has shattered a central tenet of the regime’s grand strategy: that the fight against Israel in Gaza was inextricably linked to the battle for Lebanon. Though Iran reportedly pressured the militia to accept the ceasefire deal, meanwhile, it also promised to resupply its proxy. But given Israel has implicitly reserved the right to renew attacks against Hezbollah if it violates the ceasefire, something it would inevitably do with US backing, practical support is now much harder to provide. Especially with rival sectarian groups circling, in short, Iran now faces a much less hospitable Lebanese landscape.

Combined with the pressure the ceasefire puts on another Iranian ally — Hezbollah has long supported the Assad dictatorship in Syria — Tehran’s freedom of movement suddenly looks rather constrained. The point, though, is that Iran’s leaders are nothing if not long-term thinkers: there’s no reason to believe that the sphere of influence they’ve meticulously built over decades will suddenly collapse. While, in short, the Islamic Republic’s singular focus on Hezbollah as its strategic lynchpin has proved costly, the country still has moves to play. Just like after the 2006 war, when Beirut tried to use the moment to wrest some control back from Hezbollah, the stage is therefore set for another confrontation. On one side sits the militia and Iran. On the other waits the Lebanese state and its friends. Who’ll emerge triumphant remains to be seen.

In Warsaw, however, politicians struck a rather less sycophantic tone. “The wind of history is blowing even stronger,” proclaimed Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, soon after Trump’s victory. “Poland’s leadership will rise to the occasion.” And why not? Poland already leads Europe on defence spending as a percentage of GDP, and boasts the third-largest army in Nato. And, especially if Trump makes good on his threat to abandon his transatlantic allies to their fate, the country might yet have an opportunity to become a military powerhouse right across the continent — one that could yet evoke the country’s bygone days of geopolitical dominance. 

Trump’s election is already transforming Polish politics. With the country’s 2025 presidential election looming, Sikorski, who threw his hat into the ring to become the nominee for the ruling Civic Platform party shortly before the US election, has now recalibrated his campaign around Trump’s victory. Among other things, Sikorski argues that what Poland needs now is someone with the diplomatic experience to weather the vagaries of a Trump presidency. Just as important, the foreign minister points out that he has a good working relationship with Trump, distinguishing himself from Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and Sikorski’s rival for the job.

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In reality, though, Trump’s victory is about far more than day-to-day political bickering. For while capitals across Eastern Europe are unsurprisingly worried by the security implications of America First, they equally know that whatever happens, they’re going to have to take care of themselves. And if that means filling a US-shaped void in terms of national security, not least when it comes to Russia, the disappearance of American power may also bolster the presence of the Poles or Romanians on the wider Europe stage. 

That’s clear enough West of the Oder. The recent collapse of Olaf Scholz’s government in Germany was partly triggered by arguments over support for Ukraine and the prospect that US assistance might end, even as the chancellor has been criticised by other Nato members for speaking to Vladimir Putin for the first time in years. Not that the chaos in Berlin should surprise the generals in Tallinn or Sofia. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Nato’s centre of gravity has gradually shifted eastwards. It’s no coincidence that ministerial talks on the future of European defence were lately held in Warsaw. And though Emmanuel Macron has lately started making bold statements about deploying Nato forces to Ukraine, he was only following Poland’s lead.

To put it differently, then, only the Eastern Europeans have concrete incentives to take Trump’s security threats seriously: and only Poland has the wealth and expertise to actually drag its neighbours towards an independent defence policy. And, in a sense, that’s wholly appropriate. For while Western observers are more familiar with Poland’s years of subjugation — first by Prussia and the Tsar, later by Hitler and the Soviets — there was once a time that the country dominated the continent. In 1683, it was chiefly through the intervention of King Jan III Sobieski that Catholic armies defeated the invading Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna. Pope Innocent XI swiftly proclaimed Sobieski the “saviour of Western civilisation” for the timely arrival of the famed winged hussars. Around the same time, Polish kings, ruling over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, flanked the Baltic and Black Seas, and dominated Central and Eastern European affairs all while maintaining an inventive (if imperfect) system of elective monarchy. 

Over subsequent centuries, Polish leaders like Marshal Józef Piłsudski have occasionally tried to reclaim this illustrious mantle, seeing Poland not as a European hegemon, but rather as a power counterweight to both Russian and German expansionism. It goes without saying, of course, that the sober liberals of the Civic Platform don’t see themselves as Sobieskis reborn. Yet with Trump taking a hammer to the foundations of the European security order, the pendulum of history does seem to be swinging back towards a Polish military renaissance. 

It surely helps that since the end of the Cold War, Poland has worked hard to build up its forces. Quite aside from the headline GDP numbers, that’s clear enough elsewhere too. The country has emerged as the largest tank power in Europe, and boasts the third-largest fleet of F-16 jets on the continent. That’s shadowed by a recent shipment of F-35s from the US, with Poland receiving a custom model of the plane from Lockheed Martin. The new batch, for its part, is aptly named “Husarz” — a nod to the winged hussars of old. At the same time, Poland’s military leadership recently announced plans to develop an AI centre to support decision-making. Not to be outdone, Warsaw also said it was acquiring 486 HIMARS launchers: a ridiculous number, if undoubtedly a statement of intent. 

No less important, Poland has geographical reasons to take defence seriously. The only Nato member to share borders with both Ukraine and Russia, Poles have learnt by hard experience that their location on the North European Plain is painfully exposed. Since Trump’s election, though, officials in Warsaw have eagerly underlined that, whatever the political priorities in Washington, they remain unconcerned about America’s commitment to Poland in particular or Nato in general. 

We shouldn’t imagine that Poland can become entirely self-sufficient here, at least not for the moment anyway. It surely speaks volumes that Poland’s president recently felt the need to remind the world, and presumably Trump himself, of the importance of the American alliance. The fact he did so on Poland’s independence day is even more revealing. 

But nor should Andrzej Duda worry too much: despite his tough talk, Trump will find it almost impossible to escape Europe entirely. With the landmark opening of the first permanent US base in Poland last week, as part of a broader pan-European missile defence shield, America will necessarily continue to play some role in the region. Ever the businessman, Trump is also likely to see Eastern Europe as an enticing customer for America’s military-industrial complex. Earlier this year, the US granted loans to Poland and Romania, totalling $2 billion and $920 million respectively, all to buy American weapons. Except similar deals over the years ahead — especially if Trump is confident Nebraska farm boys won’t need to be deployed to help use them. 

Indeed, the President-elect’s essential self-interest could yet prove a boon to Eastern Europe. That’s doubtless true if Trump reduces the American troop presence enough to satisfy his domestic base — but nonetheless retains the country’s existing military infrastructure. That, in turn, could offer countries like Poland the best of both worlds: the Americans would provide essential support, in line with their own interests, even as Warsaw develops a more independent defence policy, one that ultimately goes beyond the strictures imposed by Washington. 

