Where will the 2B Security Forum take place?

The 2B Security Forum will be held in Bucharest, ROU.

When does the 2B Security Forum begin?

The 2B Security Forum is scheduled to begin in May.

2B Security Forum 2026

Name: 2B Security Forum 2026
Start: 2026-05-12T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-05-12T00:00:00Z
Location: Bucharest

May 12, 2026Bucharest, RomaniaIn-person

The 2B Security Forum is scheduled to convene in Bucharest, ROU. This gathering serves as a platform for discussions on pressing security issues, bringing together experts and stakeholders in the field. The forum aims to foster dialogue and collaboration on strategies to address contemporary security challenges.

Committees & topics

Topics
Black Sea Security · NATO Summits · War in Ukraine · European Security Architecture · The Transatlantic Link · Frozen Peace: Protracted Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space · Rare Earths and Critical Minerals · Air and Space as a Battlefield

Why it matters

The forum's location in Bucharest, ROU, is strategically significant, positioning it at the crossroads of various geopolitical interests. This geographic context inherently shapes the discussions, emphasizing regional security dynamics and their broader implications. The event provides a crucial opportunity for participants to engage with complex security narratives.

By convening in ROU, the forum inherently draws attention to the security landscape of Southeastern Europe. This focus is vital for understanding the interconnectedness of global security, as regional stability often has ripple effects internationally. The forum's discussions are expected to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of these interdependencies.

How to prepare

To maximize engagement at the forum, participants should undertake thorough preparation. This includes researching the current security landscape relevant to the event's location in Bucharest, ROU. Understanding the specific challenges and opportunities within this region will be crucial for contributing meaningfully to the discussions.

Familiarity with various approaches to security, including concepts such as "Dynamic Analysis" and "Engagement Strategies," will be beneficial. Participants should also consider the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, utilizing frameworks like "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" and identifying "Hidden Stakeholders." This comprehensive preparation will enable a more informed and impactful participation in the forum's proceedings.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Romania

As the host nation, ROU is central to the forum's discussions, providing the geographic and geopolitical context for security deliberations.

Role in topic

ROU's role as host underscores its commitment to regional security and its position as a key player in addressing contemporary challenges within its vicinity.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Black Sea Security

The Black Sea has long been a contested maritime space straddling NATO's eastern flank and Russia's southern approaches. Since Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent militarization of the peninsula, the regional balance has shifted markedly, with Moscow asserting expansive claims over maritime traffic, energy infrastructure, and the Kerch Strait. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned the basin into an active war zone, with naval engagements, missile strikes on port cities, and repeated disruptions to the Black Sea Grain Initiative before its collapse in July 2023. The regime governing the straits remains the 1936 Montreux Convention, administered by Türkiye, which closed the Bosporus and Dardanelles to warships of belligerent states shortly after the invasion. Ukrainian forces have nonetheless inflicted significant damage on the Russian Black Sea Fleet using sea drones and cruise missiles, pushing major assets from Sevastopol toward Novorossiysk. NATO littoral members Bulgaria, Romania, and Türkiye have stepped up mine-clearing cooperation and air policing, while Georgia's drift away from Euro-Atlantic alignment has added new uncertainty. Today the core disputes concern freedom of navigation, the security of grain and energy corridors, protection of subsea cables and pipelines, and the post-war military posture of both Russia and NATO in the basin. Hybrid threats — including GPS jamming, drifting mines, and shadow-fleet tanker activity — have made the Black Sea a laboratory for contemporary maritime conflict.

Key players

NATO Summits

NATO summits have become the central venue for translating allied threat perceptions into binding political commitments. The 2014 Wales Summit, held after Russia's first invasion of Ukraine, set the 2% of GDP defense spending pledge. The 2016 Warsaw Summit established the Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltic states and Poland. The 2022 Madrid Summit, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, adopted a new Strategic Concept naming Russia as the most significant and direct threat and identifying China as a systemic challenge. The 2023 Vilnius and 2024 Washington summits accelerated this transformation: regional defense plans were approved, Sweden and Finland's accessions were completed, a NATO–Ukraine Council was created, and allies pledged long-term support to Kyiv including a coordination mission (NSATU) based in Wiesbaden. The 2025 Hague Summit raised the headline defense investment ambition substantially, with allies endorsing a target combining core defense spending with broader security-related investment, reflecting both Russian pressure and US demands for greater European burden-sharing. Looking ahead, summit agendas are dominated by the future of support to Ukraine, force posture on the eastern flank, defense-industrial capacity, the transatlantic balance under shifting US administrations, and the alliance's posture toward the Indo-Pacific and emerging technologies.

