Russia and the Western Geopolitical Plan

Wednesday 19 August 2026

We have previously considered the Russian geopolitical plan: the restoration of strategic depth, the assertion of privileged interests throughout the former Soviet space, the fragmentation of Western alliances and the construction of a multipolar international order in which Great Powers once again enjoy spheres of influence.

But what is the Western plan?

The question is harder than it sounds, because there is no single entity called “the West”. Washington does not always want what Brussels wants. Paris does not necessarily want what Warsaw wants. London, liberated from the institutional constraints of the European Union but still profoundly committed to European security, occupies another position again.

Kyiv has interests that overlap substantially with all these capitals while remaining emphatically its own.

Nevertheless, beneath these disagreements there has gradually emerged since 2022 something resembling a Western geopolitical strategy.

Its central proposition might be expressed as follows:

Russia must not be permitted to demonstrate that territorial conquest works, while Europe must acquire sufficient military power to defend that principle increasingly for itself.

Everything else follows from the tension between those two objectives.

The end of the post-Cold War illusion

For approximately thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of Western Europe behaved as though classical geopolitics had disappeared.

Trade would replace territorial competition. Economic interdependence would make major European wars irrational. International institutions would constrain states. Russia might be troublesome but could ultimately be integrated into a European commercial system.

Germany became the purest expression of this philosophy.

Russian gas powered German industry. German machinery flowed eastwards. Pipelines became instruments not merely of commerce but of political theory: countries that made money together would have less reason to fight one another.

The invasion of Ukraine destroyed this assumption.

The significance of 24 February 2022 therefore extends far beyond Ukraine. It represented the return of military geography to European politics.

Borders mattered again.

Ammunition factories mattered again.

Railways, ports, air-defence systems, drones, artillery pieces and mobilisable soldiers mattered again.

Europe discovered that economic power and military power are not interchangeable.

The institutional consequences are now substantial. NATO’s 2025 Hague Summit described Russia as a long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and committed Allies to defence and defence-related investment amounting to 5 per cent of GDP annually by 2035, including at least 3.5 per cent for core military requirements.

Meanwhile the European Union’s Defence Readiness 2030 programme explicitly acknowledges that decades of under-investment have weakened Europe’s military readiness and seeks to mobilise Europe’s immense economic and industrial resources for defence.

This amounts to a historical reversal.

Europe is attempting to turn wealth back into power.

The American objective

The United States approaches the problem differently.

America’s ultimate strategic concern is not Russia. It is the preservation of a favourable global balance of power.

Russia matters because she possesses nuclear weapons, enormous natural resources, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and the capacity to destabilise Europe. But Russia’s economy is not remotely comparable with America’s, nor does Moscow represent the comprehensive technological, industrial and geopolitical competitor that China does.

Washington therefore faces a problem of allocation.

How much American military power should remain committed to Europe when the long-term strategic competition is increasingly concentrated in the Indo-Pacific?

The preferred American solution is obvious: a stronger European pillar within the Atlantic alliance.

The 2025 NATO settlement reflects precisely this logic. European Allies and Canada are expected to shoulder more of the military burden while the United States remains the indispensable strategic guarantor. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte explicitly described this as Europeans taking greater responsibility for their own security while preserving the transatlantic bond.

From Washington’s perspective this is highly attractive.

A Europe capable of containing Russia with progressively less American conventional assistance releases American resources for Asia.

Hence there is no necessary contradiction between American pressure upon Europeans to spend more on defence and continued American membership of NATO.

Quite the opposite.

The ideal American Europe is not strategically independent of the United States. It is strategically capable alongside the United States.

That distinction will shape transatlantic politics for decades.

The European objective

Europe’s problem is more existential.

The United States can theoretically reduce its exposure to European insecurity. France, Germany, Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and the other countries of Europe cannot move elsewhere.

For Europeans, Russia is geography.

The European strategic objective must therefore be to create a continental military balance sufficiently formidable that Russia concludes that further territorial expansion is prohibitively expensive.

This is deterrence in its oldest form.

Yet Europe faces a peculiar difficulty. The European Union is an economic and regulatory superpower but remains an incomplete military power. Defence policy is fragmented amongst national governments. Procurement systems overlap. Armies purchase incompatible equipment. Industrial production has historically been too slow for sustained high-intensity warfare.

