Recent debates at the Munich Security Conference 2026 reinforced a growing recognition that the European and global security environment is undergoing structural transformation. Discussions throughout the conference reflected the erosion of traditional distinctions between war and peace, the normalisation of hybrid confrontation, and the systemic interlinkage between geopolitical competition, technological power, and societal resilience.
Within these debates, Ukraine was not framed merely as a theatre of war, but as the frontline through which the emerging security order is being tested in real time. Operational lessons drawn from Ukraine’s battlefield, cyber domain, energy infrastructure defence, and societal resilience increasingly inform European security planning.
It is precisely within this evolving strategic landscape that the analytical framing developed in Forward Look 2026 – “Playing by New Rules?”, published in January 2026 by the Analysis and Research Team (ART) of the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, gains particular relevance. The report provides not merely a geopolitical outlook but a structural diagnosis of how the operating logic of security, power, and institutional influence is being redefined (ART 2026).
The introduction to Forward Look 2026 is structured around the claim that 2025 represents not merely another phase of crisis, but a political inflection point that exposes the limits of traditional assumptions about the European Union’s role in the global system. The report argues that long-standing pillars of European policy—stable alliances, economic interdependence as a source of security, and a clear distinction between peace and war—no longer function as reliable guarantees of influence or predictability (ART 2026).
A central signal of this shift is the so-called “summer of humiliation,” framed not simply as a political episode but as a structural shock to European leadership. Its significance lies in undermining the assumption that the EU’s economic weight can automatically be translated into strategic influence. Instead, developments in 2025 reveal a growing gap between institutional inertia and an external environment increasingly shaped by transactional power, ad hoc coalitions, and a “grey zone” between war and peace.
For European and Ukrainian security planners, this signals the erosion of predictability in alliance guarantees and crisis response mechanisms. Strategic planning must therefore incorporate escalation ambiguity, hybrid coercion, and institutional bypass scenarios as baseline operating conditions rather than exceptional risks.
In this sense, the report resonates with crisis-driven theories of change in international relations. The shock is presented not only as a threat, but as a mobilising moment that opens a window for deeper political transformation. The notion of “new rules of the game” aligns with Peter Hall’s (1993) concept of third-order policy change, in which not only policy instruments and objectives shift, but the underlying assumptions about how the world operates are fundamentally redefined. In parallel, and in line with Mark Beissinger’s (2002) arguments, crisis is portrayed as a catalyst for political and institutional mobilisation, reshaping the balance between centre and periphery, large and middle powers, and formal alliances and flexible partnerships.
Ukraine’s wartime institutional transformation — cyber mobilisation, digital governance adaptation, defence innovation — reflects precisely this crisis-driven adaptive model.
The core strategic message of the introduction is that the EU can no longer afford to remain a predominantly reactive actor. Russian aggression, the escalation of hybrid threats, the fragmentation of the global order, and the uneasy coexistence between the United States and China have already driven a shift away from a rules-based, proactive policy model toward one centred on adaptation under conditions of competition and coercion. The report argues, however, that the appropriate response lies not in incremental adjustments, but in a systemic rewriting of Europe’s strategic “playbook” for a world increasingly unfavourable to liberal multilateralism.
From a security governance perspective, this implies a transition from reactive crisis response toward anticipatory resilience planning — integrating defence, technological innovation, industrial capacity, regulatory tools, and societal preparedness within a single strategic ecosystem.
This is why the analysis is organised around five critical domains—geopolitics, hybrid confrontation, economic vulnerability, the tension between competitiveness and the green transition, and internal societal destabilisation. Together, they provide a multi-structural perspective on crisis, in which security, the economy, technology, climate policy, and social legitimacy are treated as interdependent dimensions of European resilience rather than as separate policy silos.
Ukraine’s experience demonstrates the operational convergence of these domains: battlefield defence, cyber operations, energy coercion, supply-chain disruption, and information warfare function as mutually reinforcing theatres of conflict.
