The Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the return of geopolitics and territorial warfare to Europe, putting defence concerns on top of the political agenda. A growing body of literature demonstrates that parties matter significantly for the defence policies of established democracies. However, little is known about the impact of the geopolitical environment on parties’ defence preferences. Nevertheless, understanding this impact is important, as parties influence countries’ defence policies, which in turn influence international developments. Moreover, as international developments greatly impact the lives of ordinary citizens, it requires clarification whether constituents enjoy proper democratic choice during geopolitical crises. Therefore, this project will examine the impact of geopolitical threat on European parties’ defence preferences, in the context of the Russian annexation of Crimea (2014) and invasion of Ukraine (2022). In doing so, this project will examine evolutions in saliency, party positions, party unanimity, and variation between parties countries. Methodologically, a mixed method design will be applied, combining expert surveys, manual and computerized analysis of party manifestos, and quantitative analysis of secondary data. Combining and triangulating the results of these methods will allow to thoroughly map the evolution of and variation in parties’ defence preferences and answer our research questions.