The new European defence agenda is intended to change this. The EU’s Defence Readiness Roadmap envisages investment in air and missile defence, drones, military mobility, critical infrastructure and defence industrial capacity, while explicitly integrating continued support for Ukraine into Europe’s own security architecture.

This is important because Europe is gradually discovering something that Russia has always understood.

Defence industry is geopolitics.

A continent unable to manufacture ammunition, missiles, drones and air-defence interceptors in sufficient quantities cannot ultimately possess an independent foreign policy.

Britain’s peculiar position

Britain occupies an unusually interesting position within this emerging order.

She is outside the European Union but remains one of Europe’s principal military powers. She possesses nuclear weapons, substantial intelligence capabilities, a permanent seat on the Security Council, close integration with the United States and one of Europe’s more expeditionary military traditions.

Britain therefore has powerful incentives to prevent either Russian domination of eastern Europe or complete American disengagement from the continent.

London’s natural geopolitical role is consequently that of Atlantic bridge and European military organiser.

The development of the Coalition of the Willing illustrates this. Britain and France have taken leading roles in developing plans for a multinational force capable of supporting a future Ukrainian settlement. In January 2026 London and Paris signed a declaration of intent with Ukraine contemplating forces operating on Ukrainian territory following a peace agreement, including land, air and maritime functions and the regeneration of Ukrainian military capabilities.

Britain’s interests therefore converge strongly with those of Poland, the Nordic countries and the Baltic states.

These countries share a straightforward geopolitical proposition: Russia must be contained as far east as possible.

Poland and the eastern flank

If Germany represents the old European philosophy of commercial interdependence, Poland represents the older philosophy of geographical realism.

Polish strategic culture is shaped by an unpleasant historical fact: Poland sits between Germany and Russia.

Wars between the great continental powers have repeatedly been conducted across Polish territory. Partitions erased Poland altogether for more than a century. Soviet domination followed Nazi occupation.

Warsaw therefore has little difficulty understanding the concept of strategic depth.

It merely views the question from the opposite direction to Moscow.

For Russia, Ukraine provides strategic depth against the West.

For Poland, Ukraine provides strategic depth against Russia.

This is one of the most important facts in contemporary European geopolitics.

A sovereign, heavily armed and Western-oriented Ukraine moves the effective defensive frontier of Europe hundreds of kilometres eastwards. A Russian-dominated Ukraine would move Russian military power towards Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

Hence Poland and the Baltic states frequently display greater determination over Ukraine than countries further west.

Their strategic calculation is not primarily sentimental.

They understand the map.

Ukraine’s plan

Ukraine itself has the clearest geopolitical objective of all.

She wishes to make her independence irreversible.

That requires considerably more than recovering territory.

Ukraine’s historical problem has been her geopolitical ambiguity. She has occupied the space between Russian power and European institutions without being securely anchored within either.

That position became increasingly unstable.

The Ukrainian strategic project is therefore to eliminate ambiguity permanently.

Membership of the European Union is part of this. Integration with Western defence industries is another. Bilateral security arrangements, intelligence cooperation and the development of a powerful domestic military-industrial sector all serve the same objective.

The Coalition of the Willing’s January 2026 declarations are revealing in this respect. Participating countries stated that Ukraine’s ability to defend itself is integral to Euro-Atlantic security and developed arrangements for security guarantees following any ceasefire.

This points towards a potentially important outcome even if formal NATO membership remains politically difficult.

Ukraine may become something resembling an armed frontier state of Europe — integrated militarily, economically and technologically with the West whether or not every institutional question is immediately resolved.

Russia understands this possibility very well.

That is precisely why Moscow fears her.

The French question: autonomy or Atlanticism?

France introduces another complication.

French strategic thought has traditionally resisted excessive dependence upon Washington. From Charles de Gaulle onwards, Paris has imagined Europe as an independent centre of global power rather than merely the European component of an American-led alliance.

The war in Ukraine simultaneously strengthens and complicates this aspiration.

Russian aggression demonstrates Europe’s need for greater military capability. However the war has demonstrated how dependent Europe remains upon American intelligence, logistics, strategic systems and military technology.

France therefore wants Europe to become stronger partly so that Europe can act more independently.

Poland wants Europe to become stronger partly so that NATO becomes stronger.

