Summary:
Senior European Union and NATO figures have spent recent weeks warning their publics that a run of drones, airspace incidents and sabotage on and near allied territory is not a series of accidents but a deliberate Russian campaign, conducted below the level of armed attack. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative, told the European Parliament that the events were calculated. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm, that, per intelligence assessments he cited, Moscow’s plan included deniable strikes on countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said the aggression was against all of Europe, and that Europe had decided to defend itself.
Moscow has answered the warnings directly. President Vladimir Putin said on 18 September that Russia had no aggressive intentions toward Europe, and that European leaders invoking a Russian threat were trying to salvage plummeting approval ratings. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said two days earlier that a war begun by Europe against Russia would be a very short one.
Behind the rhetoric, both sides have been preparing. Germany is planning its medical system for mass battlefield casualties from a war scenario dated around 2029; Poland has published personnel ceilings for 2027 and is fortifying its border crossings; Lithuania has signed evacuation routes out of its capital. NATO’s military leadership says the alliance is ready for an attack, while an alliance official says no attack is imminent. Ukrainian and Western intelligence, per mid-September reporting, assess that Russia is laying administrative groundwork for its own mobilisation.
Detailed Report
1. EU Attributes Recent Incidents to a Deliberate Russian Campaign
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative, set the collective frame in Strasbourg on 15 September. The events of the previous 48 hours, she said, showed Russia’s recklessness toward Europe: a Russian warship firing flares at a Danish helicopter; NATO jets destroying a drone over Lithuania after it entered from Belarus; a strike on a passenger train near Ukraine’s border with Poland; and a drone recovered from Polish waters.
Those were the latest in a short run already on the public record. On 1 September the German government attributed to Russia an attempt on 4 August to detonate a drone next to Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a finding Moscow rejects. Off the Danish coast on 14 September, the Danish armed forces said a Russian frigate fired two flares at a helicopter on a photographic flight, one passing close; Russia’s ambassador in Copenhagen said the helicopter’s flight had been provocative. Polish prosecutors later said the drone recovered from the Baltic near Rusinowo carried a high-explosive fragmentation warhead; they have not established its mission.
We need to be clear-eyed: these are not accidents. They are calculated attempts by Russia to weaken our resolve, test our unity and play with fears of escalation.
She said President Vladimir Putin would not stop unless he was stopped, and that as Russia took greater risks Europe had to impose a greater cost. Kallas set out five lines of response.
· Attribute attacks publicly, so Russia could not hide behind ambiguity.
· Sanction those who carried the operations out.
· Cut Russian funding, including the shadow fleet, whose vessels she said had been de-flagged in the hundreds.
· Reduce the Russian diplomatic and visa presence in the Union. Hungary, she noted, had just expelled ten Russian diplomats.
· Move faster against information operations.
Von der Leyen took the same reading to the State of the European Union the next morning. On Leipzig, she was categorical.
An attack using military-grade material, carried out by Russian operatives on European soil. An attack not only on one Member State, but against all of our Union.
She said hybrid threats facing Europe were “less and less hybrid and less and less threats,” with cyberattacks, sabotage, arson and drone incursions rising daily. Her institutional answer was a new Emergency Security Protocol — a mechanism, as she described it, to flank NATO’s Article 4, under which any member state could convene all the others to coordinate a response to incidents falling below armed aggression. She also announced that the Commission would set out ideas for a European Security Council with partners including the United Kingdom, Norway, Canada and Ukraine.
The Parliament the same day adopted a report on hybrid threats by the Lithuanian rapporteur Rasa Juknevičienė, 470 votes to 129, with 62 abstentions. Europe had for too long feared that a stronger response would provoke Moscow, she said; the Kremlin saw hesitation as weakness. Her fellow MEP Rihards Kols supplied the escalation arithmetic in the preceding debate: two attacks attributed to Russia in Europe in 2022, 34 in 2024, and more than 189 by September 2026.
2. Leaders Across Europe Warn of Deliberate Russian Action
From Warsaw to Berlin, leaders carried the same warning to their own publics, preparing citizens for what they said was coming.
Poland
Tusk told the Sejm on 17 September that he was setting out the most probable course of the war through early spring, and that late autumn and winter would be the most critical phase so far. He said Russia was putting a new type of drone into mass use — jet-powered, faster, operating at high altitude before diving on its target — and that almost no one was yet able to counter them effectively. Ukrainian partners, he said, had told him recent losses were running at 27,000 killed and wounded a month. Russia, in his account, had no interest in even a limited pause on strikes against energy infrastructure, and had destroyed more than 300 Ukrainian locomotives in recent weeks.
The core of the speech was the intelligence assessment. Per Polish public-radio and agency reportage of the address:
In the assessment of the intelligence services, the Russian plan also includes hybrid drone and missile strikes on countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland.
