Abstract

This paper analyzes the transformation of the EU’s enlargement policy during the ongoing war in Ukraine through a comparative study of Moldova and Georgia. While the geopolitical crisis propelled Moldova to open EU accession negotiations due to successful democratic and structural reforms, Georgia’s democratic backsliding and anti-Western turn have brought its integration process to a de facto standstill, leaving its candidate status purely nominal.

Methodologically, this research builds upon a comparative case study approach to evaluate how shifting external geopolitical pressures interact with domestic political structures in Moldova and Georgia. Building on the literature on the EU’s geopolitical turn, the paper starts from the premise that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fundamentally disrupted the post-Cold War security architecture, compelling the European Union to transition from a normative and technocratic actor into a geopolitical security provider, thereby revitalizing an otherwise stagnant enlargement policy.

Against this backdrop, Moldova successfully leveraged the geopolitical window of opportunity and strictly aligned its internal reforms with European standards. In stark contrast, despite being granted candidate status in December 2023, Georgia experienced a severe trend of democratic backsliding.

The Russia-Ukraine war has created a critical geopolitical momentum for potential EU integration, however, the realization of this window remains precarious and contingent upon the war concluding on terms that secure regional stability. In any case, the comparative analysis of Moldova and Georgia demonstrates that external geopolitical factors alone are insufficient. While Moldova has made substantial, though incomplete, progress in dismantling the networks of state capture, Georgia’s ruling elite prioritized narrow partisan interests and authoritarian consolidation, once again confirming that the realization of a European future remains strictly contingent upon domestic political will, democratic resilience, and an unwavering commitment to the rule of law.

Author: Revaz Topuria

Abstract

This article examines what the war reveals about the actual military utility of battlefield AI, its genuine contributions, its structural limitations, and its implications for the future of armed conflict. Drawing on operational reporting, peer-reviewed analysis, and critical war studies scholarship, it traces AI’s role across Ukrainian drone warfare and targeting, the compression of the intelligence-to-strike cycle through platforms such as Palantir, Russia’s more centralised and comparatively underdeveloped AI posture, and the unprecedented involvement of Western private technology firms as de facto participants in the conduct of hostilities. The analysis finds that AI has not proven decisive in the conventional sense, its battlefield value is highly context-dependent, eroded rapidly through adversarial adaptation, and ultimately contingent on institutional integration rather than algorithmic sophistication alone. Engaging Bousquet’s concept of technoscientific regimes and Der Derian’s theory of “virtuous war,” the article argues that AI has made the battlefield more legible without making it more decisive, thinning the fog of war while leaving the underlying frictions of logistics, organisation, and political will largely intact. It concludes that the war’s deepest lesson is not technological but structural, that the states best positioned for future conflict will be those that master not the algorithm, but the organisation built around it, a finding with significant implications for the unresolved governance of autonomous weapons and the growing privatisation of military AI.

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