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In practice, this means Warsaw could finally execute major defence initiatives previously held in check by the Biden administration. One good example here is shooting down incoming Russian missiles and drones over Ukrainian airspace. As I wrote back in September, Russian projectiles have crossed into Polish, Romanian, and Latvian airspace several times since 2022, occasionally landing hundreds of kilometres inside Nato territory. Not only does this pose a threat to civilians, it also raises the risk of an Article V declaration against Russia. Certainly Mark Rutte, Nato’s new secretary general, seems to understand that where Poland goes, he’ll eventually need to travel too.

Nor is a decline in American interest merely a chance for Warsaw to flex its military muscles. On the contrary, Poland has also shown striking independence on migration policy as well. Warsaw has long viewed the influx of migrants along its border with Belarus — arguably history’s first man-made migration crisis — as indistinguishable from the security threats it faces from Russian hybrid operations in its territory and the errant Russian missiles lobbed from Ukraine. Much to the chagrin of NGOs, and despite some initial pushback, Europe has now mostly accepted the Polish narrative. 

Combined with Eastern Europe’s rising military might, and the region is clearly moving away from its traditional role as a pale imitator of Paris or Berlin. On the contrary, Warsaw and Bucharest could yet become the cities where the continent’s policy is devised and executed. Once that Pandora’s Box is opened, moreover, it’ll be impossible to close — even after 2028. Whatever happens in four years, whoever enters the White House after Trump may yet find a Europe transformed, one where the future is decided less in stagnant Brussels, and more in a fearless and prosperous Warsaw.

Poland’s cultural renaissance couldn’t have started under grimmer circumstances. Back in 2022, when war came to Ukraine, Warsaw quickly established itself as a key player in the broader Nato network. Yet amid the turmoil on Poland’s eastern border, and its robust support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s broader image was shifting too. Already, it had successfully emerged from Eastern European obscurity and taken on various associations in the Western mind, from a bulwark of Catholic traditionalism to an alternative destination for American tourists who want to experience “Europe” without the crowds or Parisians. 

Yet it’s online that Poland has truly found a new life in mainstream culture, where vodka-soaked stereotypes are falling away. Among some obscure circles, that’s been true for years: starting in the 2000s, Polish users on forums like 4chan pioneered memes like Polandball and Wojak, the “feels guy” that continues to dominate the internet today. Starting in 2007, meanwhile, The Witcher series of video games won the hearts of players everywhere, and was later adapted into a Netflix series. 

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Yet while these aspects of Poland’s digital patrimony have surely had a lasting impact among young online men, their broader reach was limited. No less important, their connection to Poland itself was often lost along the way: how many people watching Henry Cavill slay monsters really knew his character had been invented by a novelist from Łódź? In practice, that meant Poland long punched below its weight as a driver of internet culture, despite being Europe’s fifth most populous country, its sixth largest economy, and a leader in the use of digital services.

But as Poland’s political star soared, the country has secured a new and unlikely online audience: Gen Z. This odd-ball surge in enthusiasm was partly down to luck. It all started in November 2022, when an errant missile crashed in an eastern Polish field. After realising the incident was a mistake, rather than the precursor to a Russian invasion, the media quickly moved on. But, remarkably, the episode coincided with the release of Poland, a hit song by rapper Lil Yachty. 

Whether due to the fortunate timing, or anyway thanks to the absurdism of a codeine-fueled hip hop anthem, the track went viral. Despite having little to do with Poland itself, meanwhile, the song’s music video, which currently has 33 million views on YouTube, also happens to feature Polish flags flying beneath the medieval walls of Kraków. Soon enough, Mateusz Morawiecki, the country’s then prime minister, had invited Lil Yachty to explore Poland for real. Last year, the rapper ended up performing the song six times at the Open’er Festival in the northern city of Gdynia.

This past summer, Poland found itself in the spotlight again, when notorious YouTuber and streamer IShowSpeed visited the country while on a transatlantic tour. He was impressed, declaring it “low-key the best country in Europe.” That was swiftly followed by Quavo, another rapper who posted a video of himself stopping in a Polish bakery. Amid the doughnuts and animal-shaped cookies, the clip garnered over two million views on Instagram. 

Taken together, Poland had now come to the attention of Gen Z, whose memes mocking IShowSpeed run-ins with the intricacies of the Polish language have spread like wildfire. In contrast to Poland’s rather obscure online presence over previous years, these new bits of micro-culture have had tangible effects in the offline world: I soon found myself discussing Polish memes at actual parties with real people. I’m apparently not alone. Sales of a Polish bottled water brand, and accidental star of one famous meme, have apparently risen since IShowSpeed’s visit.

What stands out about the internet’s encounters with Poland over the last two years is a sense that netizens experience the country as it exists. That’s a change from the old historical cliches, of winged hussars and ugly apartment blocks, that have plagued its image for decades. Just as importantly, Poland is today seen as a standard-bearer for that “other” Europe, one online Americans are rarely exposed to. In internet narratives about Poland’s place in Europe and the world, Warsaw and Wrocław are increasingly lionised, in contrast to the over-saturated western side of the continent. Not unrelated, some recent online praise for Poland carries with it the whiff of nativism, with the country lauded for its safety, cleanliness, and supposed preservation of a “pure” and homogeneous European culture — an inaccurate stereotype that’s anyway been dampened by the defeat of the Right-wing Law and Justice Party in last year’s elections.

Yet the most enduring exhibit of Poland’s online influence aren’t fashy Instagram reels about Polish cities “free” of migrants, but rather an off-beat meme. As far back as 2012, Polish social media users started posting videos of themselves following beavers, usually at night, and exclaiming “Kurwa bóbr!” — which roughly translates to “Fuck, a beaver!” Despite an illustrious history in Polish online communities, the meme shot to wider fame in 2023, when a video of such an encounter gained 30 million views on TikTok.

While the phrases foreigners associate with Italy or France are friendly greetings, it’s been Poland’s destiny to become closely associated with a swear word. And though kurwa is used right across Central and Eastern Europe, it’s safe to say Poles have monopolised the term’s brand. As beaver memes spread across the internet, so too did the popularity of kurwa, which skyrocketed on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of last year. 

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The beaver meme phenomenon, and the associated use of kurwa, has become as intimately connected to Poland online, just as the faux pas of breaking spaghetti has to Italy and the supposed blandness of the food has to Britain. Underneath the meme’s absurdity lies an uncompromising honesty that’s unequivocally Polish, even as it hints, paradoxically, at the country’s newly robust presence on the geopolitical stage.

What all this means for Poland’s future cultural impact is unclear. But what’s indisputable is that as its voice becomes increasingly vital to European politics, the country’s online clout will only grow. And if its appeal at this phase remains quirky and irreverent, the power of the Polish brand will, I think, eventually translate to cultural heft on a par with that of its famous western neighbours. Offline, the stage has already been set for such a transformation. Polish cuisine, long enjoying a patronising reputation as comfort food, lately received official recognition when a local soup was named the second best on earth.

Alongside its famous tradition of video game development, Polish cinema has also been praised by Hollywood filmmakers, even as Poles have scooped up Nobel Prizes as recently as 2018. Of course, beaver memes may seem like a long way from such highbrow engines of the country’s soft power. But in our terminally online world, one sphere drives the other. Though Poles might cringe at the thought, then, a day is coming when kurwa bóbr is as widely understood as bonjour, danke and gracias. 

