THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION REPORT. Europe in a period of transition

THE FUTURE ARCHITECTURE OF EUROPEAN SECURITY 115 The fact is that NATO came about to confront the threat of a massive attack on Western Europe by the USSR and that threat disappeared 30 years ago. The threats now are of a much different nature: terrorism, the trafficking of people or drugs, hybrid or asymmetric conflicts, cyberattacks, disinformation, the use of ground or space technologies to dominate the adversary, and so on. This type of threat does not require big fleets or arsenals of nuclear weapons to meet them, rather it requires advances in innovation, resources, research, intelligence. And the risks to Europe do not come from the Indo-Pacific area, but from instability in North Africa, the Sahel or North Africa.And, of course, from the east of the continent too, where there is a fault line with its most powerful neighbour, the Russian Federation. EU-Russia Relations and the security of the Eastern Partnership countries Over the last few years, Russia’s drift into a more asserti- ve – even aggressive – international policy, particularly in its immediate geographical surroundings (Georgia, Ukrai- ne), but not exclusively so (Syria, Libya), has prompted the keenest Atlanticists to reassert their idea that NATO remains indispensable. Certain European countries such as the Baltic states, which were members of the USSR – particularly Estonia and Latvia, which have a border with Russia and significant Russian minorities in their territories –, or Poland, given its historical experience, see Russia as a real and present threat and trust their security to NATO, actually referring to the United States, which they consider to be the only country truly capable of deterring Russia from any aggressive designs on them. It is only natural that the annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s military, economic and political support for the pro-Russian secessionists of Donbas in Ukraine and of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia cause concern and repulsion and that the EU cannot stand by in the face of an assault on the sovereignty of a European country. Yet it is a far cry to assume then that Russia might attack the EU. Russia certainly is highly sensitive to the changes in countries that it considers within its sphere of influ- ence, but it currently does not have the means – barring nuclear ones, which it is clearly not going to use – nor probably any interest in attacking the EU, which, let us not forget, is its main trading partner. The nub of the matter is that it is very hard – not to say impossible – to have a lasting and stable security en- vironment in the European continent without counting on Russia, which is not a global power and cannot succeed the USSR as the enemy to beat, but it is indeed a regional power with interests in its most immediate surroundings and which demands respect.We must acknowledge that neither in Georgia in 2008 nor in Ukraine in 2013 was it Russia that began the destabilisation of the existing status quo, rather what sparked the conflicts were, in the first case, the initiative of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to recover sovereignty over the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – which officially form part of his country – and, in the second, the Maidan revolution that ousted the legitimate President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and triggered the rejection of the majority pro-Russian population in certain regions of the country. In both cases, and particularly explicitly in the sec- ond, the sectors of society and leaders opposed to Russia found political support – even encouragement – in mem- ber states of NATO. We all know the outcome: Russia intervened in 2008 to maintain the de facto independ- ence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in 2013 sup- ported the secessionists in Donbas and annexed Crimea (which had been Russian until 1954). How events un- folded showed that the Western countries’ support for those breaks with the status quo was a mistake that compounded the instability in eastern Europe, though perhaps it was not so much of a mistake for those who seek to keep Russia in the role of the villain and threat that NATO needs to remain united. It may be that those in this latter group are largely in Washington and London and that is why NATO is not the most appropriate organisation to resolve the tension in that zone.At the Bucharest summit of 2008, the NATO