Why did Vladimir Putin order the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, despite numerous warnings from Western countries about the consequences of such an action? This article argues that misperceptions about having the upper hand vis-à-vis Western countries, formed and proliferated among the Russian leadership, emboldened the Kremlin to launch the military invasion of Ukraine, assuming that the West would stand down in the face of the attack. Based on a detailed analysis of Russian elites’ discourse through the theoretical lens of interdependence studies, this study demonstrates that Putin miscalculated Western resolve largely because of two key misperceptions. First, Putin’s elites were convinced that the West was asymmetrically dependent on Russia, viewing it as a strategic resource that would tie the hands of Western and EU countries, eventually making them accept the outcome of the war. Second, the Kremlin believed that Ukraine occupied a secondary role in Western interests that would further limit the West’s involvement in the conflict, as it would not risk exposing its dependence on Moscow for the sake of an issue that, in the Kremlin’s eyes, was marginal to European and American security.

Amidst the Russian aggression against Ukraine, peace and stability within the geostrategic region of the Western Balkans have come under the spotlight. While some have called for the “denazification” of the Balkans, others have firmly supported Ukraine. Among the six non-European Union states in the Balkans, the Republic of Serbia is perceived as the most visible and longstanding supporter, akin to a brotherly state, of the Russian Federation. This article aims to investigate President Vučić’s narrative in his Addresses to the Nation concerning the war in Ukraine. The objective is to gain a better understanding of Serbia’s foreign policy positioning with regard to the conflict in Ukraine. Anchored in the Regional Security Complex theory, the article examines President Vučić’s Addresses to the Nation from February 2022 to February 2023, revealing Serbia’s consistent insistence on independent decision-making in foreign policy matters, including in the context of the war in Ukraine. These Addresses to the Nation further reinforce the notion of Serbia’s multi-vector foreign policy, while also utilizing the war in Ukraine to reignite public discussions on the importance of Kosovo to Serbia’s foreign policy.

The Hungarian government has been utilising emergencies to expand its political power instead of upholding constitutionalism and the rule of law. This strategy has given the government almost unlimited power to enact emergency decrees, even when the state and the population are not in immediate danger. The ninth amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary has raised concerns about the government's use of emergency powers, granting the executive branch even more authority during exceptional times by allowing the government to prolong the ‘state of exception’ indefinitely and maintain pandemic-related emergency measures to respond to potential consequences of the war in Ukraine. As a result, the executive body has been able to exert significant political control without proper parliamentary oversight.

In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is striking that there have been many references to resilience, including by Western and Ukrainian leaders. This article is precisely about their use of resilience discourse, and it makes two important contributions to existing scholarship on resilience in conflict settings. First, drawing on Ish-Shalom’s idea of ‘concepts at work’ and analysing a selection of speeches and policy statements (by Western leaders and President Volodymyr Zelensky) that specifically refer to resilience, it demonstrates that resilience is a significant ‘concept at work’ in the war, making certain forms of international and domestic politics possible. Second, while research on resilience frequently discusses different ways that the concept has been defined and approached in fields such as engineering, ecology, and psychology, this article highlights that diverse framings of resilience have become entangled as the concept is ‘at work’ in the war in Ukraine. More specifically, its analysis makes prominent the fusion of different resiliences at different levels – from the individual to the systemic – discursively working together for particular political ends. In this way, it offers a novel way of thinking multi-systemically about resilience and, by extension, about resilience and complexity.

By considering the history of bioethics and international humanitarian law, Joseph J. Fins contends that bioethics as an academic and moral community should stand in solidarity with Ukraine as it defends freedom and civility.

The ongoing pandemic disaster of coronavirus erupted with the first confirmed cases in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) novel coronavirus, the disease referred to as coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the outbreak and determined it a global pandemic. The current pandemic has infected nearly 300 million people and killed over 3 million. The current COVID-19 pandemic is smashing every public health barrier, guardrail, and safety measure in underdeveloped and the most developed countries alike, with peaks and troughs across time. Greatly impacted are those regions experiencing conflict and war. Morbidity and mortality increase logarithmically for those communities at risk and that lack the ability to promote basic preventative measures. States around the globe struggle to unify responses, make gains on preparedness levels, identify and symptomatically treat positive cases, and labs across the globe frantically rollout various vaccines and effective surveillance and therapeutic mechanisms. The incidence and prevalence of COVID-19 may continue to increase globally as no unified disaster response is manifested and disinformation spreads. During this failure in response, virus variants are erupting at a dizzying pace. Ungoverned spaces where nonstate actors predominate and active war zones may become the next epicenter for COVID-19 fatality rates. As the incidence rates continue to rise, hospitals in North America and Europe exceed surge capacity, and immunity post infection struggles to be adequately described. The global threat in previously high-quality, robust infrastructure health-care systems in the most developed economies are failing the challenge posed by COVID-19; how will less-developed economies and those health-care infrastructures that are destroyed by war and conflict fare until adequate vaccine penetrance in these communities or adequate treatment are established? Ukraine and other states in the Black Sea Region are under threat and are exposed to armed Russian aggression against territorial sovereignty daily. Ukraine, where Russia has been waging war since 2014, faces this specific dual threat: disaster response to violence and a deadly infectious disease. To best serve biosurveillance, aid in pandemic disaster response, and bolster health security in Europe, across the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) and Black Sea regions, increased NATO integration, across Ukraine’s disaster response structures within the Ministries of Health, Defense, and Interior must be reinforced and expanded to mitigate the COVID-19 disaster.