Challenges to national defence in contemporary geopolitical situation

Contemporary conflicts increasingly involve strategic competition conducted outside physical confrontation, where persistent contest within the information environment seeks to influence cognitive processes. This paper examines the role of psychological care, as a component of military medical support, in strengthening the resilience of professional soldiers. A qualitative approach combining doctrinal and policy analysis, comparative review, and conceptual synthesis were applied. The findings identify mental health as a foundational element of cognitive resilience and highlight a doctrinal shift toward preventive, resilience-oriented psychological care. The institutionalization of this approach within the Slovak Armed Forces demonstrates its relevance for sustaining operational readiness in cognitively contested environments.

This article analyses the challenges and perspectives of the European Union's security and defence policy in a new geopolitical era shaped by Russian aggression against Ukraine, growing US-China rivalry, and instability in the EU's neighbourhood. It identifies three key weaknesses that limit the Union's strategic autonomy: insufficient military capabilities, the fragmentation of the defence industry, and a reliance on external suppliers of weapons, equipment, and critical raw materials. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that combines political economy, political science, European studies, and security studies, the article examines how existing tools and initiatives, the EDF, PESCO, ASAP, EDIRPA, and the ReArm Europe plan, are responding to these deficits. While these instruments and initiatives demonstrate the EU's ambition to strengthen its security role, their effectiveness remains limited by political divergences and restricted resources. The author concludes that overcoming fragmentation and building sustainable mechanisms for defence cooperation are essential if the EU is to establish itself as a credible security actor in a multipolar world.

This article examines the evolution of the Kremlin’s emotional management strategies during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Based on qualitative content and critical discourse analysis of 900 media and official texts (2025–2026), the study identifies a shift from targeted fear during the first years of the war to a total politics of fear, implemented towards the whole society, including previously depoliticised segments. The findings show that this shift was predictable under the framework of the emotional management cycle. The shift from emotional governance to manipulation creates structural constraints that limit available strategies, making the escalation of emotional manipulation and the move toward generalised fear a likely outcome. The article contributes to understanding how regimes structurally produce generalised fear in prolonged crises.

This paper analyses the cognitive vulnerabilities of the Slovak information environment and identifies mechanisms through which adversarial actors exploit societal fractures to undermine national strategic resilience. The research employs a theoretical-empirical analysis, integrating NATO doctrinal frameworks with psychological concepts and current sociological data on public trust in Slovakia. The findings reveal significant cognitive lability regarding strategic alignment and demonstrate how horizontal mistrust facilitates strategic paralysis. Based on these findings, the authors identify the process of the Preparation of the Population for State Defence as one of the strategic tools for building cognitive resilience. The study provides an original synthesis of cognitive warfare theory and empirical facts, establishing cognitive sovereignty as a cornerstone of modern national security.

This paper examines whether adapting a multilingual large language model (LLM) to clearly pro‑Kremlin or pro‑Western texts can improve the automatic detection of pro‑Kremlin narratives in Czech‑language content. The study compares three variants of the same model: a base multilingual model, a pro‑Kremlin adapter trained on Russian‑language texts with pro‑Kremlin framing, and a pro‑Western adapter trained on Western sources that respond to the same topics from an opposing perspective. All models are fine‑tuned using a parameter‑efficient method and evaluated on a small Czech corpus covering five key narrative types. The pro‑Kremlin adapter shows the strongest ability to distinguish between texts with pro‑Kremlin framing and neutral texts, while the pro‑Western adapter brings only a modest improvement over the base model. These findings suggest that exposing an LLM to ideologically aligned training data can make it more sensitive to that ideology, with potential applications for supporting the detection of hostile information operations in smaller‑language NATO member states.

The study analyses residential social service facilities as a component of civil defence and the internal stability of a democratic state. Based on a qualitative analysis of international strategic and legal documents and relevant scholarly literature, it demonstrates that continuity of care for vulnerable groups constitutes an important element of national resilience to hybrid and other contemporary threats. Key factors include crisis preparedness, the decision-making capacity of management, intersectoral coordination, and the professional training of staff. The text emphasises the need for their systematic integration into security and crisis planning.

This paper examines possible demographic trajectories of the Kaliningrad region up to 2045 under conditions of growing geopolitical isolation after 2022. Using the cohort-component method, it models three scenarios that differ only in net migration, while fertility and mortality remain fixed. The results show that migration remains the decisive factor shaping future population size and age structure. Under sustained negative net migration, the region may fall below 1 million inhabitants by 2030 and experience accelerated ageing, with additional implications for the regional economy and defence potential.

The metaphysical technology of the security concept implies a mental-conceptual system of ontological definition of security as a state of being and establishing its conceptual criteria, which allows for planning through a rational algorithm and establishing principled approaches to avoiding and overcoming threats through formal methods, including mathematical deduction. The discussion part, through a review of scientific and literary sources, focuses on the specifics of the metaphysical concept of security in order to identify axiological analytical needs. The results highlight the relevance of the study with scientific novelty, in particular, the contribution of ethical-political discourse to the modern framework of the ontological concept of security. The conclusions and findings demonstrate the practical value of the research, namely, the inevitability of transforming the ethical-political discourse as a subject of reflection on universal scientific knowledge, in the perspective of understanding and evaluating pragmatic security problems.

Economic security is currently becoming one of the key dimensions of strategic thinking in the context of growing geopolitical tension, instability, uncertainty and systemic economic shocks. The paper analyses economic security as a complex and multidimensional concept that combines the protection of survival, sovereignty and prosperity with the ability to anticipate, absorb and respond to growing threats and risks. The first part deals with the theoretical foundations of the concept of economic security. This is followed by a discussion of global trends and risks. The third part analyses the instruments, strategies and limits of EU economic security policy. And the final chapter formulates recommendations for moving towards a resilient and adaptive policy. The results of the study indicate the need for a coordinated and value-based response to the challenges of an unstable multipolar world in which tensions and rivalries are growing, because economic security is no longer just a question of national survival, but also of ensuring the sustainable development of open and democratic societies in a period of global transformation.

This study evaluates the spatial uniformity of minefields established by different minelaying methods using discrepancy-based metrics. Scatterable, row-based, and quasi-random layouts were compared in a common 200 × 200 m area for mine counts of 60, 120, and 180. Spatial quality was assessed using star discrepancy and 𝐿2-star discrepancy. The results showed that scatterable minefields achieved the highest discrepancy values, while row-based layouts performed substantially better. The most favorable results were obtained for quasi-random layouts generated by the Halton and Hammersley sequences, with the Hammersley sequence producing the lowest discrepancy overall. The findings support the use of discrepancy as an objective tool for evaluating UAV-assisted minelaying.