Yet 16 years later, there’s no doubt that the Russo-Georgian War marked the start of a new era in Russia’s relationship with its near abroad, culminating in the invasion of Ukraine and the shadow conflict with the West that followed. Now, after all, Georgia has once again become the epicentre of this new Cold War. It’s just that this time, Russia and its proxies are using ballot boxes rather than tanks to capture the Georgian state.

Ahead of the country’s pivotal parliamentary elections on 26 October, Georgian liberals were cautiously optimistic. For the first time in years, the country’s fractured opposition stood a chance of ousting the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party from power. Initially favourable exit polls only confirmed their hope. But soon enough, their excitement was dashed. Despite pursuing a highly divisive policy agenda — including the passage of an infamous foreign agent law in May, dovetailed by more recent laws limiting LGBT activity — Georgian Dream secured a stunning 54% of the vote.

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The same evening, opposition parties appeared on national TV, denouncing the vote as illegitimate. Among other things, they cited electoral fraud, violence, and intimidation. Videos of a Georgian Dream loyalist stuffing ballots into a box went viral across Georgian media, as did clips of government supporters attacking election observers. Independent statistical analysis corroborated many of their claims. Over the following days, meanwhile, the country’s opposition-aligned president called for protests against the results of the election, accusing Russia of orchestrating Georgian Dream’s victory. The four main opposition parties also pledged to boycott Parliament, effectively incapacitating the Georgian Dream government.

Though investigations into the vote continue, the battle lines have already been drawn. So far, only Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have recognised the result. On the other hand, the US, the EU, and various European governments have denounced the voting irregularities and expressed “alarm” at the electoral process. Already, Sweden has cut ties with the Georgian government over its democratic backsliding.

With few signs the opposition will back down, comparisons have already been made between Tbilisi and Kyiv’s Euromaidan revolution of 2014. Certainly, the showdown in Georgia could yet prove just as consequential: not just for the small mountain nation but for the whole post-Soviet space. Like Ukraine a decade ago, after all, Georgia has become ground zero for confrontation between Russia and the West.

And while the slaughter in the Ukraine may be the shadow conflict’s most dramatic expression, it’s in Georgia where Russia’s ability to dominate its neighbours is being tested most vividly. “Russia will say that ‘we win like always.’ But Russia will lose this battle against Ukraine and Georgia,” says Luka, a 21-year-old student at an opposition-led protest on Monday. “We will fight until we die.”

Certainly, the stakes for young Georgians couldn’t be higher. For those eager to finally join the European Union — according to one poll from last year, that’s almost 90% of the population — the fight is existential. If Georgian Dream’s victory holds, the country’s EU ambitions are dead. Democratic politics more generally is fighting for survival too: Georgian Dream has pledged to outlaw the majority of opposition parties, likening Saturday’s vote to the Nuremberg Trials.

Given this polarised atmosphere, there are only a few ways the crisis could end, especially when both the West and Russia have so much to lose. Having staked their reputation on challenging the election results, opposition parties are unlikely to accept a Georgian Dream government. If the opposition maintains its boycott of Parliament, and the president continues to refuse to approve the new government, Georgian Dream will be unable to hold parliamentary sessions without two-thirds of elected members being present. That, in turn, would make Georgian Dream — and by extension Russian — unable to legally govern.

In such a situation, Georgian Dream could conceivably choose to buck the law and sidestep the opposition entirely, leading to a constitutional crisis and putting Georgia on an even more perilous collision course with the EU and the US. Brussels and Washington, for their part, are already looking to expand their sanctions against the party.

On the other hand, Georgia could head for a political stand-off in which neither Georgian Dream nor the pro-Western opposition budge. That would doubtless lead to political paralysis: which Russia would be sure to exploit. Already, officials in Moscow have stated that they’re prepared to intervene on Georgian Dream’s behalf if the situation called for it. Nor is this bullishness very surprising. As I explained back in May, Georgia’s position by the Black Sea, along both trade routes and energy pipelines, makes it strategically vital to both Russia and Nato.

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Beyond Georgia itself, meanwhile, a Russian victory here would have repercussions much further afield. Consider Armenia, which has been slipping away from Moscow for years, but which is nonetheless dependent on Georgia for transit. To put it differently, Russian domination of Georgia could force Yerevan to move back towards Moscow’s orbit too. The fall of Georgia could equally demoralise anti-Kremlin movements in places like Moldova and even Kazakhstan.

There are other reasons for Russia to force the issue in Georgia too. The war in Ukraine may be going reasonably well — but fighting a full-scale war is nonetheless risky, costly and domestically destabilising. On the other hand, electoral trickery of the sort Moscow’s trying in Georgia is relatively straightforward, and indeed has been part of its playbook for years. The point, clear enough from Baku to Almaty, is this: if Russia gets away with state capture in Tbilisi, it can do the same anywhere.

While, in short, the Euromaidan revolution was the first attempt to reverse Russian domination of its near abroad, Georgia has now become another kind of test case: is it possible that Putin’s expansionism can be defeated through peaceful means alone? And while the fight in Tbilisi is only just beginning, and Western powers are so far holding back, escalation is inevitable — Georgia, and all it represents, is far too important to abandon.

In the wake of a cross-sectarian protest movement, and deep-seated popular anger against the corrupt and intransigent Lebanese state, many Lebanese saw their former colonial master as the answer to all their prayers. The President was especially well-received in Gemmayzeh, a Christian bastion, and one of the neighbourhoods most affected by the port explosion. Macron, for his part, played his part well, echoing the grievances of a people beset by a crumbling economy and shameless elite corruption. “I’m not here to help them,” Macron proclaimed. “I’m here to help you.”

So popular was Macron’s visit, in fact, that 50,000 Lebanese even signed a petition urging France to recolonise their homeland. The President never addressed the petition, but beyond helping raise €250 million for the benighted country, he also established an ambitious roadmap to transform Lebanon, claiming he’d received assurances from Lebanese leaders that they’d soon form a new cabinet. The humanitarian duly arrived — but the reforms never materialised. It took another year before Lebanon’s bickering politicians finally formed a new government, and by all appearances it’s just as feckless as any other.

Now, four years later, Macron is trying to save Lebanon once more — this time motivated as much by domestic political concerns as by France’s influence in the Middle East. Today in Paris, he’s hosting an international conference to garner “support” for Lebanon’s people and sovereignty, after already endorsing a ceasefire proposal to end Israel’s war in the country. Facing challengers from both the Left and the Right at home, Macron has become all but powerless domestically, and sees high-profile crises in places like Ukraine, Africa, and especially Lebanon as opportunities to boost his credentials as a bold international player. But his chances of success this time around are little better than they were four years ago. For while France has grand pretensions in Lebanon, drawing on centuries of tangled cultural and political engagement, the truth is that the Middle East has moved on.