Key players

War in Ukraine

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022, expanding a conflict that had simmered since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. After failing to seize Kyiv, Russian forces shifted to a war of attrition across the south and east. Ukrainian counter-offensives liberated Kharkiv region and Kherson city in late 2022, but the 2023 summer offensive yielded limited gains against dense Russian fortifications. Since 2024 Russian forces have pressed slowly westward in Donetsk oblast, while Ukraine launched an incursion into Russia's Kursk region in August 2024. The war has reshaped the international system: unprecedented Western sanctions on Russia, the freezing of roughly USD 300 billion in Russian central bank assets, deepening Russian dependence on Iranian drones and North Korean munitions and troops, and a wholesale rearmament in Europe. Multilateral diplomacy has stalled — the UN General Assembly has repeatedly condemned the invasion, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March 2023, but the UNSC remains deadlocked by Russia's veto. As of late 2025 the front is largely static, attritional, and increasingly drone-defined. Debate centers on the terms of any ceasefire, security guarantees for Ukraine short of NATO membership, use of frozen Russian assets, accountability for war crimes, and the sustainability of Western military aid under shifting political conditions in Washington and key European capitals.

Key players

European Security Architecture

Europe's post-Cold War security architecture — built on the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris, the OSCE, the NATO–Russia Founding Act, and the conventional arms control regime — has effectively collapsed. The CFE Treaty was suspended by Russia in 2007 and formally exited in 2023; the INF Treaty ended in 2019; the Open Skies Treaty unraveled in 2020–2021; and the OSCE has been paralyzed by consensus rules amid Russian obstruction. Russia's invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 demonstrated that the territorial settlement of 1991 is no longer accepted by Moscow. In response, European states have undertaken the most significant rearmament since the Cold War. Germany announced a EUR 100 billion special fund and a Zeitenwende in defense policy; Poland has become the alliance's largest per-GDP spender; Finland and Sweden joined NATO, more than doubling the alliance's land border with Russia. The EU has activated the European Peace Facility, launched the ASAP and EDIP defense-industrial initiatives, and is debating common defense bonds and the deployment of frozen Russian assets. Core disputes today include the future of arms control, the place of Ukraine and the Western Balkans in European institutions, the management of hybrid threats and sabotage campaigns, energy security after the severing of Russian pipeline gas, and the degree to which Europe can act autonomously of the United States.

Key players

The Transatlantic Link

The transatlantic relationship has anchored Western security since the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, underpinned by Article 5 collective defense, the US nuclear umbrella, and dense economic ties. For most of the post-Cold War period the link survived disagreements over Iraq, missile defense, and burden-sharing because the underlying strategic consensus held. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine initially reinvigorated transatlantic cohesion, producing aligned sanctions, the Ramstein-format Ukraine Defense Contact Group, and coordinated military aid. Since 2024, however, the link has come under unprecedented strain. The second Trump administration has demanded sharply higher European defense spending, signaled conditionality on Article 5, opened bilateral negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, imposed tariffs on European goods, and questioned long-standing arrangements on extended deterrence and forward presence. European responses have ranged from accelerated national rearmament and discussion of a 'European pillar' within NATO to renewed French and British debate over a European nuclear dimension. The core dispute is whether the alliance is undergoing a temporary renegotiation of burden-sharing or a structural decoupling. At stake are the credibility of extended deterrence, the future of US forces in Europe, the trajectory of Ukraine support, transatlantic trade and technology relations, and the West's collective posture toward China.

Key players

Frozen Peace: Protracted Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space

'Frozen' or protracted conflicts have shaped the post-Soviet space since the dissolution of the USSR. Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1992 and hosts Russian troops to this day. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were the site of wars in the early 1990s and the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, after which Russia recognized both as independent. Nagorno-Karabakh was contested between Armenia and Azerbaijan from 1988; the Second Karabakh War in 2020 and the Azerbaijani offensive of September 2023 dissolved the de facto Armenian-administered entity and triggered the displacement of nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population. The Donbas conflict, frozen by the Minsk agreements of 2014–2015, was reignited and superseded by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These conflicts share common features: contested sovereignty, Russian military presence or peacekeeping mandates, large displaced populations, and stalled negotiation formats such as the 5+2 talks on Transnistria, the Geneva International Discussions on Georgia, and the OSCE Minsk Group on Karabakh. Most of these formats are now moribund, with Russia's role discredited or rejected by host states. Today the principal questions concern the demilitarization and reintegration of breakaway territories, the safe return of displaced persons, the status of Russian forces, and whether new mediation formats — involving the EU, Türkiye, or the UN — can replace structures that no longer function.

