The story that is still being written

In 2026, this magazine commemorates its 15th year of publishing. Our first issue, released in October 2011, which now seems like a lifetime ago, announced that New Eastern Europe was established to present readers with provocative texts, in-depth analyses, and stimulating reports from the countries that belong to what we then called Eastern Europe. We were convinced that a new story about the region was being developed in front of our eyes and that required close observation and commentary. We took on the challenge to provide them to you – our readers.

When we started discussing what our magazine should be like, what we should cover and whom to ask for texts, the overall mood in our region was that of cautious optimism. On the one hand, some countries, such as Poland where we are located, offered a story of success. After having completed a successful transformation from communism to democracy and market economy, Poland became a member of western security, political and economic structures. Together with other post-communist countries it joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

However, as we were collecting the very first texts for the first issue, Europe was not free of challenges. While the EU was still recovering from the 2008 eurozone crisis, one could still sense divisions (also economic) between the West and the East. The authors of the first issue analysed these issues from different angles and perspectives. At that time, the memory of the 2004 Orange Revolution and its promise to turn Ukraine into a modern and democratic state, as well as the launch of the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme, were still vivid and inspiring. It was not entirely naïve to believe that the EU integration of Eastern Europe was the next step in Europe’s development. However, this vision was not shared in the Kremlin where, despite Dmitry Medvedev’s time in office, the policy of the reintegration of the former Soviet republics was being formulated. The West, unfortunately, turned a blind eye to these developments, charmed by the idea of reset and rapprochement through trade.

Which way East?

When we published the first issue of New Eastern Europe, we did not start it by claiming to know what Eastern Europe was. Instead, we began by asking what Eastern Europe meant – to the people and societies in the region, but also to those who often looked at it through the lens of outdated stereotypes. Our first task was to examine what connected the very different countries and societies placed under this geographical label. It was also important to think how much of “Eastern Europe” existed not on the map, but in the political imagination of those looking at the region from outside.

A funny anecdote from our early days involved a meeting between our editors and the then senior editor and Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Economist, Edward Lucas. During a meeting with Lucas in London, we proudly presented him with our first issue, knowing his affinity for the region and direct connections to our city, Kraków. His response after seeing our front cover was direct and provocative. “I hate the name,” he said bluntly. Obviously, we were taken aback. Lucas then argued that the expression “Eastern Europe” was outdated, misleading, and a lazy shorthand for a complex region. The label, he contended, inaccurately reduces diverse nations to outdated Cold War stereotypes of backwardness and political instability. In many senses he was right then, and even more so today. Our retort can only be seen in subsequent issues. We understood that the region is diverse and resistant to easy categorization. However, at the same time, we see that it is connected by shared histories and experiences that continue to influence its political and social development.

The impetus for launching New Eastern Europe came from the emerging Polish perspective at that time. For the first time since its EU accession, Poland held the presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2011. It made a strategic decision to focus largely on the new Eastern Partnership programme, launched two years earlier under the joint leadership of Sweden and Poland.

Our publisher, the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe, had been publishing the Polish edition of Nowa Europa Wschodnia since 2008, a journal which aimed to influence Polish thinking about its eastern neighbours. The idea for the English edition came out of a meeting of the then Chair of the College of Eastern Europe, Jan Andrzej Dąbrowski, together with the then mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz (who was later assassinated in public in 2019), and Basil Kerski, then director of the European Solidarity Centre. The initial thought was to directly translate the Polish edition into English. However, once the editors gathered for their first editorial meeting they quickly came to the conclusion that Polish thinking about the region was much more nuanced and needed less explanations than what should be offered to the wider, global audience. It was also clear that New Eastern Europe was to not only cover what is understood as Poland’s eastern policy, which includes countries east of Poland. The discussion that we wanted to carry on through our magazine was meant to also focus on the broader understanding of Central and Eastern Europe. As a result, a decision was made to split the Polish edition (Nowa Europa Wschodnia) and the English-language New Eastern Europe.

Interlude period

Looking back at our first full years of publishing in 2012 and 2013, it now appears as something of an interlude – a period between the optimism associated with the post-1989 transformation and the upheavals that would soon fundamentally reshape the region. At the time, of course, we did not know what was coming. Yet many of the warning signs were already there, and they were increasingly reflected in the pages of New Eastern Europe. We noted declining freedom and democracy rankings across the region and looked ahead to elections in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Russia inevitably occupied a central place in this discussion. Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 coincided with the largest demonstrations the country had witnessed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At first, there were voices stating that the growing urban middle class and the emergence of a new generation of politically engaged Russians might begin to challenge the system built during Putin’s first two presidential terms. Provoked by these opinions, by early 2013 we asked the question directly on our cover: “Can Russia really change?” Yet what interested us was not Putin himself, but the durability of the political system around him and whether the civic awakening of 2011-12 represented the beginning of something larger. In retrospect, we can clearly see that this was a decisive moment. The regime survived the challenge it faced from the democratically-minded members of Russian society. In the following years, it would increasingly respond to any domestic uncertainty through repression, ideological mobilization, and confrontation with the West.

