Review Article Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–5 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/03043754241229654 journals.sagepub.com/home/alt “Eastern Europe” and War. Introduction to the Special Issue Aliaksei Kazharski 1  and Andrey Makarychev 2  Abstract 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 Visegr´ ad 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. Keywords Eastern Europe, Central Europe, war, Ukraine, regionalism, Visegr´ ad Four, Baltics The full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russia launched on February 24, 2022, has become a wa- tershed for Europe in many respects. Not only did we come to witness the largest European war since 1945, but as many would be prone to point out, it was also an open and undisguised war of conquest with territories being annexed shamelessly and without much effort to invent a convincing pretext. Here, of course one should not forget about the previous dynamics around Russia and its neighbors, including the 2008 war against Georgia, the de facto annexation of the two Georgian provinces disguised with the help of unrecognized proxy states, and the direct annexation of Crimea and the first Russo-Ukrainian war of 2014, which was often hypocritically downplayed as the “Ukraine crisis.” As it, no doubt, happened on numerous previous occasions the inertia of perceptions slowed down the realization of the scale of things. At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the 2022 invasion would remain the biggest shock or if more dramatic events are yet in store. However, 2022 has clearly become a turning point with respect to the post-Communist transitions in the East of Europe. In public discussions over the past decades there have been multiple candidates for the so- called “return of history”—a catchy even if grossly inaccurate reinterpretation of Francis Fukuyama’ s renowned thesis. Arguably, this was now the strongest one. It provided truly shocking evidence of the failure of the linear models of transition which was clearly foreshadowed by multiple events 1 Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic 2 Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Corresponding Author: Aliaksei Kazharski, Univerzita Karlova, U Kˇ r´ ı ˇ ze 1, Prague 158 00, Czech Republic. Email: aliaksei.kazharski@fsv.cuni.cz