Is Russia about to launch an attack on Europe? In the last few weeks the rhetoric has rapidly escalated and the number of sabotage and arson incidents linked to Russia have escalated fanning the flames of fear. How close is the start of WWIII?
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament on September 17 that allied intelligence pointed to Russian drones and missiles testing Europe’s eastern flank, entering Polish airspace and then being explained away afterwards as accidents. The design is to leave member states that Nato’s "Article 5 is more theoretical than practical". Poland scrambled fighter jets on September 17 as jet-powered drones crossed western Ukraine, and put ground-based air defence on high alert.
"In the Russian plan, according to intelligence assessments, there are also hybrid drone, and missile strikes on countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland," Tusk said. "The threat of provocations by Russia is real and could materialize at any moment."
French President Emmanuel Macron said the next day that Russian hybrid operations were now aimed directly at France and ordered new protection for critical infrastructure and defence-industry sites, Reuters reported.
When CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced trip to Moscow in August, reportedly to warn against a Russian attack on Nato. The last time the CIA director made an unannounced trip to Moscow was shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, after the trip Lithuanian and Estonian officials reported no increase in the military threat afterwards.
And countries along both sides of the border are making active preparations. Ukraine has already reinforced its border with Belarus. The Baltic states have put up fences and built defences, and Finland completed similar reinforcements this month. Poland's East Shield covers some 700 km of its borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad at a cost of about €2.4bn.
Russia recently built ten new missile launch-pad bases on its side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders that now put six Nato states inside Geran range. Behind them sit the powerful Oreshnik and the Iskanders ballistic missiles in Belarus and Kaliningrad that can hit any major capital in Europe.
More worryingly, Belarus ran tank and mechanised battalion exercises from September 15 to 18 at ranges roughly 15 km and 60 km from the Polish border and at Gozha on the Lithuanian frontier, beside the Suwalki Gap, the 104-km corridor that is the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the alliance – long seen as the favoured invasion point for Russian troops to take the Baltic states. Minsk called the drills "purely defensive", said they fell below the notification thresholds of the 2011 Vienna Convention and has not disclosed how many troops took part
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has also restarted radio relay stations used to guide Russian drones attacking targets in northern Ukraine, after he turned them off following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s threat to attack Belarus if they stayed in place.
"On his territory, along two regions bordering Ukraine, there is equipment directing fire at the Ukrainian population," Zelenskiy said in June. "Turn it off, take it down, and show us that it's been taken down. If they don't take it down, we'll take them down." Now the repeater stations are back on, there is a chance that Zelenskiy will follow through on his threat to strike them.
Fears of an invasion have risen to the point where Estonia has put in place plans to evacuate the entire population to Finland if Russia invades. Lithuania has published evacuation routes from Vilnius towards Poland. And both Russia and Germany have released plans to allow hospitals in the region to cope with a sudden surge of mass casualties should hostilities break out.
Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said on September 18 that it was "no coincidence" Tusk was speaking so strongly and that the warning had to be taken "very seriously"; the Dutch defence ministry's own strategy, published in June, put a limited war against Nato members as possible within a year of the Ukraine war ending. But that timely appears to have been brought forward now.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sounded the alarm during her Strasbourg state of the nation speech on September 16, telling the European Parliament that the union was "now dealing with an openly hostile world" and that the EU is now “surrounded by enemies.”
Her list was hybrid rather than military: "cyberattacks and sabotage, arson and drone incursions. They are ramping up every day." She proposed a European version of Article 4 — an emergency security protocol for members that are threatened rather than attacked — and a European Security Council to sit above it.
As tensions escalate, Putin denied Russia has any plans to attack Europe: "We don't want to fight you, we want to cooperate with you… I want to say once again: Russia has no aggressive intentions toward Europe or European countries. We are ready for cooperation and for restoring relations with our European neighbours," Putin told his military-industrial commission on September 18 in televised comments. But then he denied Russia had any intention of invading Ukraine as well, right up to the day before Russians tanks rolled across the border on February 24, 2022.
Another “turning point"?
The “enemies at the gate” rhetoric is reminiscent of the talk of a “turning point” that swamped the airwaves in the run up to the Ankara Nato summit on July 8, where Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, Nato and EU leaders hyped Ukrainian gains ahead of the meeting in an effort to raise a fresh €70bn in funding and more missiles supplies. That talk rapidly faded away after the summit was over that largely failed to meet any of these goals.
Now Ukraine has its back against the wall and the calls for money and missiles are louder than ever. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed in his Independence Day speech earlier this month that the government had a $27bn hole in its defence budget it cannot fill just as it ran out of interceptor missiles completely.