The opening vignette of Donald Trump’s all-caps announcement of a “G2” meeting with Xi Jinping is used in the report as a deliberately anachronistic symbol. While the US–China rivalry remains the dominant long-term axis of global politics, the assumption that these two powers can impose structure on the international system is increasingly untenable. Instead, the report situates the world in a phase of fluid, transactional multipolarity, characterised by conditional engagements, shifting alignments, and the erosion of multilateral authority (ART 2026).
In this environment, regional and middle powers are no longer confined to hedging behaviour. They act as brokers of influence, conveners of ad hoc coalitions, and providers of selective global public goods. Power is exercised situationally — through supply chains, technological leverage, energy corridors, sanctions regimes, and security partnerships — rather than exclusively through formal alliances.
For Ukraine, this geopolitical fluidity produces a dual effect. On the one hand, it increases exposure to geopolitical bargaining among major powers. On the other, it significantly elevates Ukraine’s strategic relevance. Positioned at the intersection of Euro-Atlantic security, Black Sea geopolitics, energy transit routes, and digital conflict, Ukraine functions not as a peripheral actor but as a structural node in the evolving European security architecture.
The report therefore implicitly raises a structural dilemma: whether Europe can convert its economic scale, regulatory influence, and institutional capital into geopolitical agency within a system where bargaining increasingly occurs outside formal multilateral frameworks.
This section frames Europe’s security environment as one defined by persistent, below-threshold confrontation. Russia’s war against Ukraine unfolds simultaneously with escalating hybrid tactics across the European continent — cyberattacks, disinformation operations, election interference, infrastructure sabotage, and instrumentalised migration pressure.
Conflict, in this sense, is no longer episodic. It becomes ambient — embedded within political, technological, economic, and societal systems. The concept of “tense peace” captures precisely this condition: the absence of declared interstate war combined with the continuous presence of coercive pressure.
Ukraine has experienced this integrated pressure ecosystem most intensively. Military invasion is accompanied by sustained cyber intrusions, attacks on energy grids, satellite communications disruption, financial system targeting, and information warfare campaigns. As a result, Ukraine functions as the primary laboratory of contemporary hybrid warfare, where multidomain confrontation is not theoretical but operational.
This environment also reshapes deterrence logic. Traditional models premised on military retaliation struggle to address deniable cyber operations or proxy sabotage networks, thereby requiring new escalation management frameworks.
Asymmetry and the Economics of Modern Conflict
A recurring theme throughout the report is the asymmetry between low-cost offensive instruments and high-cost defensive systems. Technologies such as drones, cyber tools, sabotage networks, and AI-enabled influence operations allow adversaries to generate disproportionate destabilisation with limited material investment (ART 2026).
This asymmetry is particularly visible in Ukraine’s battlefield and cyber domains. Commercially adapted drones challenge conventional air defence systems worth exponentially more. Volunteer cyber formations generate strategic effects against state infrastructure targets. Open-source intelligence ecosystems rival classified surveillance capabilities in agility and speed.
Ukraine’s adaptive defence model — combining state command structures with civilian innovation networks and private-sector technological support — demonstrates how asymmetric resilience can partially offset structural capability gaps. Defence capacity is thus no longer measured solely in conventional military assets but in innovation velocity, digital integration, and societal mobilisation.
Authorial Reflection and the Cyber Responsibility Gap
This diagnosis invites reassessment of long-standing academic claims that cyber war remains strategically marginal (Rid 2013; Gartzke 2013). If war is defined by organised confrontation pursued for political objectives, hybrid campaigns combining cyber operations, infrastructure disruption, and information warfare clearly meet this threshold.
Yet recognising cyber conflict as war introduces a deeper governance dilemma: the problem of responsibility.
As cyber operations increasingly involve volunteer hacker networks, private cybersecurity firms, AI-enabled decision-support systems, and cloud infrastructure providers, the attribution of operational responsibility becomes structurally diffuse (Schmitt 2017; Efrony and Shany 2018).
