"Eastern Europe" and War. Introduction to the Special Issue

The present collection of papers is a joint effort aimed at making sense of the changes that Russia's war against Ukraine ushered into the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We have invited a team of authors working on the two subregions, the Visegrad Four and the Baltic Three, to share their reflections on how the full-scale invasion has impacted the transformations in the respective countries' regional outlook. The "kidnapping" as an overarching theme of our forum is an image that refers us to the Cold War and the history of forceful subjugation of CEE countries to foreign imperial domination as a result of aggressive wars and the spheres of influence politics in Europe. As we now clearly see, that is a part of European history that, for the moment, refuses to become history tout court.