The war in Ukraine has been through a phase change, switching from four and half years of a war of attrition to a full scale total war. This summer Zelenskiy has taken the fight to Russia using new medium- and long-range drones and missile targeting, first Russian oil refineries, and since the end of July Russia's retail sector.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded in kind, warning that Bankova had opened “Pandora’s box” and unleashed a brutal retaliation. That includes an effort to systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail infrastructure, taking out 90% of the country’s modern warehousing, hitting megamalls and petrol stations, and most recently targeting over 300 locomotives. The shelves in Ukraine’s supermarkets are emptying, and the country is anticipating the most brutal winter of the war when the heating season starts in November.
As the conflict expands it is now increasingly spilling over into Europe as Ukraine’s only remaining ally goes from funding the fighting to building its weapons. Moscow says that takes Europe from “supporting” Ukraine to become an “active participant” in the war and warns that European defence factors are now “legitimate military targets.”
Fresh interceptor missiles are coming in, in dribs and drabs, and Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance (MinFin) is asking for the second tranche of the €90bn loan, due next year, to be pulled forward to this year. Without it, Ukraine is again facing the same macroeconomic collapse it faced in April, before the €90bn was approved.
With a massive barrage of Russian ballistic missiles and the freezing subzero temperatures of winter looming, Bankova’s need for help is urgent and time is running out fast. Everyone knows what is coming.
Arms production
What has changed is the arms production. Ukraine has all but run out of the critical interceptor missiles it needs to bring down Russian ballistic missiles and the US has halted arms deliveries since US President Donald Trump took over. Ukraine has been reduced to hunting Russian launchers rather than shooting down what they fire. In recent months, Zelenskiy is starting to sound increasingly desperate.
Russia's missile production already vastly outpaces Ukraine's. This week Putin claimed a more than 22-fold increase in deliveries of ammunition and weapons, which has not been independently verified. European stockpiles have been run down to the bottom of the barrel, so to keep Kyiv supplied, dozens of joint ventures have been launched under the so-called Danish model to make weapons in European factories to which are then shipped to the frontline in the Donbas and elsewhere.
Particularly effective have been British-made Nyan drones which only carry a 20kg payload, but as they can fly thousands of kilometres and have state-of-the-art guidance systems, they can pinpoint the most sensitive parts of Russian refineries and put them out of action for months at a time. Previously Ukrainian drones did little more than cause superficial fires and refineries were back in action after only a few days. The Kremlin said the Callen-Lenz factory in Wiltshire that makes the Nyan is now a legitimate target, but has not suggested targeting it with Russia’s ICBMs yet.
In April the Russian defence ministry published the addresses of 21 facilities in 11 European countries making drones for Ukraine — sites in London, Munich, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Madrid and Venice among them — and Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, called the list a “register of potential legitimate targets for the Russian armed forces.”
And European money is being poured into Ukraine’s defence sector. The €90bn loan package agreed on in April earmarks €60bn for defence across 2026 and 2027, with the first €5.9bn tranche reserved for Ukrainian-made drones. In particular, Germany has begun series production of long-range drones for Ukraine, and a Ukrainian-European joint venture started building long-range strike drones on EU soil this month – standing on Euro Nato territory that should, in theory, give them Nato Article 5 protection. European leaders are now starting to question the validity of that theory.
Is Europe ready for war with Russia?
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on September 11-12 that Europe enjoys "overwhelming air superiority", that its air forces could destroy what remains of Russia's refining industry "in six weeks".
“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly,” he said, arguing that Nato enjoys a large advantage in airpower.
“If after six months Ukraine can cause a fuel crisis in Russia with its limited airpower, we can do the same in six days,” said Sirkovsky, estimating that European Nato has some 2,500 more planes than Russia.
Those comments set off a debate on how effective Europe’s airpower is. Kremlin aide and former FSB head, Nikolai Patrushev replied that if Poland tried that, it would “lose its statehood within days.”
Russia has around 1,500 advanced jet fighters and bombers in its fleet that are under a single command and are veterans of a four and half war. Europe’s air forces are divided amongst 21 European commands with little hands-on experience. Eight fleets hold about three quarters of the total: Turkey around 300, France 260, Germany 220, Greece 215, Italy 190, Spain 180, the UK 150 as well as Poland with fewer than 70 planes. Currently, Europe’s air defences are coordinated by a US general based in Ramstein, but the Pentagon told Europe explicitly early this year it was withdrawing from this role next year as part of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) released last December. If the US general withdraws from running Europe’s logistics, currently, the system requires all 32 Nato members to make logistic decisions by committee unless a new commander is appointed.
Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics has put it flatly. "We are not ready. That's absolutely clear," he said in an interview. "We can't keep simply hoping for a situation where the US remains much involved in Europe."
And there is a “Babel problem”: although these forces are supposed to be Nato-compatible, in reality there are 172 types of major weapons systems in European service across eleven categories, against 32 in American service, according to McKinsey. This problem has already come up on the Ukrainian battlefield where nominally identical EU-made 155mm artillery shells won’t work in guns made by another country due to local “refinements.”
