Scenarios for Europe’s eastern border: navigating uncertainty in a fragmented world

October 2025

Europe’s north-eastern frontier has once again become a fault line of geopolitical uncertainty. The area, which was once seen as a periphery of integration where cooperation, mobility, and cross-border development could flourish, has become a testing ground for resilience, security, and European solidarity.

The ESPON CHANEBO project (Challenges at the EU’s North-East External Borders (Abre numa nova janela)) examined potential future scenarios along the EU’s borders with Russia and Belarus. The project's three scenarios — Green EU Buffer Zone, EU Showcasing, and EU–Russia Appeasement — capture diverging trajectories in a world shaped by prolonged instability, authoritarian resurgence, and shifting global power dynamics.

These scenarios are not predictions, but structured reflections on possible futures. They provide a lens through which to understand Europe’s strategic choices and their territorial consequences for the regions of South Karelia (Finland), Ida-Viru (Estonia), Latgale (Latvia), and Utenos (Lithuanian). However, they also prompt a broader debate about the EU’s capacity to maintain security and cohesion along its new geopolitical frontier.

A contested frontier in flux

The EU’s north-eastern border regions, stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Lithuanian lakes, were once bridges of exchange. They hosted vibrant cross-border cooperation, supported by Interreg programmes and a cooperation framework including Russia, such as VASAB (Visions and Strategies around the Baltic Sea (Abre numa nova janela)). However, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered this logic, replacing interdependence with isolation and trust with suspicion.