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Relations between France and Lebanon stretch back almost 1,000 years. During the First Crusade, Count Raymond of Toulouse “discovered” the Maronites, the largest of Lebanon’s Christian sects, living in the mountains of the Levant, thereby reconnecting them to the rest of Western Christendom. Centuries later in 1649, as the area today known as Lebanon gained a degree of autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty, France opened its first consulate in Beirut and officially took the Maronites under its protection at the behest of the community’s patriarch. In the 19th century, meanwhile, as the protector of Lebanon’s Christian population, France armed the Maronites against their local rivals and even sent troops on their behalf. All the while, France spread the glories of its culture across the Mediterranean, opening universities and lycées. Even today, names like Beirut’s Saint Joseph University evoke the best schooling Lebanon can offer.

These varied efforts would be crystalised in 1923, when France established colonial mandates in Lebanon and Syria. Unlike in Damascus, where foreign rule was fiercely resisted, many in Beirut saw the French as cousins — perhaps unsurprising for a Christian-majority country where French education had long been prized. Soon enough, meanwhile, these varied influences would reshape Lebanese identity. Greetings like ça va and bonjour became common refrains in Beirut cafés, even as many Christians named their children Georges or Pierre. Michel Aoun, a commander during the Civil War and later the country’s president, is just one of many political luminaries to have a French name too.

Though French was most eagerly embraced by the Maronites, it was equally used right across society. At the institutional level, French has long appeared on Lebanon’s currency, its central bank is officially known as The Banque du Liban, and French transliterations of Arabic place names continue to appear on signs across the country to this day. Even now, around 40% of Lebanese can speak at least some French.

All the same, French in Lebanon would fade. Perhaps the main obvious factor is demography. Though the Maronite elite envisaged the modern Lebanese state as a Christian island in a Muslim sea, the country today is a multicultural nation of Sunni and Shi’a, Christian and Druze. Maronites, for their part, along with other Christian sects, have fallen sharply as a share of the country’s total population. As Lebanon’s population has grown and many Christians emigrated in search of greener pastures, the percentage of Maronites and other Christian groups in the country dropped from around 50% in 1932 to around 32% today. And while French retains some prestige among the country’s elite, the idea that Lebanon is some hardy Christian outpost is unsurprisingly alien to the Shi’as of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley.

Little wonder, then, that English has supplanted French as the most popular foreign language among young Lebanese. White-collar professionals have moved the same way, with English business jargon and phrases like “sorry” or “bye” (often in combination with the Arabic expression yalla) now as ubiquitous in the local Arabic dialect as French once was. Renowned newspapers that once published exclusively in French like L’Orient-Le Jour have launched English-language versions in the past few years, and recent Lebanese films like The Insult have opted to use English, rather than French, titles. While I was in Beirut several years ago, a friend comically recounted how a Lebanese university student at a poetry reading said they had written their poem in Arabic because, they claimed absurdly, it was “a dying language” in Lebanon — and was giving way not to French, but rather to English.

Nor is this merely a story of linguistic change. For as French’s star has fallen, so too has that of the Republic itself. Though Paris deployed troops to Lebanon during the Civil War — and helped secure the release of then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Saudi custody as recently as 2017 — it’s generally been supplanted by the US. After all, it’s now Washington not Paris that funds the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the Pentagon pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Lebanon since the Nineties. The US too has emerged as the primary Western backer of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim political elite alongside its ally Saudi Arabia, and there is hardly a better symbol of its growing might in the country than its gargantuan, fortress-like embassy looking down on Beirut from the surrounding hills. It hardly helps that France’s own foreign policy, typified by the independent spirit of people like Jacques Chirac, has long since been subsumed by American interests.

Taken together, then, the pleas of Lebanese Francophiles back in 2020 were little more than the dying breaths of a lost age. As the President’s appearance in 2020 so vividly proved, the “Paris of the Middle East” vanished long ago. And performative proposals aside, today’s conference won’t achieve much either. Tellingly, neither Israel nor Iran are attending Macron’s shindig, making any progress towards a ceasefire a non-starter, and although the US is sending a few diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will not be present. It’s clear then that the most critical players involved in the conflict see it as a sideshow, and Macron’s ability to act decisively in the region has long disappeared, if it ever existed at all. Where Lebanon now goes, in short, is out of France’s hands.

Hezbollah is far from finished. It has continued to fire hundreds of rockets, and at times even ballistic missiles, towards Israel on a daily basis over recent weeks. In Lebanon’s south, its guerrilla forces have reportedly repelled Israeli advances, claiming to have killed dozens of troops and destroyed multiple Israeli Merkava tanks. And if Hamas has been able to endure a year of war with Israel in the tiny Gaza Strip, the expansive Shi’a militia will surely endure too.

Yet whether the war in the north persists for weeks, months, or longer, it’s already clear that Lebanon’s old political order is dead and buried. As its fierce resistance to the IDF implies, this is less about Hezbollah’s military capabilities — and more because of politics. With the group humbled by Israel, Lebanon’s powerbrokers are finally poised to nudge the militants from their prized place at the top of the country’s political hierarchy. That, in turn, will leave space for the group’s allies and rivals to scrap for influence, both in Lebanon itself and across the region. As disastrous as the status quo has been for the Lebanese people, in short, whatever happens next will surely rival the worst crises of the country’s modern history.

The essential problem here is how Lebanon works. It may in theory be a democratic republic, but in practice the country’s politics is a tangle of feudal, sectarian fiefs, each ruled by an oligarchy of former warlords operating though political parties. Woven into this complex tapestry are threads of foreign influence. From Syria to Israel to Iran, they’ve each prodded Lebanon in varied directions since the latter’s independence from France in 1943. No wonder the formal state has become little more than a way for domestic leaders and their foreign backers to enrich themselves at the expense of the Lebanese people.

This reality is unlikely to change after the current war. But it also means that, unlike in Gaza, Hezbollah and its Iranian masters aren’t the only game in town. Certainly, Lebanon’s elite are keenly aware of this. Having for years been forced to watch their country be abused by Hezbollah and Iran, the prospect of winning back some degree of independence is surely enticing.

That’s especially true given that Hezbollah have been making themselves unpopular for years. Consider, for instance, their support of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War. Apart from alienating Lebanese Sunnis, who loathed the Syrian army’s extermination of their coreligionists in Aleppo and Homs, many Lebanese Shi’a couldn’t understand the relationship between Assad’s brutality and Hezbollah’s claims to be fighting for a free Palestine.

In more recent years, moreover, Hezbollah increasingly became bound up within the Lebanese state itself. That meant it was forced to act as a guarantor of the country’s corrupt order, even as people from across the religious spectrum rose up in protest after the financial collapse of 2019. Many Lebanese, especially Christians, also blamed the group for the catastrophic 2020 Beirut port blast, hardly unsurprising given Hezbollah essentially shut down efforts to investigate it.

Though Hezbollah’s level of support among Lebanese Shi’a remains high, and is perhaps more robust than ever right now, it’s now far less popular among other denominations. At the height of the 2006 war, after all, the group was lionised across the Middle East for its stout defence against Israel, with its support among Christians, Druze and Sunnis ranging from 80-89%. These days, almost exactly 18 years later, polls show that their non-Shi’a support had collapsed to just 10%, with more than half of Lebanese stating they had no trust in Hezbollah at all.

