Securitizing Decarbonization: How The Russo-Ukrainian War and Russia’s Accompanying Hybrid Warfare Campaign against the EU Operated as an Unlikely Accelerant of European Energy Transition through the Reconstitution of Decarbonization as a Continental Security Imperative

Abstract

Within the dominant security studies and energy policy literature, climate ambition has long been treated as necessarily subordinate to national security priorities in moments of geopolitical crisis. This thesis turns this canon on its head. Throughout the 2000s-2010s, the EU was heavily reliant on Russian fossil fuel supplies, representing approximately 40% of the EU’s fuel consumption between 2000-2022. During this period, Russia leveraged this trade relation as a site of geopolitical coercion, arresting fuel flows to destabilize the EU. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European policymakers, wary of the prospect of Russian territorial aggression, suspended all fossil fuel trade with Russia, pursuing regional energy integration to to offset the suspension of Russian fuel supplies. Yet, in the years that followed, Russia continued to exploit European energy systems as a node of coercion, targeting European transboundary infrastructure with covert attacks as part of a broader hybrid warfare campaign against the EU. Responsively, EU policymakers increasingly framed energy security via energy sovereignty as a key priority within the states’ national security doctrines. Specifically, and unexpectedly, EU policymakers looked to decarbonization as a means of enhancing domestic energy autonomy, framing renewable energy transition as a core national security imperative. This surprising divergence from the canonical theory that climate ambition must necessarily be sidelined in times of conflict begs the questions: To what extent did the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and Russia's accompanying hybrid warfare campaign against the EU drive the securitization of decarbonization, reconstituting energy transition from a climate imperative into a national security asset? Moreover, to what extent did this securitization of decarbonization materially 4 accelerate the energy transition ambitions of EU member states, and what might this imply about the influence of exposure to conflict on the pace of renewable energy transition? To answer this question, this thesis employs a mixed methods approach of historical tracing, empirical energy system analysis (employing International Energy Agency energy mix and fuel import data as well as The Center for the Study of Democracy’s Energy Security and Cliamte Risk Index), and textual policy analysis comparing the pre-2022 and post-2022 national security doctrines and National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs)’s of six country case studies: Finland, Poland, Romania, The Czech Republic, Germany and France. These case studies were selected to capture the geographical scope of the European Union, differentiated exposure to Russian hybrid energy coercion, and diversity of energy system structure and energy security risk profiles. Textual policy analysis comparing the pre-2022 and post-2022 national security doctrines and National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs)’s examines whether rhe 2022 energy crisis borne of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and Russia’s sustained hybrid energy warfare against the EU has compelled EU member states to incorporate decarbonization as a security imperative within their official national security doctrine and whether this framing has resulted in an acceleration of the state’s decarbonization targets under explicit security-based justifications. Ultimately, this study finds that, across Europe, exposure to the 2022 energy crisis and Russian hybrid energy warfare universally motivated the reconstitution of decarbonization as a national security imperative and the acceleration of state decarbonization targets under this securitized logic. The findings of this thesis thus unseat the longstanding epistemological segregation of climate policy and national security, advocating that moments of geopolitical volatility can converge state security and climate interests and thus offer an opportunity for climate progress under security-based incentives.