Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)

06/05/2026

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to see that as Putin was planning the 2014 occupation of Crimea and infiltration of eastern Ukraine, Xi was simultaneously adopting a more assertive and confrontational posture for China in the South China Sea." Christopher Walker

What appeared to be separate crises were actually unfolding in parallel.

As Beijing and Moscow deepened ties, both leaders embraced a more confrontational approach to the international order. More than a decade later, that alignment now extends across economics, military cooperation, and global governance, and is helping sustain Russia's war effort in Ukraine.

Read The China-Russia Meta Threat: The Architecture of Authoritarian Power, linked in the comment below

06/04/2026

Ukraine's drone campaign is exposing growing weaknesses in Russia's air defenses, allowing increasingly successful strikes deep inside Russian territory.

David Kirichenko argues that while Russia has scaled offensive drone production, it has struggled to build effective defenses against Ukraine's rapidly evolving and low-cost drone warfare.

The imbalance is making Russia's vast territory harder and more expensive to defend.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

06/04/2026

European and Americans share a desire to keep children safe online. The US uses courts. Europe regulates.

Bans are the easiest answer to explain and the hardest to make work. They give governments a clean message: children should not be there. A series of EU countries are passing laws to prohibit children under 15 or 16 from using social media.

But bans push back the real question. Who checks? On what basis? How often? With what data? And what happens when children move somewhere else?

Read the full analysis by Anda Bologa in the comment below.

06/04/2026

Europe and China are moving closer to a trade confrontation as Brussels warns that a record €359 billion trade deficit and rising Chinese imports are becoming unsustainable.

Michael Sheridan explains that while the EU is considering tariffs and other measures to reduce dependence on China, Beijing argues Europe's problems stem from weak competitiveness, not Chinese overcapacity.

The dispute is evolving into a broader battle over economic power, industrial strategy, and the future of global trade.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

06/04/2026

One year after Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine’s drone campaign continues to reshape modern warfare and expose vulnerabilities far beyond Russia.

Henry Patton and Noah Greene explain how Ukraine’s use of low-cost drones to destroy Russian strategic bombers exposed a growing vulnerability: billion-dollar military assets can be neutralized by inexpensive, hard-to-detect systems.

Yet, many countries have yet to adapt their defenses to this rapidly evolving threat.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

06/04/2026

A decade ago, few could have predicted the trajectory of China-Russia relations. Yet, by 2026, the convergence of their authoritarian power has become a defining feature of global politics, and the failure to anticipate it is its own story.

Christopher Walker, Mathieu Boulègue, Tamás Matura, and Evgeny Roshchin argue that the democratic world dismissed the relationship as transactional or fragile when it was neither. Moscow and Beijing are now deepening coordination on security, technology, and global governance, and the post-2022 landscape has accelerated rather than strained that cooperation.

Action items for the US, Europe, & other allies & partners:
▪️Target selective, domain-specific opportunities disrupting the Russia-China partnership.
▪️Tighten export controls moving between Moscow & Beijing.
▪️Systematically constrain China-Russia capacity to act in parallel to affect global governance.

The label "alliance" does not capture what this partnership is. Understanding what comes next means moving past it, and quickly. Read the full report in the comment below.

06/03/2026

On the morning of June 3, at least 50 Ukrainian drones struck targets across St Petersburg as Russia's Davos opened in the city. President Zelenskyy called them "long-range sanctions."

David Kirichenko contends Ukraine's deep-strike campaign has graduated from sporadic embarrassment to sustained attrition. Production of mid-range strike drones rose 312% in the first four months of 2026 compared with all of 2025. The air defense ring around Moscow is being penetrated with growing frequency.

Russia is relearning, the hard way, how to defend itself.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

Despite Russia building its foreign policy on the notion of encirclement, it is a country that is bad at defending against drone attacks.

06/02/2026

Russia’s influence operations extend far beyond traditional diplomacy.

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov show how the Kremlin uses a combination of intelligence services, state institutions, media networks, and the Russian Orthodox Church to cultivate influence abroad. The campaign behind Moscow’s new International Security Forum offers a revealing look at how these tools work together to advance Russia’s global ambitions.

The effort highlights the breadth of Russia’s influence network and the lengths Moscow will go to project itself as a leading global power.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

06/02/2026

Europe may be solving the wrong defense problem.

Igor Harry Rusnak explains how Ukraine's battlefield success has come from coordinating a wide range of drone systems rather than standardizing around a single platform. While European countries continue searching for common defense systems, Ukraine's experience suggests that interoperability, not uniformity, is the key to building effective military capability.

The lesson for Europe is clear: focus less on choosing one system and more on ensuring many systems can operate as a cohesive whole.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.

06/01/2026

Ukraine is not just competing with Europe for investment. It is competing for its own people.

Kateryna Odarchenko contends that the question is no longer whether young Ukrainians love their country enough to return. Most still do. The question is whether Ukraine can make returning a rational and attractive choice. That means high-value industries, competitive salaries, affordable housing, transparent institutions, and a serious anti-corruption agenda. Action on corruption is not secondary to reconstruction. It is reconstruction.

Europe's long-term security depends on a stable, economically viable Ukraine. Helping it retain and return its people is a strategic investment.

Read the full analysis in the comment below.