The impact of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on military expenditures of European states: security alliances or geography?

ABSTRACT

The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has shaken the European post-Cold War security order. In response, European leaders started to talk about the need to strengthen the defense of European nations. This article quantitatively analyses changes in military expenditures of European states in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. There are significant differences in changes in ME´s of European states, which however cannot be explained by freeriding within NATO, the relative power of individual states, within-state variables or by membership in the EU. Instead, our results indicate that it was the distance from Russia which drove changes. Interestingly, while traditional operationalization of distance based on fly distance from capital-to-capital showed strong explanatory power, our operationalization based on road distance fared even better. Our results indicate that even in the 21^st century distance remains an important geopolitical factor.

KEYWORDS:

• Defense
• geopolitics
• military expenditures
• NATO
• Russia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Ukraine lost at least 6 million inhabitants to Russia and DNR/LNR and roughly 8% of its territory.

2. The voices of politicians have been widely echoed by academics as well (see, e.g. Arbatova and Dynkin 2016)

3. For a similar point see (Allison 2017)

4. In panel or time-series data analyses, year to year correlations dominate over other variables.

5. For example of analogous research design see e.g. (Dinas et al. 2019).

6. Turkey is excluded as it is, geographically speaking, an Asian country. Further, it is quite safe to say that Turkey´s threat perception has been strongly affected by middle-east politics.

7. As distance alone does not explain all the variability, appendix 3 offers a brief analysis of the two most deviant cases (Lithuania and Finland).

8. When both road distance and Iskander threat are modeled in an additive model, the later variable loses its explanatory power.

9. Recent research mapping arms procurement among NATO members since 2011 has already found such a pattern (Béraud-Sudreau and Giegerich 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Charles University [UNCE/HUM/009].