Central and Eastern European countries’ approaches towards the Russia’s invasion on Ukraine

The paper discusses foreign and defense policies of CEE countries, specifically, 11 members of the NATO and the EU: Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The author’s initial research demonstrates some variety of approaches towards Russia’s challenge to European security before the 2022 invasion. The purpose is to examine how the full-scale war in the CEE’s neighborhood affects their policies. The specific purpose is to assess the variety of approaches which show differentiation among CEE countries. Then the purpose is to find general causes of different approaches by applying a regression model. The developed version of the balance of power theory brings a spectrum of categories that can be fruitfully applied to explain CEE countries approaches: from confrontational counterbalancing to various types of hedging and accommodation. These categories can be applied to assess the divergence of CEE responses to the Russian military expansion. The ambition of the paper is to place each CEE state on the scale of approaches between “soft” accommodative and strongly confrontational. General indicators of these approaches analyzed in the paper are divided into three groups. The first group contains diplomatic activities such as meetings with Ukrainian officials, meetings with Russian officials, expulsions of Russian diplomatic staff. The second group includes defense effort such as military assistance for Ukraine and participation in new NATO counterbalancing activities. The third considers economic issues such as imposing unilateral sanctions and accepting cessation of economic flows such as rejecting ruble payments for gas imports. The paper takes also into account more contextual indicators of confrontational or non-confrontational positions towards Russia. For instance, Bulgaria in unison with North Macedonia and Montenegro forbid to cross their airspace for the Russian minister Lavrov’s airplane thus preventing his visit in Serbia. The geographic context and the history of similar accidents shows that other neighboring countries such as Romania were not taken into account by Russia, since they also would not have permitted for transit. The final result of this part of analysis is the quantitative scale of each CEE country’s approach applicable to multivariate regression model. Independent variables used in the statistical model should somewhat reflect countries’ responses to power relations, threat perception as well as allegedly important historical, economic and national minority variables. Thus the paper considers constant factors (historical experience with Russia; distance of capital cities to Moscow; economic situation; the size of Russian minorities; military power) and quite variable factors (energy supply from Russia; geographic proximity to the Russian military forces during the war). The results should verify the author’s prior-to-war research which indicates that proximity and historical experience played the most important role, whereas the factor of energy supply and economic situation showed only mixed impact.