In the midst of the Ukrainian crisis the question of spheres of influence has returned to political discourse. Actors find themselves in between a rock and a hard place, as global and regional interests seemingly exist, but acknowledging the idea of “spheres” can be a slippery slope. Both the EU and Russia have denied the existence of their “spheres” but at the same time blamed each other on building of such entities. I will, on one the hand, ask the nature of the current struggle of the concept. On the other hand the question is, whether such a contested concept has ever vanished from international arena. Moreover, these conceptualizations are linked to different ideas of domination and world order. Empirically the paper examines classic cases from colonization of Africa, through Churchill’s preventive attempt to calculate different percentages of influence in East Central Europe, to the current EU-Russia relations.