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Given all this, the arrival of full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah was the last straw for many Lebanese — and their political representatives. Without a sitting president since 2022, and with a mere caretaker as prime minister, the main representative of the Lebanese state has long been Nabih Berri. A career politician and long-time parliamentary speaker, he’s for decades served as Lebanon’s political kingmaker. And though he’s long tied his political prospects to Hezbollah, in the last few days Berri has signalled that he may sidestep Hezbollah’s preferred presidential candidate in favour of a consensus-minded alternative. The Biden Administration has reportedly backed this proposal too, even as it prods the Lebanese elite to pick a new president before any ceasefire with Israel is signed.

The election of a president without Hezbollah’s blessing — and indeed one backed by the White House — would be a major departure from the tenure of former president Michel Aoun. Serving from 2016 to 2022, he proved a reliable Hezbollah ally. More fundamentally, though, the relegation of Hezbollah’s voice within Lebanon’s bewildering political chorus could have broader implications too. Within the country’s sectarian parliamentary system, it may signal that Berri and his Amal Movement seek to grab more influence among Lebanon’s Shi’a.

Other political factions could be quick to pounce too. One example is the Lebanese Forces, the country’s largest Christian party, which has long opposed Hezbollah. They’ve already spoken out against Hezbollah, Iran, and the current war, and may ultimately seek to absorb burgeoning discontent among Lebanese Christians toward Hezbollah — and in doing so may try to gain leverage over their confessional rivals, namely Michel Aoun and his Hezbollah-aligned Christian party. Lebanon’s Sunni leaders, who’ve struggled to make their voices heard amid Hezbollah’s dominance, could also feel reinvigorated to pursue their interests — especially if Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States decide to reinvest in Lebanon now that Hezbollah is weaker.

Naïve observers may be inclined to see this political merry-go-round, and Hezbollah’s potential weakening within it, as a sign that Lebanon’s prospects could improve. But even if you ignore the country’s mountain of social and economic problems, a humbled Hezbollah would hardly slink off without a fight. We’ve seen exactly what the group is capable of when it feels threatened. On two occasions, in 2008 and 2021, it deployed fighters to the streets of Beirut, clashing with other militias as well as the Lebanese army proper.

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That’s hardly surprising: vastly more powerful than the nation’s official soldiers, Hezbollah is used to throwing its weight around. Just as important, the destruction of some of its arsenal may delude Hezbollah’s enemies into believing the group is primed for annihilation. That would be a mistake — and anyway, without the deterrent of the group’s missiles and armoured vehicles, the risk of bloodshed between Lebanon’s various militias becomes ever higher. To put it bluntly, then, the end of the conflict with Israel may yet return civil war to Lebanon itself.

As so often, though, what happens to Lebanon is ultimately for outsiders to decide. Crucially, Hezbollah has never acted independently, and as the region takes stock when the current round of killing finally ends, Iran will be there to pull the strings of its favourite Lebanese puppet. One option is that Tehran chooses to strengthen Hezbollah once more. In practice, however, it may find its freedom limited by a range of potential post-war agreements. One is the implementation of UN Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006, which mandates a withdrawal of Hezbollah away from Lebanon’s border with Israel. Both the US and Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister have endorsed the resolution as a way to end the war, though practical implementation remains hard to envisage. If Tehran decides Hezbollah is no longer up to the task of carrying out its wishes in Lebanon, Iran may instead opt to borrow the lesson of Syria — and deploy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards directly. Paradoxically, this would only further erode Hezbollah’s influence within Lebanon, and introduce even more jockeying into the region’s Shi’a ecosystem.

As far as the Americans are concerned, the current uncertainty offers a striking opportunity. After decades of failure in Lebanon, the White House could finally rebuild the Lebanese state and empower its army to become the country’s primary armed force. Despite its relative impotence, and the fact it’s been hamstrung by the government’s near bankruptcy, it’s long been one of the few state institutions to enjoy cross-confessional support. All the same, the idea that the Lebanese state can easily overcome its sectarian corruption is fanciful. This, after all, is a country completely bound by domestic venality and foreign power politics — just as it has been for most of the last century. Whatever happens to Hezbollah, that’s unlikely to change.

The quiet stillness of Slim’s villa, its libraries, its garden — all were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Dahieh beyond. Slim, for his part, offered me coffee as we discussed Lebanon’s complex political existence, apparently unconcerned by his powerful armed neighbours. Yet less than two years later, in February 2021, he was dead, murdered by unknown assailants in his car outside Beirut. Though no perpetrators were ever identified, the assassination was obviously carried out by Hezbollah or one of its affiliates. Slim, like every Shi’a Muslim living in Dahieh, was ultimately swallowed by it.

This is the reality for many people in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Lebanon: sooner or later, you’ll either need to tie your existence to the group, or else be consumed by it. This was made plain by Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks last week, when communication devices exploded in supermarkets, offices, homes, and funerals across Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley, leaving no corner of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state untouched. 

Commentary on this revolutionary event has largely fallen into one of two camps. While some have derided the pager operation as an indiscriminate attack on civilians, others have noted that those who carried pagers distributed by Hezbollah were by default bonafide members of the organisation. 

The truth, however, is that both these viewpoints are accurate simultaneously. Hezbollah in 2024 is not just a militia fighting Israel — it is an entire parallel society, boasting a political party, a social welfare system and charitable religious institutions, alongside five hospitals and hundreds of medical centres. Even the Beirut International Airport and the city’s commercial seaport have for years been under Hezbollah’s sway. 

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Altogether, these institutions serve a living, breathing, multi-religious patchwork of communities. As Lebanon has weathered financial ruin, disasters like the 2020 port explosion, and the intransigence of the country’s sectarian politics, the Lebanese government has slowly collapsed, taking many social services with it. This has pushed Lebanese Shi’a, Hezbollah’s primary constituency, even closer to the group, where they’ve been able to provide much more for adherents than the state itself. Examples abound. As pharmaceutical supplies dried up amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hezbollah was able to provide life-saving medication smuggled in from Syria and Iran to people living under its rule. As the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted, it opened supermarkets for its constituents that sold Iranian goods at lower prices than the competition.

The majority of those killed in the pager attacks were indeed Hezbollah fighters. Yet hundreds of people — working as medics and teachers, mechanics and shopkeepers — were wounded too. Though they’d never held a rifle in service of the group, and were by most definitions civilians, they too were caught in the crossfire: Hezbollah’s hold on their daily lives was just too tight. It’s a situation with parallels elsewhere, with Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels in Latin America playing a similar social function.

Nor is all this merely relevant to Lebanon’s internal dynamics. Deciding where to draw the line between combatant and civilian has been and continues to be a vital matter in conflicts involving non-state actors, blurring as they do the line between guerilla movement and quasi-government. But with Israel seemingly setting the stage for an all-out war with Hezbollah — having now conducted hundreds of air strikes north of the border, which collectively have resulted in the single deadliest day in Lebanon since hostilities began last year — this unresolved ambiguity will continue to produce deadly consequences for the Lebanese people. To put it bluntly: many risk finding themselves declared guilty by association with Hezbollah and its vast, multifaceted network.