Poland also has a formidable army with some 220,000 men under arms and the highest defence spending in Europe of 4.68% of GDP, with ambitions to create the largest conventional army in Europe. But its military is still dwarfed by Russia’s.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Douglas Barrie said in a report that Europe’s air force is more advanced, more capable and better trained than Russia’s but still doubts Nato could win air superiority over Russia. The obstacle is not Russian aircraft but Russian ground-based air defence — the advanced S-400, S-300, Pantsir and Tor batteries stacked across Russian territory, as well as the effective electronic warfare systems protecting them. Thanks to the thirty year “peace dividend” since the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe has not invested into anything similar.
The issue was put to the test during the Polish drone incursion last September when six unarmed Russian reconnaissance drones flew almost across the entire Polish territory unchallenged. Warsaw scrambled its air force, fired off $1.4bn of air defence missiles and eventually called in the Danish air force for help to eventually bring the Styrofoam drones costing about $10,000 each. Since then Russian drone incursions have become common over Poland, Romania and Moldova.
Clement Molin, the French open-source milblogger argues that Polish and Baltic border defences are patchy at best and ill-equipped to deal with 1,000-strong Russian drone swam. Russia has been investing heavily into both drone production and development. It is on course to make 10mn drones this year and has recently switched to the more advanced jet powered Geran-4 drone that can evade Ukraine’s best interceptor drones. In addition it has rolled out the Geran-5 drone, a lightweight and inexpensive cruise missile, and the Banderol light weight cruise missile.
European leaders have talked about setting up a “drone wall” to protect Europe’s eastern flank. Warsaw has since joined an anti-ballistic missile coalition with Ukraine and other allies, despite the fact that no one has enough ammo. Germany has a licence to make the Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles but won’t go into production until next year. The total European drone production is currently estimated to be on the order of 300,000-400,000 drones. Just how unprepared Nato is was shoved in Nato commanders face during the Hedgehog military exercises in Estonia this May, when a ten-man detachment of Ukrainian operators destroyed an entire battalion of Nato troops. Twice. Before the lunch break.
A 24-year-old Ukrainian operator at the exercise said: "They paused the exercises three times to determine how to improve, but if this had been real life, they would already be dead."
The Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) is just as well versed in drone warfare. It would take years of investment to catch up to where Russia is today, and Putin has already put the whole Russian economy on a full war footing.
"What we see is that air defence, drone defence, anti-ballistic defence has serious problems," Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, speaking in Washington on September 19, said. "Because if Russia decides to use a couple of missiles in that territory, I think that would be a serious challenge today for many countries to cope with that."
Hybrid attack
As von der Leyen pointed out, Russia’s attack, if any comes, is likely to be hybrid – enough to cause destruction, but not enough to trigger an unavoidable Article 5 collective response.
"I don't believe in the threat of a land operation, even a limited one, in Europe," Molin said. “Moscow would instead intensify what he called its "indirect war" against Europe.”
Those fears were stoked by the discovery of a bomb in a bag at the Leipzig-Halle airport next to a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane ferrying French ammunition to Kyiv that was linked to Russia by Germany’s intelligence services. Medvedev wrote on Telegram, "Germany deserves[s] a direct strike on all German military equipment production facilities for the Bandera clique. And quite possibly on several other locations in Berlin as well," after Russia was accused of planting the bomb.
The contradiction at the heart of the fearmongering amongst European leaders warning of an imminent Russian attack is on the one hand they point to a full scale invasion of the Nordic countries; on the other they scoff at Russia’s failure to take more than 20% of Ukrainian territory after four years of full scale war and its inability to even capture the small chunk of the Donbas Russia still does not control. Russia can’t attack Nato unless the AFU’s defence of Ukraine collapses and frees Russian troops for other duties.
"More than 90% of the Russian army is currently on the Ukrainian front," Molin wrote, with most of the air force, recruits and munitions committed there. "The Russian army has no major forces in Kaliningrad, which would make any offensive against an EU state suicidal for that strategic territory."
Ukraine’s shortage of men, money and missiles is acute, but Russia, while better off, is in the same boat. To raise the additional million men that an invasion of Europe would require, would mean a general mobilisation – something Putin has been very careful to avoid - and that could trigger wide scale protests in Russia.
"As long as the war in Ukraine continues, without a Ukrainian collapse, Europe is not at much risk", because "the Ukrainians have lined up more than 1mn men, which would be impossible to replace by European armies in a few months".
A land invasion remains off the cards for now, but a hybrid attack on the already weakened Europe economy is already underway. Analysts warn that critical infrastructure - refineries, ports, airports, power stations, rail networks and command centres – need to be prepared now.
