Geography, alliances, and European military spending after 2014 and 2022: a retest

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in Donbas in 2014 fundamentally challenged assumptions about the stability of Europe’s post-Cold War security order and prompted renewed attention to conventional military threats. Previous research by the authors found that only about one-third of European states increased defense spending after 2014, and that physical distance from Russia was the only robust predictor of variation across countries. This paper reexamines those findings in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a more extensive and severe security shock. Using quantitative analysis, primarily OLS regression and supplementary robustness checks, the study compares changes in military expenditure as a share of GDP across European states after both 2014 and 2022 and examines whether the explanatory power of key variables remained stable across the two episodes. The results show that the 2022 invasion produced a much broader rise in defense spending than the 2014 shock, while confirming geographic distance (no matter how operationalized) from Russia as the most robust predictor of variation in national responses. Overall, the findings suggest that European threat perceptions remain strongly shaped by geography, even though we can argue that a consensus has emerged on the need to increase defense spending.