After the adoption of the constitutional changes in Russia in 2020 the issue concerning who would be Vladimir Putin’s successor was seemingly disarmed as he could now legally stay on in office until 2036. However, the full-scale invasion launched against Ukraine in February 2022 has increased the need for studying the issue, as the war has come to be so closely associated with Putin personally. This article discusses how official Russian discourse, as mirrored through the presidential website kremlin.ru, has dealt with the issue of presidential succession during Putin’s fourth term in office (2018–24), and how the subject has been taken off the public agenda during this time. The argument is that the silence on the matter is indicative and intentional. The regime acts as if Putin’s continued incumbency is taken for granted and accepted as legitimate by default by the public. In Weberian terms, the regime has shifted from relying on charismatic and legal-rational legitimation to claim instead what can be described as neo-traditional legitimacy.

This article provides a comparative analysis of laws on youth policy and patriotic education in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine (as a control case), as well as model laws developed by the Commonwealth of Independent States. These laws are aimed at educating young people and transferring values of loyalty and obedience to authoritarian rule, as well as love and patriotic devotion to the Motherland, as means to legitimise and sustain authoritarian regimes. The article identifies similarities, differences and cases of ‘authoritarian legal harmonization’ in these laws. To compare the similarities and differences in the laws, we use plagiarism software. The software detects words and phrases which are the same or similar, in order to establish the extent to which the texts of laws are harmonised. Our research indicates that levels of legal harmonisation have fallen as new amendments and laws have been introduced, signalling a weakening of Russia’s influence.

This volume examines the strategic transformation of NATO’s borderland regions from perceived vulnerabilities to recognised strategic assets within the Alliance’s collective defence architecture. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European security landscape has undergone profound changes, exposing limitations of traditional deterrence models and necessitating NATO’s recalibration toward greater emphasis on civil preparedness and resilience alongside conventional military strength. Rather than viewing borderlands as vulnerable peripheries requiring protection, this work demonstrates how regions sharing direct frontiers with Russia have emerged as critical centres of security innovation whose proximity to threat vectors grants them unique experiential knowledge and adaptive capabilities essential for broader Alliance security. Borderland communities have developed sophisticated approaches to managing hybrid threats through whole-of-society defence models that integrate civilian and military efforts while maintaining democratic governance under pressure. Their lived experience with Russian aggression has produced practical knowledge about deterrence implementation, early warning systems, and cross-domain threat management that complements theoretical strategic planning with operational reality. The volume argues that resilience should be conceptualised not merely as recovery from disruption but as transformative capacity enabling systems to reorganise, innovate, and evolve in response to changing threat environments, positioning these borderlands as force multipliers within NATO’s deterrence framework.

This volume examines the strategic transformation of NATO’s borderland regions from perceived vulnerabilities to recognised strategic assets within the Alliance’s collective defence architecture. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European security landscape has undergone profound changes, exposing limitations of traditional deterrence models and necessitating NATO’s recalibration toward greater emphasis on civil preparedness and resilience alongside conventional military strength. Rather than viewing borderlands as vulnerable peripheries requiring protection, this work demonstrates how regions sharing direct frontiers with Russia have emerged as critical centres of security innovation whose proximity to threat vectors grants them unique experiential knowledge and adaptive capabilities essential for broader Alliance security. Borderland communities have developed sophisticated approaches to managing hybrid threats through whole-of-society defence models that integrate civilian and military efforts while maintaining democratic governance under pressure. Their lived experience with Russian aggression has produced practical knowledge about deterrence implementation, early warning systems, and cross-domain threat management that complements theoretical strategic planning with operational reality. The volume argues that resilience should be conceptualised not merely as recovery from disruption but as transformative capacity enabling systems to reorganise, innovate, and evolve in response to changing threat environments, positioning these borderlands as force multipliers within NATO’s deterrence framework.

As was the case with other federal states, Russia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was decentralized and devolved responsibility toregional governors. Contrary to the common highly centralized governance in Russia, this approach is thought to have helped insulate the government from criticism. Using local research and analysis based on a national representative survey carried out at the height of the pandemic during the summer of 2021, the article charts the public response to the pandemic across Russia. It examines the regionalization of the response, with an in-depth focus on two of the Russian cities with the highest infection rates but differing responses to the pandemic: St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk. There are two main findings: at one level, the diffusion of responsibility meant little distinction was made between the different levels of government by the population; at another level, approval of the pandemic measures was tied strongly to trust levels in central and regional government.