While observing these, and other political developments, we were becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the political transformations that had begun two decades prior did not necessarily move in one direction. The Soviet legacy, personalized systems of power, political patronage, and even Cold War-style espionage had survived into what was supposed to be a new European reality. In Ukraine, we examined how Viktor Yanukovych had concentrated power, while in Belarus we monitored different stages of Lukashenka’s path to dictatorship. Even Hungary, long considered one of the success stories of the post-communist transition, appeared in our pages as evidence that democratic consolidation could not simply be taken for granted. The lines dividing Europe, as Timothy Garton Ash told us at the time, were becoming “more fluid and more complex”. In this way, they did not resemble anything that was known from the period of the Cold War when the Iron Curtain marked a clear split between two opposing systems.

Our understanding of the region has never been limited to the geopolitical space between Russia and the EU. In early 2013 we thus turned towards the Western Balkans. We published an issue titled “Painful Past, Fragile Future” in which we focused on questions of memory, identity and belonging in this part of Europe. The experiences of the societies in the Balkans reminded us that the past can continue to shape the political choices of the present.

By the middle of 2013, however, many of the questions appearing in our pages about Russia’s trajectory, Ukraine’s geopolitical position, democratic backsliding, unresolved histories, and the limits of Europe’s transformative power were beginning to converge. Within months, they would do so dramatically. Our final issue of that year focused on the Eastern Partnership ahead of the Vilnius Summit and reflected a moment when further European integration still appeared possible. Carl Bildt, one of the two architects of the Eastern Partnership Programme, envisioned a Europe without dividing lines, while Radosław Sikorski, its second architect, argued that the countries covered by the programme were not simply Europe’s neighbours, but its “European neighbours”. When that issue went to print, we could not foresee the developments that would be triggered as a result of the then approaching Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius.

More than a revolution of dignity

The uncertainty with which we ended 2013 did not last long. Yanukovych’s decision to abandon the Association Agreement in Ukraine triggered the protests that grew into the Euromaidan and later the Revolution of Dignity. Suddenly, many of the questions we had been following since the magazine’s launch came together in this extraordinary moment. During the most intense weeks of the revolution in January and February 2014, we followed events through a live blog online, while our subsequent print issues tried to understand the Maidan from political, historical, cultural and social perspectives and, importantly, through voices from Ukraine itself.

As we acknowledged in our second issue of 2014, the events were moving so quickly that some articles risked becoming outdated even at the time when the paper was released from the printers. Our task was therefore not to report on what was happening, but to provide the context necessary to understand why it was happening. Thus, the Revolution of Dignity also marked a turning point for New Eastern Europe itself. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent outbreak of the war in Donbas transformed what had begun as a struggle over Ukraine’s political future into a crisis of the European security order. The demand for deeper analysis of the region increased accordingly. Despite receiving no corresponding increase in funding, we made the decision to transform our journal from a quarterly into a bimonthly magazine. It was an ambitious step for our small team, but also a response to our readers, who were looking for ways to understand a region that in the second decade of the 21st century had moved from Europe’s political margins to the centre of international attention.

The rupture of 2014 did not end with the Maidan or the annexation of Crimea. It established a new reality with which the region would have to live. In 2015, we were already asking whether the Baltic states might once again find themselves on the geopolitical frontier between East and West, while warning that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could no longer be treated as a regional conflict but as a challenge to the wider European order. The war in Donbas, Russian disinformation campaigns, as well as the difficult question of whether reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine could ever be possible, were then addressed in our pages.

As the immediate shock of 2014 receded, our focus widened. The migration crisis in Europe, democratic backsliding in several countries including those in our region, and the rise of illiberal and populist forces demonstrated that instability was not confined to Europe’s East. By 2017, when we asked whether “the world is turning upside down”, it was becoming increasingly difficult to assume that the liberal democratic model towards which the post-1989 transformations had been heading was either inevitable or irreversible. This led us back to one of the questions with which NEE had started: what was the meaning of the post-communist transformation in the former Soviet republics, which were now independent states?

By 2018 and 2019, another theme had become visible in the form of a generational change that was seen across different states. The question we asked was could this shift lead to new developments in the realm of politics? We looked at young Russians taking part in anti-corruption protests led by Alexei Navalny, but also analysed the factors pointing to the durability of Putin’s increasingly authoritarian system and the Kremlin’s instrumentalization of historical memory. The tenth anniversary of the Eastern Partnership offered an opportunity to revisit some of the hopes that had been seen in our coverage prior and to ask how much the EU had actually succeeded in transforming its eastern neighbourhood. In 2019, we noticed some “new faces” appearing across the region. Among them was Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine who was elected also in this year.

Bound to explode

The year 2020 brought us a deliberately provocative question: was the region “bound to explode”? – a question we placed directly on the cover of the first issue of that year. Political polarization, populism, competing narratives and growing tensions between Russia and the West all suggested that the new decade would bring greater instability. Within months, COVID-19 closed borders and disrupted societies, economies and even the distribution networks on which a small international magazine like ours depended. As a result, our third issue of 2020, devoted to the still ongoing war in Donbas, could not reach newsstands and bookshops. To meet this challenge, we appealed to our readers to order the magazine directly from us. Their response, as well as that of some of our partners, allowed us to meet our sales target for the issue – a small but important demonstration of the community that had grown around NEE.