As the last year of warfare in Gaza has made clear to the world, Israel has little problem with inflicting devastating civilian casualties to achieve its battlefield goals. Indeed, the policy of bringing maximum pressure to bear on Hamas and Gaza was itself born in Lebanon. In 2006, the IDF smashed civilian infrastructure to bring Hezbollah to heel, ultimately producing the infamous Dahieh doctrine. Since the start of the current round of fighting, now almost a year old, Israel has hit Hezbollah-linked rescue teams, as well as the group’s medical services. This suggests that, for Israel, the distinction between civilian branches of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and its military wing is already null and void.

From a purely military perspective, this brutal policy is understandable. All branches of Hezbollah’s network feed into the same coffers. These play a part in funding its armed wing, so working to incapacitate the entire organisation does make sense for Israel strategically, despite the immense ethical caveats involved. But then the question emerges: how far is Israel willing to go?  Who, to put it bluntly, will it decide is contributing to Hezbollah’s operations — and therefore get a target on their back? Nor are random civilians the only ones at risk here. Since 1992, after all, Hezbollah has held seats in the Lebanese parliament, and is currently part of the country’s governing coalition. Though Israel apologised for killing a member of the Lebanese Armed Forces in late 2023, IDF commanders have previously stated that they wouldn’t distinguish between Hezbollah and the formal state in any future war.

Over the past year analysts have often noted that while Israel may have achieved tactical victories against Hezbollah — notably the pager attack or the recent killing of Ibrahim Aqeel — it has no strategic vision beyond these triumphs. The closest thing they have is the belief, apparently held by many within Israel’s national security and military leadership since October 7, that deploying overwhelming force will awe its enemies into capitulating. This calculus has in effect produced a policy of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for their closeness — voluntary or not — to Hamas. As we’re now seeing, Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon are now suffering a similar fate thanks to their (often unwanted) relationship with Hezbollah.

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From Fifties British Kenya, to post-2011 Syria, where powerful actors tried to tame guerilla forces and the restive populations that supported them, history shows that such a strategy is doomed. Basic group psychology agrees. In Lebanon, punishing people who just happen to be under Hezbollah’s thumb will do nothing but strengthen Nasrallah’s authority, and personalise support for a group that was hitherto more abstract. In the event that Hezbollah can be defeated militarily — and with some 20,000 active personnel and over 100,000 missiles, that’s no sure thing — that inevitably means Lebanese antipathy toward Israel will linger. That, in turn, offers space to new rogue actors, especially in the absence of a fully functioning state.

A brave new generation of Lokman Slims can only appear when Lebanese Shi’a can choose which political group they associate with. Hezbollah’s stifling repression is the most significant obstacle stopping this happening — but how Israel behaves is crucial too. If people working regular jobs in suburbs like Dahieh can expect to be attacked no matter what they do, why bother resisting Hezbollah at all?

But geopolitics is never so simple, and the nature of conflict has changed dramatically since then. As Russia’s hybrid-war against Poland since 2021 has demonstrated, the latter has had to face a growing and increasingly complex set of pressures from both the Kremlin and its ally Belarus that Nato has had little ability to combat. And since 2022, despite its hopes that its worst security fears could be safely confined to history, Poland has witnessed foreign projectiles striking its territory for the first time since the Second World War.

Although the errant Ukrainian air defence missile that killed two Poles during a Russian barrage on Ukraine in November 2022 garnered the most international attention, incidents of this sort have continued to take place since. In May, I wrote about the discovery of a Russian missile in central Poland that had flown undeterred for up to 500 kilometres before landing just west of a major Polish city, and most recently, in late August, Polish authorities reported that a Russian drone had entered Polish airspace and likely crashed into its territory.

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In the days since, Polish ministers have stated that they have not been able to find any trace of the drone, and have qualified their previous claims. Nevertheless, such apparent penetrations of Poland’s hard-won security bubble have come as a shock to the Polish public, whose historically ingrained aversion to aggressive foreign intrusion has made it eager to support proactive measures to defend every inch of the country. In the wake of the most recent incident last month, a survey found that 59% of Poles unequivocally supported Poland shooting down Russian projectiles moving in the country’s direction while still in Ukrainian airspace, which would give Polish pilots and air defence systems ample time to respond to them before they have a chance to threaten Poland itself.

Calls for such a bold change in policy have been growing in Poland since the spring, and finally reached a fever pitch this week when Poland’s outspoken Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told the The Financial Times that it is the country’s  “duty” to down Russian missiles heading toward Polish, and by extension Nato, territory. A proposal to do exactly that had been featured in a landmark defence cooperation agreement signed by Ukraine and Poland back in July — but had been quickly rebuffed by Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who claimed such moves could risk the alliance “becoming a part of the conflict” in Ukraine. Following Sikorski’s most recent comments, in which he claimed that Poland’s Nato membership should not stop it from pursuing its own security agenda, Nato spokespeople have doubled down on Stoltenberg’s pronouncement, claiming that Nato “is not a party to the conflict and will not become a party to the conflict”.

Nato, however, has offered no alternative solutions for how to handle the spillover from the war in Ukraine onto its territory. The European Union too, despite endorsing a Polish-Greek proposal earlier this year for the construction of a pan-European air defence infrastructure, has allowed discussion of the matter to languish in meetings. A disconnect between the alliance’s leadership and its eastern members, who have for years been lauded as its future visionaries, is painfully evident — while cautious Nato and EU leaders in Brussels are most concerned with the optics of such a change in policy and what it may mean for Nato’s role in Ukraine, in countries like Poland, the issue is far from an abstract one, and is connected to immediate national security concerns that require creative solutions within the active Ukrainian battlespace itself. If Nato is unwilling or unable to provide solutions for the threats Poland regularly faces over its own airspace, the least it could do is get out of the way to let Poland keep itself safe in whatever ways it sees fit.

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By Lily Lynch

The reality is that Nato is an alliance that was built to respond to the risks of the Cold War and the post-1945 era, and its Article V provision only truly protects Poland and other countries along its eastern flank from outright invasion or aggressive attack. Wayward missiles and drones that “accidentally” enter Nato airspace are much more difficult to guard against, and are thus able to fly under the radar (pun intended) of Nato’s collective defence framework while still posing a very real risk to the alliance’s member states.

Such incidents are not just a Polish problem either — Russian drones have repeatedly breached and crash landed in Romanian territory since 2022 as well. But even beyond Nato’s east, looking at the big picture, the prospect of enemy projectiles recurrently hitting its soil in the absence of any real policy that would deter them is a recipe for disaster, and makes an eventual Article V declaration against Russia more likely than if member states were allowed to preemptively shoot its missiles and drones down before they reached Nato territory. Despite Nato’s claims otherwise, and certainly in Russia’s eyes, the alliance is already a participant in the Ukraine conflict, and pretending otherwise is potentially much riskier than walking on eggshells to avoid provoking a Russian escalation. 

