“At the level of public opinion, a sense quite similar to panic is beginning to take root. Which is exactly what Russia is seeking”
There is a growing consensus that this summer Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has decided to escalate the war he launched in February 2022. The recent visit to Moscow by John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, the first such visit since the months before the start of the conflict, also set off alarms. Since then everything has accelerated greatly. Drone activities and NATO airspace violations have returned to the headlines, as well as possible Russian attacks. This Thursday, El Mundo published that the CIA would have warned of possible drone attacks against Spain, France and Italy. The scenario of a large-scale invasion of a member state of the EU or NATO seems completely ruled out, with Moscow fully involved in Ukraine, but analysts do point to the increasing risk of a limited incursion or a substantial rise in hybrid attacks.
If Russia is shedding blood, sweat and tears to gain every square kilometer in Ukraine, why would Moscow decide to raise the stakes? Precisely for that reason. Kyiv has been able to resist with enormous backing from its Western partners. And that is the Kremlin’s objective with these threats. In Russian public discourse, it has long been signaled that Ukraine’s objective is to drag the rest of Europe into a direct conflict against Russia. It is an idea that the satellites of Russia in the EU, through political leaders and commentators, have been pushing since the start of the war: arming Ukraine amounts, one way or another, to taking part in the conflict.
But that attempt has not taken hold. Even in countries like Spain, with a left-wing government and an electorate traditionally reluctant to any discourse related to war, the parties that defended abandoning Ukraine have not managed to make their initiative take hold, although the country does not occupy a prominent position in terms of the percentage of GDP allocated to aid to Ukraine. Globally, aid to Kyiv has not only not disappeared or decreased, but since Donald Trump arrived at the White House, cutting off donations to the Ukrainian army, it has been European allies, especially the Nordic and Eastern ones, who have opened their wallets wide.
“Kyiv is able to resist with enormous backing from its Western partners. And that is the Kremlin’s objective with these threats”
Russia’s threats are only aimed at making more real what until now was a narrative trick. The idea is to sow panic and to cause European public opinion to become hostile to continuing to provide aid to Ukraine. Although these acts of sabotage and hybrid aggressions are still not very visible to many citizens, analysts agree that an increase in Moscow’s activities could lead to harsher attacks on infrastructures focused on maintaining support for Ukraine, as well as making Russia’s aggressions more visible to citizens in order to undermine public support for Kyiv.
On many occasions, Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, has used a formulation that was difficult to translate into reality: “Europe is not at war, but neither is it at peace.” What is happening is the practical embodiment of that theory. Everything that happens has more to do with a psychological war than with a conventional war on the part of Moscow. But if the Kremlin manages to prevail in the psychological war, that will have very real effects on the conventional war currently being fought in Ukraine. In a game of nerves, the one who blinks loses.
Estonia and Lithuania, two of the countries most involved in backing Kyiv, which are also the two most exposed to any aggression by Moscow, have made clear that they see no sign that Russia is preparing to attack NATO, even though one of the main risk scenarios is a Russian operation against the Estonian border city Narva. Tallinn and Vilnius, as exposed as they are to a Russian attack, are clear that panic is the enemy of preparedness.
Indeed, panic makes an increase in Russian aggression more probable, believing that Europe is much less prepared than it actually is to confront Russian activities. “With winter approaching, Europe needs to maintain its focus on supporting Ukraine and be calm and clear: Russia has nothing to gain by attacking NATO. We should not amplify the Kremlin’s miscalculation through a public debate driven by panic“, Kristi Raik, director of the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, has stated in recent days.