By the autumn, the pandemic itself had become the subject of our analysis. Our authors looked at the different responses to COVID-19 across Eastern Europe, as well as what the crisis was exposing beneath the surface: economic vulnerabilities, migrant labour, expanding state surveillance and political systems already under strain. In spring 2020, we saw how the negligence of public health issues brought on political mobilization in Belarus, which a few months later, after the blatantly fraudulent re-election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, led to an unprecedented wave of democratic protests. These acts of dissent were brutally suppressed, followed by a wave of repression on a scale unseen in the region for a long time.

If 2014 had shattered many assumptions about the post-Cold War order, February 24th 2022 destroyed any remaining illusions. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was, as we wrote later that year, “the single most important event in our region this century”. At New Eastern Europe, the war became the central focus of our work, but it also brought us back to questions we had been asking since the magazine’s first issues.

Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance provided its own answer to some of those questions. It demonstrated that Ukrainian statehood and identity were not abstract slogans but realities that millions of people were prepared to defend. At the same time, the invasion forced a much broader reckoning with Russia. By the end of 2022, we argued that relations between the democratic world and the Kremlin had passed a “point of no return”. The debate no longer included questions of how to talk with Russia but focused on such issues as Russian imperialism or the accountability of the Russian state for the crimes committed in Ukraine. We also analysed the mistakes that had been made in foreign policy thinking across Europe, pointing to how some countries, especially Germany, needed to rethink assumptions that had shaped their Russia policies.

Belarus also offered a warning. The defeat of the democratic protests of 2020 had been followed by the Lukashenka regime’s greater dependence on Moscow. That also partly explains Minsk’s complicity in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Eleven years after NEE had begun by asking what Eastern Europe was and where it belonged, the war had made clear that these were never merely questions of geography or identity. They were questions of sovereignty, freedom and, ultimately, the kind of European order that would emerge from the struggle taking place in Ukraine.

Changing with the times

In the years since 2022 our attention has increasingly turned towards a much larger transformation of the international order. For example, Russia’s deepening relationship with China prompted us in 2023 to examine Beijing’s growing presence in Central and Eastern Europe and the wider implications of the Sino-Russian partnership. In the same way, the developments in the South Caucasus that same year, when Azerbaijan regained control over Nagorno-Karabakh and more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the region, would have been almost unthinkable in our early years of publishing.

A year later, a historic series of elections around the world led us to ask whether democracy itself could withstand the pressures it was facing, while the 20th anniversary of the EU’s “Big Bang” enlargement provided an opportunity to revisit another of the assumptions that accompanied NEE’s early years: that the divisions between Europe’s East and West would gradually lose their significance. By the end of 2024, we were instead writing about an “age of uncertainty”.

In 2025, as questions grew over the future of transatlantic relations and continued western support for Ukraine, we suggested that “something is coming to an end.” And by the beginning of 2026, our cover described Europe as existing in a “new disorder”: a world in which international law, alliances and established spheres of cooperation are increasingly challenged by the return of great power competition and the politics of might. The question facing us today is therefore no longer simply where Eastern Europe fits within Europe, but whether our entire region, and Europe itself, will fit within the new global order now taking shape.

As the world we cover has changed, so have the ways in which we try to understand and explain it. The printed magazine remains at the heart of New Eastern Europe thanks in large part to our readers and partners. It is enriched by the content offered on our website: www.neweasterneurope.eu, which offers more updated analysis and reports from the region. However, these two are only one part of a much broader conversation we have with our audience. Since 2019, our podcast Talk Eastern Europe has grown into an important part of our work and, in 2026, it expanded further as a YouTube channel. In 2024 we also launched Brief Eastern Europe, which has developed into a weekly newsletter helping readers follow the most important developments across the region, and our website continues to provide analysis and commentary between the publication of our print issues.

As we enter, hopefully, our next 15 years of publishing, we continue to look for reasons for optimism, despite the enormous challenges facing our region. We often find them in the stories of individuals, communities and societies where real change begins and where hope persists, even under the most difficult circumstances.

The story of this region has entered another chapter, one that is increasingly inseparable from the wider story of Europe and the changing world around it. We cannot know where history will take us next. But we can continue to observe it, question it and try to understand it. And perhaps we can allow ourselves one hope of our own: that one day the words “Eastern Europe” will evoke not division, conflict or a troubled past, but freedom, prosperity, solidarity and renewal.

 

In the end, we would like to take a moment here to thank all of the staff and colleagues at the College of Eastern Europe who have worked with us over this decade and a half; as well as extend our sincerest gratitude to the City of Gdańsk and the European Solidarity Centre for their continued support and incredible partnership.

 

Adam Reichardt is the editor in chief of New Eastern Europe and co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast.

Iwona Reichardt is the deputy editor in chief of New Eastern Europe. She is a member of the board of the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe and a co-founder of FemGlobal, Women in Foreign Policy – a Polish-based association of women working in the field of international relations.