Poland and other frontline states would hardly be the first actors to look out for their own well-being by downing projectiles flying around in their own neighbourhood, even those not intended to hit their territory. During Iran’s attack on Israel in April, the Jordanian Air Force proactively took out dozens of Iranian drones that entered its airspace en route to their destination, and although Iran certainly wasn’t pleased, no physical Iranian threat against Jordan has since materialised. Russia too can talk tough, but as it has shown time and time again throughout the war, its threats of escalation amount to little more than an uptick in sabotage activity against the West and headline grabbing provocations against frontline states. There is little more Moscow could realistically do, especially in this case — intentionally striking a Nato state in response to missile interceptions over Ukraine or anywhere else would not only be incredibly disproportionate, but would cross the threshold into triggering the alliance’s Article V tripwire. Until a truly existential threat emerges to Russia or its military might, low-grade hybrid warfare will be the name of the game. 

The debate about states like Poland and Romania using their air defence architecture to shoot down Russian missiles has another dimension however — if these countries have the capacity to take out projectiles moving toward their borders, what’s stopping them from shooting down any Russian missiles within the range of their surface-to-air missiles over Ukraine? This is exactly what Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has been pushing allies to do since June, suggesting that Poland use Patriot missile systems stationed along its borders to effectively create a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. The implications of such a solution would be enormous for security in the country — with a range of 160 kilometres, strategically placed Polish Patriots would be able to provide air cover for Ukrainian cities like Lviv and Lutsk, which have both been pounded by Russian missiles over the past month.

Whether or not Poland will have the necessary assets to secure its own skies as well as those of Ukraine’s west remains an open question, but within the emerging paradigm in which Polish leaders like Sikorski have appeared willing to act independently of Nato on certain security matters, such a scenario is no longer entirely off the table. While Poland will likely be wary of openly defying Stoltenberg’s dictums for the time being, its rising star within Nato means that where Warsaw goes, so eventually goes the alliance. Poland’s clout may well allow it to bring a new security framework into being that gives frontline states greater leeway to protect themselves and their borders without micromanagement from Nato HQ — and all of Nato will be better for it.

Putin and his propaganda machine would seem to be carrying on as normal, referring in typical Moscow Newspeak to the advance as a “terrorist attack” or “provocation”, or even merely as “the events in Kursk”, and launching a media blitz to reassure Russians that they are in control. But it is obvious to everyone, including the Russian people themselves, that things are different this time — more threatening even than the short-lived Wagner mutiny, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in July 2023. Ukraine has not only turned the tables on Moscow, but has fundamentally altered the rules of the game, extending the frontline to include the entire Russo-Ukrainian border — areas where Ukrainian forces can strike decisively at Russia’s soft underbelly. Now, Russia is being forced to defend its own sovereignty too.

Something else, however, is happening on the home front that may be even more dangerous. As the illusion of security and disconnect from the war in Ukraine disintegrates for those Russians living in Kursk, residents across the country’s southwestern border are feeling increasingly abandoned by the Russian state itself. Some are even holding Putin personally responsible. At the same time, dissatisfaction with Russia’s military brass, which in part fuelled Prigozhin’s insurrection last year, is continuing to escalate within the country’s nationalistic military blogosphere. Influential voices are furious not just with the military’s handling of the crisis in Kursk, but also with the state media’s ongoing obfuscation of the realities on the ground.

A growing realisation is setting in that these lies from the Russian establishment have led to a real and immediate threat to Russian national security. And for Putin to have allowed such a threat to continue unabated for over a week undermines the central guarantee he had made to the people about his war in Ukraine from the start: rebuilding Russia’s imperial sphere of influence and keeping Nato at bay would make the Russian heartland safer and more prosperous.

The Kursk incursion won’t convince Russians that the war in Ukraine was a bad idea — that ship has long sailed. But it may finally convince a growing number of Russians that the people running the show in Moscow are no longer up to the task of executing the national vision that Putin set in motion in 2022.

So far, it appears locals from Sudzha, the largest town captured by Ukraine in Kursk, have taken this red pill. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, tell your officials responsible for truthful information to show the real situation,” said a Sudzha resident in a video addressed to Putin and posted on Telegram before the town was fully captured by Ukraine. The residents complained about the wholesale downplaying of the realities in Kursk even as the town was on the brink of conquest by Ukraine. “These lies are causing civilians to die.”

Russia’s military bloggers echoed such sentiments.

“We knew that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would go to Kursk Oblast,” wrote Anastasia Kashevarova, an influential blogger with over 245,000 subscribers. “We knew everything as usual, the guys from the fields reported it, but the higher-ups did nothing.”

Another blogger writing under the pseudonym Philologist in Ambush went further, claiming that the Russian military’s concealment of the facts “shows a desire to cover up the reputational damage to the top military leadership… by all possible means”, calling out “the biased media propaganda, which continues to serve not the national interests of Russia”.

Explosive as such statements may seem, this is not the first time that pro-war bloggers have attacked the Russian Ministry of Defence and the country’s military leaders. But they do show that dissatisfaction with not just the army but also the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is reaching a boiling point. It may even be spreading beyond the usual cadre of online hyper-nationalists.

As far away as Russia’s Arctic Coast, ordinary people have started feeling the impact of Ukraine’s incursion; in Murmansk, parents of recently conscripted young men are petitioning Putin to stop their sons from being sent to fight in Kursk, claiming they were promised that such deployments wouldn’t take place. Meanwhile in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, a mother whose son had gone missing after being captured by Ukrainian forces complained on Facebook that military officials lied about his whereabouts.

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How will the Ukraine war end?

By Aris Roussinos

Russians are of course no strangers to being deceived and treated with contempt by their own government. But, when the safety of their own children is at stake, their veil of tolerance will inevitably begin to break down. This is especially the case given that the story they’ve been sold for years by Putin and his circle about Russia as the eternally victorious bulwark against foreign invasion has now been irrevocably tarnished. The legacy of the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, forms the cornerstone of Putinism, and the war in Ukraine has always been presented as an extension of this legacy by the Kremlin.

The historical implications of Ukraine’s violation of Russian territorial integrity at Kursk — which, incidentally, is also where the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — hasn’t been lost on Russia’s domestic observers. This is the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since the Great Patriotic War, and high-profile figures like media personality Andrei Medvedev were quick to compare the incursion to the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in dodging blame for the failures of his state through a “good tsar, bad boyars” approach — he has been able to shift the blame for the war’s shortcomings to his generals, ministers, and other lower-level officials. But it is Putin who is ultimately the face of the Russia that has emerged since 2022, and it is he who declared the “special military operation”. Now, the war has come back to bite him where it hurts. There is a 1,000 square kilometre hole in his public image as the inheritor of Russia’s triumph in the Great Patriotic War, and his own credibility is on the line.

Putin may well survive to fight another day after this crisis as he did in the wake of the Wagner uprising, when he shuffled some chairs in the Ministry of Defence, eliminated Prigozhin, defanged the group, and moved on. But whereas Prigozhin’s insurrection was stopped in its tracks after 24 hours, the same isn’t the case in Kursk. Ukrainian forces have started digging in and building trenches, and, according to one Russian analyst, it could take Russia up to a year to win back control over the territory under Ukrainian occupation.

What Putin has tried to present as a mere inconvenience could balloon into the most significant challenge to his legacy. Russia’s militant nationalists may not forgive him this time around — and ordinary Russians may well follow suit.

