Author: Oleksandra Diakonova is a Master’s student in International Relations at CEU, specialising in Conflict and Security Studies. She holds Bachelor’s degrees from NaUKMA (Psychology, focusing on student-centred educational approaches) and the University of Amsterdam (Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics, with research on the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian authorities). Her current research examines… Read more: Reflection Paper: Non-Interventionist Global Order: Neo-Imperial Wars from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Crimea.

To truly understand the grit of the fighting in eastern Ukraine, you have to look past the colored lines on a news map and look at the heavy, rusted reality of Soviet-era steel. In the Kharkiv and Donbas sectors, this isn’t just a war of ideologies; it’s a war of tonnage. Kupiansk isn’t just a… Read more: The Hinge of the East: Why Kupiansk Dictates the War’s Pace

By the dawn of 2025, the Russo-Ukrainian War had stripped away the last vestiges of 20th-century manoeuvre doctrine, mutating instead into a hyper-transparent, sensor-fused conflict that fundamentally defied conventional Western military expectations. If 2022 was defined by the catastrophic failure of the Russian Blitzkrieg and 2023 by the gruelling, static lessons of the southern counter-offensive,… Read more: War in Ukraine in 2025 and What to Expect in 2026