International humanitarian law maintains that responsibility for the use of force is non-delegable. Legal obligations relating to distinction, proportionality, and military necessity remain vested in human command authority. They cannot be transferred to civilian hackers, outsourced contractors, or algorithmic targeting systems (ICRC 2019).
Ukraine’s cyber mobilisation ecosystem illustrates both the strategic utility and the legal ambiguity of civilian participation in digital defence. Volunteer cyber actors operate within patriotic mobilisation frameworks yet often outside formal military command structures. Private technology platforms provide targeting analytics, satellite imagery, and data integration capabilities essential to battlefield awareness.
This creates layered accountability dilemmas:
When does civilian cyber participation constitute direct participation in hostilities?
How should collateral cyber effects on civilian infrastructure be assessed legally?
To what extent are states responsible for operations conducted through loosely affiliated digital actors?
These questions form the core of the emerging cyber responsibility gap — a structural lag between operational practice and legal doctrine.
Borrowing from the Future – Artificial Intelligence and Security Governance
Artificial intelligence occupies a dual role within the emerging security landscape. On the one hand, it acts as a driver of productivity, innovation, and defence modernisation. On the other, it diffuses technological power beyond state monopolies and reshapes the architecture of decision-making (ART 2026).
Ukraine’s wartime deployment of AI illustrates this duality. Battlefield data fusion, predictive targeting analytics, cyber defence automation, and satellite-enabled situational awareness enhance operational effectiveness. Yet these systems also complicate legal accountability.
AI does not replace human responsibility. Rather, it restructures the informational environment within which human decisions are made. Commanders rely on algorithmically filtered data, prioritised threat assessments, and predictive modelling outputs. Responsibility therefore remains human but becomes cognitively mediated by technological systems — deepening debates surrounding meaningful human control and algorithmic accountability.
The report frames the green transition not solely as climate policy but as a domain of geopolitical competition. Energy systems, supply chains, and critical raw materials become strategic assets embedded within security calculations (ART 2026).
Ukraine’s experience underscores this interdependence. Russian strikes on power plants, substations, and grid infrastructure demonstrate how decarbonisation systems and energy modernisation projects can become targets within hybrid war. Energy resilience — grid decentralisation, renewable integration, and infrastructure hardening — therefore emerges not only as sustainability policy but as national defence strategy.
The report identifies democratic backsliding, societal polarisation, and disinformation ecosystems as structural security risks. Digital platforms amplify external interference, erode institutional trust, and destabilise public discourse (ART 2026).
Ukraine’s sustained exposure to information warfare — deepfakes, psychological operations, narrative manipulation — illustrates how societal cohesion becomes a frontline defence layer. Resilience is measured not only in military capability but in informational integrity and democratic legitimacy.
Conclusions – Security Under New Rules
The conclusions emphasise that the “rules of the game” are being reshaped simultaneously across geopolitical, technological, economic, and societal domains (ART 2026).
For Ukraine, this transformation is not anticipatory — it is lived reality. The country operates simultaneously as:
a battlefield of conventional interstate war,
a laboratory of cyber resilience,
a testing ground of hybrid confrontation,
a frontline of democratic defence.
“Playing by new rules” therefore signifies a systemic transition: from security grounded in stability toward security grounded in adaptive resilience — the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and respond to permanent multidimensional pressure within an evolving international order.
References
ART. 2026. Forward Look 2026: Playing by New Rules? Brussels: General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union.
Efrony, Dan, and Yuval Shany. 2018. “A Rule Book on the Shelf?” American Journal of International Law.
Gartzke, Erik. 2013. “The Myth of Cyberwar.” International Security.
ICRC. 2019. International Humanitarian Law and Cyber Operations.
Rid, Thomas. 2013. Cyber War Will Not Take Place. Oxford University Press.
Schmitt, Michael. 2017. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations.
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