Key players

Rare Earths and Critical Minerals

Rare earth elements and a broader set of critical minerals — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and gallium — are essential inputs for defense systems, semiconductors, electric vehicles, and the energy transition. China dominates the global value chain, accounting for roughly 60% of mining and over 85% of processing of rare earths, and similar shares of refining for several other critical materials. Beijing has progressively weaponized this position: imposing export controls on gallium and germanium in 2023, on graphite in late 2023, on rare earth processing technology in 2023, and tightening restrictions on rare earth exports through 2024 and 2025. In response, the United States has passed the Inflation Reduction Act and used the Defense Production Act to fund domestic mining and processing; the EU adopted the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2024 with benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling; and resource-rich states from Australia and Canada to the DRC, Indonesia, and Chile have become objects of intensified strategic competition. The US has also negotiated bilateral minerals partnerships with Ukraine and several African and Indo-Pacific states. Key policy disputes involve the security of supply chains, environmental and labor standards in mining, export controls, the role of state subsidies and friend-shoring, and the geopolitics of seabed mining as the International Seabed Authority continues to negotiate a mining code.

Key players

Air and Space as a Battlefield

Air and space have moved decisively from enabling domains to contested battlefields. In Ukraine, both sides have integrated thousands of one-way attack drones, FPV systems, and electronic warfare into daily operations, while Russia has used Iranian Shahed-136 drones and a range of cruise and ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities and energy grids. NATO airspace incursions, GPS jamming over the Baltic, and the downing of civilian aircraft — including the 2024 Azerbaijan Airlines incident attributed to Russian air defenses — have demonstrated the spillover risks of contested skies. In space, the 2007 Chinese, 2008 US, 2019 Indian, and 2021 Russian kinetic ASAT tests demonstrated direct-ascent counter-space capabilities; the 2021 Russian test created a long-lived debris field. States are deploying non-kinetic counter-space tools — jamming, spoofing, dazzling, and cyber — against commercial constellations such as Starlink, which has itself become a critical battlefield communications layer. The PAROS negotiations remain stalled at the Conference on Disarmament, and the Outer Space Treaty does not address most contemporary threats. Key debates focus on integrated air and missile defense, the regulation of military uses of commercial space services, norms against debris-creating ASAT tests (a moratorium endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2022), responsibilities of private operators in armed conflict, and the future of arms control covering hypersonic and space-based systems.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 2B Security Forum 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Hilton-Becerra Race Sets Up High-Stakes Clash

Arming an archipelago: Is time running out for Europe's oldest DMZ? | Euronews

Comprehensive approach to security: Federal Council launches consultation on Switzerland's security policy strategy

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Frequently asked questions

Free account

Save conferences, research any topic with AI, build position papers, and keep your daily prep streak — free.

Create free account

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2B Security Forum 2026

May 12, 2026Bucharest, RomaniaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Black Sea Security · NATO Summits · War in Ukraine · European Security Architecture · The Transatlantic Link · Frozen Peace: Protracted Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space · Rare Earths and Critical Minerals · Air and Space as a Battlefield

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Romania

As the host nation, ROU is central to the forum's discussions, providing the geographic and geopolitical context for security deliberations.

Role in topic

ROU's role as host underscores its commitment to regional security and its position as a key player in addressing contemporary challenges within its vicinity.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Black Sea Security

Key players

NATO Summits

Key players

War in Ukraine

Key players

European Security Architecture

Key players

The Transatlantic Link

Key players

Frozen Peace: Protracted Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space

Key players

Rare Earths and Critical Minerals

Key players

Air and Space as a Battlefield

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 2B Security Forum 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Hilton-Becerra Race Sets Up High-Stakes Clash

Arming an archipelago: Is time running out for Europe's oldest DMZ? | Euronews

Comprehensive approach to security: Federal Council launches consultation on Switzerland's security policy strategy

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Romania May 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Free account

Save conferences, research any topic with AI, build position papers, and keep your daily prep streak — free.

Create free account

Already a member? Log in

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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