These positions overlap operationally while diverging philosophically.

For the foreseeable future, practical necessity probably wins.

Europe will rearm within NATO while simultaneously developing capabilities that could one day permit greater strategic autonomy.

Whether those two projects eventually diverge is one of the central geopolitical questions of the twenty-first century.

Germany awakens

Germany may prove still more important.

The Federal Republic possesses Europe’s largest economy but for decades deliberately restricted the geopolitical role of military power.

This was historically understandable.

Post-war German political culture was built upon the repudiation of militarism. European integration allowed Germany to become extraordinarily powerful without appearing threatening.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the comfortable equilibrium.

Germany now confronts the uncomfortable proposition that Europe’s largest industrial economy may also have to become one of Europe’s principal military powers.

NATO’s expanded spending commitments and the EU’s defence-industrial agenda inevitably push Berlin in this direction. The Alliance has also strengthened its eastern posture, including through Germany’s permanent multinational brigade in Lithuania.

This represents an extraordinary historical development.

Russia launched her invasion partly to prevent NATO military power moving closer to Russian territory.

One consequence has been permanent German military deployment in Lithuania.

Geopolitics is rich in unintended consequences.

The economic battlefield

Western strategy also operates through economics.

Sanctions are sometimes misunderstood as attempts to cause the immediate collapse of Russia. That was never a realistic objective.

A large country possessing energy, minerals, agriculture, nuclear technology and extensive trading relationships cannot easily be economically strangled.

The more plausible objective is cumulative degradation.

Restrict access to advanced technology.

Increase transaction costs.

Reduce investment.

Complicate energy exports.

Constrain access to capital.

Force Russia to purchase substitutes through expensive intermediaries.

Make sophisticated weapons harder to manufacture.

None of these measures wins a war overnight.

Together they alter the long-term balance between Russian resources and Western resources.

The West’s great structural advantage remains economic scale.

Its problem is political time.

Russia can organise resources through authoritarian command. Democracies must repeatedly persuade voters, parliaments and companies to accept costs. The geopolitical contest therefore becomes a race between Western economic mass and Russian political endurance.

Technology and the Ukrainian laboratory

There is another element of Western strategy that may ultimately prove more important than tanks.

Ukraine has become the world’s most intensive laboratory for modern warfare.

Drones, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, battlefield software, satellite communications, autonomous navigation and rapidly iterated weapons systems are being tested under combat conditions at extraordinary speed.

The traditional Western defence procurement model can take years or decades to produce a new platform. The Ukrainian model can sometimes iterate a drone in weeks.

This difference has profound implications.

A successful Western geopolitical strategy will therefore not merely finance Ukraine. It will learn from Ukraine.

The flow of knowledge should become reciprocal.

Western capital, industrial capacity and advanced components move eastwards.

Battlefield experience, rapid engineering and operational data move westwards.

The result could eventually become a formidable Euro-Ukrainian defence-industrial network.

This is one reason NATO now explicitly emphasises emerging technology, innovation and expanded defence-industrial cooperation alongside conventional military expenditure.

The war may consequently accelerate a transformation in Western military technology that extends far beyond Ukraine.

China changes everything

Yet Russia is not the ultimate organising problem of Western geopolitics.

China is.

This creates an extraordinary strategic triangle.

Russia needs China because confrontation with the West makes Chinese markets, technology and diplomatic support increasingly valuable.

China benefits because Russia provides energy, military experience, diplomatic alignment and strategic distraction.

The West therefore faces a difficult choice.

Attempting permanently to isolate Russia risks driving Moscow ever deeper into Beijing’s orbit.

Allowing Russia to dominate Ukraine, however, would demonstrate that military revisionism succeeds and might influence calculations far beyond Europe.

Western policy therefore contains an unresolved strategic question:

Should Russia eventually be contained, weakened or reconciled?

These are not the same objective.

A Russia permanently dependent upon China may not ultimately serve European or American interests.

The distant Western objective might therefore be a post-war Russia strong enough to remain independent of China but insufficiently strong to dominate its European neighbours.

Achieving that balance would require exceptionally subtle diplomacy.

At present the conditions for it scarcely exist.

But geopolitics operates across decades.

What does Western victory look like?

Western victory does not require the destruction of Russia.