Yet history’s severed heads have a troublesome habit of growing back. The Russian invasion of Ukraine served as a powerful reminder of this reality for the European mainstream, but other unresolved threads of the continent’s brutal and very recent past have also re-emerged in much more subtle ways.

Last week, Poles had hoped that one such long unresolved injustice, the matter of German reparations for the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, would be clarified during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to reset German-Polish relations under Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new government. Back in 1953, under the rule of a Soviet-backed puppet government, Poland had formally renounced its claims to much of the reparations it had been promised, leaving the matter unsettled for decades. Yet the issue resurfaced under the previous Law and Justice Party (PiS) government, which, in an effort to appeal to its nationalistic base, argued that the 1953 declaration was inadmissible since it had been made by a government beholden to Russian interests. PiS intensified its efforts in 2022, when it formally requested that Berlin pay Poland over €1.3 trillion in reparations — the total estimated value of Polish wartime damages as determined by Poland’s Jan Karski Institute for War Losses. Although Tusk had previously supported such moves, his government appeared to soften its stance earlier this year, and signalled it was open to receiving other forms of compensation aside from cold hard cash. 

Tusk’s new approach and Germany’s newfound willingness to address the reparations issue didn’t emerge from a vacuum — both Poland’s swing from Eurosceptic populist rule to a pro-Brussels centrist government and the recent Rightward shift in the European Parliament have scrambled politics within the bloc. Despite its ultimate loss in this weekend’s elections, the recent success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has forced Scholz to prepare for an unruly France in years to come and to look for allies wherever he can find them — opening the door for a rapprochement with a newly sympathetic Poland.

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At the joint press conference in Warsaw, though, despite saying all the right things about “a clear view of the past” and the “unmeasurable suffering” of Poles at the hands of Germany, Scholz dashed any hopes that Poland would receive anything close to what it is truly owed. Instead, he spoke of compensation for the few thousand still-living Polish victims of the Third Reich, the opening of a house of memory for such victims in Berlin, and closer defence cooperation with Poland along its eastern border with Russia and Belarus. In response to questions from journalists, he indirectly invoked Germany’s official state position that the 1953 decision had been legally binding, and that Berlin was no longer responsible for fulfilling its reparations obligations to Poland.

The backlash in Poland was immediate, and alongside the predictable criticism from PiS leaders such as President Andrzej Duda, commentators across Polish media denounced Scholz’s comments as “a sign of disregard for the Polish side by our Western ally and partner”. The importance of the matter to everyday Poles was also confirmed shortly after the visit — a new survey released last week found that a majority of Polish citizens supported continuing to demand compensation from Germany for the war.

Getting Germany to pay the full cost of reparations to Poland was always going to be a Herculean task politically, and PiS’s all-or-nothing approach had been bound to fail. But even in trying to make good with a Polish government that had pivoted back to his camp after years of PiS rule, Scholz offered Poland — which proportionally suffered more civilian deaths than any other nation during the war — little more than symbolic gestures and nice words about German guilt, all while leaning on flimsy, decades-old legal arguments. This attitude plays into a long-running and convenient logical fallacy that has allowed modern Germany to divorce itself from its Nazi past: that because it has reformed itself ideologically and spiritually since the Third Reich, it deserves to be tacitly absolved of its sins without having to foot the bill for them in full. 

This attitude, which hardly started with Scholz, underscores the enduring lack of understanding among modern German leaders when it comes to contemporary Polish political identity. Although wartime reparations themselves may not be front-of-mind for every Pole, Scholz’s unserious approach to the matter speaks to a much broader concern Poles have about Western Europe’s continued inability to treat their country with dignity in the international arena — especially at a time when Poland has become so crucial for countering the increasing threat to the continent from Russia. 

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This isn’t to say that Germany has been wholly dismissive of the reparations issue. In 1992, two years after German reunification, Berlin did in fact pay Poland a portion of what it was owed, granting Polish victims of the Nazis around €295 million before disbursing additional funds for Poles who had been forced into slave labour in years afterward. But throughout its relationship with Germany, Poland has repeatedly had to balance its historical grievances with the needs of the present. In 2004, shortly after Poland joined Germany as a member of the EU, the Polish government itself issued a statement confirming that it had lost its right to full reparations in 1953. In the interest of European integration, Poland found it more advantageous to let go of history and satisfy itself with what it had received from Germany, at least for the time being.

Yet on the eve of yet another opportunity to gain the recompense that their country is owed, Polish leaders’ contemporary political interests appear to have trounced earnest desires for full historical justice once again. With his eye on Poland’s most immediate concerns, Tusk declared that he had heard what he needed to hear from Scholz and agreed to effectively put the wrongs of the past aside in exchange for Germany’s help with the pressing security challenges on Poland’s doorstep.

It would, however, be in Tusk’s interest to keep up the pressure on Scholz to satisfy Poland’s demands. Arguments that he has been too conciliatory towards Germany and other European heavyweights have historically been easy fodder for the narratives of PiS and other Right-wing parties, and although Tusk’s party came out on top in Poland’s European elections last month, the far-Right Confederation party’s strong showing should set off alarm bells in his mind about the future of Poland’s electorate. His failure to secure meaningful reparations at such an opportune moment in Poland’s relationship with Germany would haunt his political prospects not only with Poland’s Right, but also with parts of his own base, too. While it may indeed be the case that Poland has no leg to stand on with regard to reparations under international law, as Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said in February of this year, “the issue of moral, financial and material compensation has never been realised”.

This point is particularly salient because the reparations process at the end of the war was indisputably tarnished by politics and corruption. At Potsdam in 1945, the Western Allies gave the USSR the right to dispense reparations from Germany on behalf of Poland, which, after the war, became a Soviet satellite state. Poland received only a portion of the machinery, raw materials and military hardware the Soviets seized from Germany on its behalf after the war, until of course the USSR compelled Poland to make its 1953 declaration in an effort absolve communist East Germany from further obligations. As a result, the country that would have likely benefited the most from its full share of reparations was robbed of them prematurely — a reality that, while unchangeable in the eyes of the law, remains otherwise indefensible to this day.

Germany has been critical for Poland’s post-Cold War development and national security, which has made these historical loose ends difficult to satisfactorily address. But adequately dealing with history and developing a mutually beneficial relationship should not be a binary choice — the latter would only be strengthened through the former. And even if full reparations to the tune of over €1 trillion is out of reach, alternative forms of compensation, like rebuilding historical buildings the Nazis destroyed across Poland, additional funds for economic development, and payments not just to still-living survivors, but also to the countless families across Poland that remain impacted by the war almost 80 years later are all on the table as substitutes.

Satisfying such material demands would be a step towards not only closing the darkest chapter in Polish-German relations and delivering justice for its victims, but also affirming that Poland is indeed an equal partner to Germany in a rapidly changing EU. While Europe’s West may be content to live out its post-historic fantasy, in Poland and other eastern members of the bloc, the past haunts our lives at every turn. As it becomes clearer that the EU’s destiny will be defined by its eastern half, acknowledging this and addressing it seriously is no longer a luxury for the European mainstream — rather, it has now become central to its very future.