Indeed Russia’s collapse could be extraordinarily dangerous. A fragmented nuclear power stretching across eleven time zones would create security problems beyond anything Europe presently confronts.

Nor does Western victory necessarily require regime change in Moscow.

The more realistic objective is behavioural.

Russia must eventually conclude that territorial expansion westwards costs more than it yields.

Ukraine must survive as a sovereign state capable of defending itself.

European countries must possess sufficient conventional military power that American assistance becomes an augmentation rather than the sole foundation of continental defence.

NATO must remain credible.

Europe must develop a substantially larger defence-industrial base.

And the Russian state must eventually discover that prosperity through peaceful commerce is more attractive than expansion through military coercion.

That last objective may require a generation.

The contradictions within the Western plan

There are nevertheless serious weaknesses. Western countries disagree about acceptable risk. They disagree about defence expenditure. They disagree about relations with China. They disagree about the eventual borders of Ukraine. They disagree about whether Russia should ultimately be punished, contained or reintegrated. And democratic politics ensures that governments change.

Russia can pursue a strategy for twenty years under the same ruler. The United States can substantially alter her foreign policy every four years. European governments may fall even faster.

This is Moscow’s great hope.

The Kremlin does not necessarily believe that it can defeat the combined resources of the Western world.

It believes the Western world may eventually cease combining them.

Hence Western cohesion is itself a strategic weapon.

Two competing theories of time

The contest between Russia and the West is ultimately a contest between two theories of time.

Russia believes time favours endurance. Western strategy increasingly assumes that time favours scale.

Moscow calculates that democratic enthusiasm for Ukraine will diminish, governments will change, economic interests will reassert themselves and Western societies will eventually seek accommodation.

The West calculates that sustained sanctions, technological superiority, European rearmament, Ukrainian military development and the vastly greater collective economic resources of NATO will gradually make Russian expansion unsustainable.

Both theories cannot be entirely correct. The outcome may depend upon which side maintains political coherence for longer.

The map after the war

The final settlement of the Ukraine war — whenever it comes — will therefore not merely determine the ownership of particular towns and fields.

It will establish the strategic architecture of Europe.

If Ukraine emerges sovereign, heavily armed, increasingly prosperous and integrated into European institutions, Russia will have suffered a profound geopolitical defeat even if she retains some conquered territory.

If Ukraine emerges exhausted, economically crippled, politically unstable and permanently vulnerable to renewed Russian coercion, Moscow may claim strategic success even without conquering Kyiv.

Territory matters. But orientation matters more.

The deeper Western objective is therefore to ensure that Ukraine’s geopolitical trajectory points irreversibly westwards.

The European Council now describes Russia’s war and its consequences as an existential challenge for the European Union and is explicitly pursuing the capacity for Europe to act more autonomously while remaining coherent with NATO.

That is a remarkable transformation from the Europe of only a few years ago.

The new balance of Europe

We can therefore discern the outlines of the Western geopolitical plan.

America wants a Europe capable of carrying more of its own military burden so that American power can address global challenges elsewhere.

Britain wants to preserve the Atlantic alliance while remaining one of the principal organisers of European security.

France wants a militarily stronger Europe capable eventually of greater strategic independence.

Germany is being pushed towards accepting military responsibilities proportionate to its economic weight.

Poland and the eastern states want Russia contained as far eastwards as possible.

Ukraine wants to make her escape from the Russian sphere of influence irreversible.

These are different ambitions.

For the moment, however, they point in approximately the same direction. And that may be enough.

The great irony of Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical project is that in attempting to restore Russia’s sphere of influence, he may have created something Moscow spent decades trying to prevent: a militarily awakening Europe, an enlarged NATO, a permanently alienated Ukraine and a continental defence system increasingly organised around deterring Russia.

The Russian geopolitical plan seeks strategic depth.

The Western geopolitical plan seeks strategic denial.

Russia wants the countries between Moscow and Berlin to constitute a buffer within which Russian interests receive special deference.

The West increasingly wants those same countries to become sufficiently sovereign, prosperous and militarily formidable that no buffer is necessary.

These visions cannot easily be reconciled.

And so beneath the trenches, drones, sanctions, summits and diplomatic manoeuvres lies a much older argument.

Russia asks: Where does our sphere of influence end? The West increasingly answers: At your border.