He said there was a real risk that drones or projectiles would enter NATO territory on the eastern flank and even cause destruction, and that the official narrative would then call it an accident requiring no response. In his telling, the aim was to convince alliance members that Article 5 was more theoretical than practical. He said the assessments were consistent and convincing, and on a direct attack on Poland:
If anyone dares to attack us, they will face a resolute response from us and our allies.
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, speaking on 12–13 September at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, put a sharper line on a direct clash: “If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly.”
Lithuania
Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said Vilnius held the same intelligence as other states in the region and as allied force commanders, including on a possible Russian false-flag operation, and that he had checked the reading with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and his deputy. Public statements by politicians, he said, were part of a coordinated campaign to warn Russia not to count on an incident failing to trigger Article 5.
Denmark
After the Gedser flare incident, Denmark summoned the Russian ambassador. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she was not surprised.
It is part of the pattern we see across Europe. With an increasingly aggressive and assertive Russia that has intensified hybrid war against Europe. And that is testing and challenging NATO.
Russia’s ambassador in Copenhagen, Vladimir Barbin, said the helicopter’s flight had been provocative and delivered a formal note demanding steps to prevent a repeat.
France
President Emmanuel Macron said on 18 September that the Russian hybrid threat facing Europeans and France had intensified in recent weeks, and that France had been targeted. He spoke after an Élysée meeting with party leaders and 2027 candidates, attended by the heads of France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, and its domestic security service, the DGSI. He ordered a plan to protect critical infrastructure and sensitive defence-industry sites against drones and cyberattacks, and called Tusk’s warning sound and well-documented.
The intention behind it is to intimidate us and to derail the effort to support the Ukrainians. The consequence will be the opposite. We are not intimidated, because we know that what is at stake today in Ukraine is our security.
Finland and the Netherlands
President Alexander Stubb told MTV that Finns should prepare mentally for sabotage and for drones entering national airspace — four had come down in Finland this year — while there was no reason to panic. The war Russia was waging had two forms, he said: kinetic war in Ukraine, and hybrid war against Europe. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said Tusk’s warning should be taken very seriously.
Italy
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, speaking in Oslo with her Norwegian counterpart, was the period’s dissenting voice. No one could miss the multiplication of Russian provocations, she said, and Putin needed to shift attention from a battlefield not going as he had promised his public. But the answer was restraint: “I don’t think we should respond to these provocations. Responding would be more in Moscow’s interest than Europe’s.”
Germany
At a meeting of Nordic and Arctic leaders in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 14 September, Merz told reporters that “high north and low attention is over” — placing Germany, with its Baltic and Atlantic coasts, inside Europe’s exposed north. On Leipzig, he said the evidence was very clear and that Germany had shown it was ready to react.
This aggression is not only against Ukraine. It’s an aggression against all of us, and we have decided to defend ourselves.
In the Bundestag on 9 September he said Germany had had to learn, “in an entirely new dimension on 4 August 2026,” that freedom had to be defended at home as well as across Europe. At a party event in Berlin on 17 September, per Reuters, he said that anyone who thought of abandoning Ukraine today would abandon freedom in all of Europe tomorrow. And per remarks reported by the Rheinische Post on 19 September: “We are not at war, but we are also no longer at peace.”
On policy, he went further than warnings. Per remarks to the WDR Europaforum reported on 20 September, there were no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine — not from the British, the French, Germany or the Americans — and Ukraine’s defence now reached military infrastructure on Russian state territory. In Berlin with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the same day, he said Russia had no chance of winning the war and that German military support would be continued and expanded.
3. Ready for Escalation: NATO’s Chiefs of Defence Speak
The alliance’s military leadership answered the period’s warnings with a readiness message. Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s Military Committee — the alliance’s most senior military body — spoke in Copenhagen on 19 September after a meeting of the alliance’s 32 chiefs of defence. Per published remarks from the appearance:
The alliance is ready, the structure is ready, the soldiers … the weapons are ready.
The chiefs had not discussed the latest political warnings in that session. NATO holds, he said, some 4,000 pages of military plans for the eastern flank, beginning from a minimal crisis or interference on allied soil.
Allies are ready in case of an escalation. In case of an attack, we know how to do it. Russia’s reckless behaviour over the last weeks and months … continues to test allied resolve and aims to undermine trust and weaken our unity. I want to be clear — these attempts are not dividing us. They are sharpening our tools, making us much more united and determined.
A NATO official told Politico on 18 September: “At this time, we see no imminent threat of attack. But we cannot be naive or complacent, and we must make sure NATO remains strong in the years ahead.”
4. Putin and Lavrov Deny Aggressive Intent Toward Europe
Moscow has responded to European warnings with categorical denials of aggression, accusing Western states of provocative rhetoric and double standards.
While addressing the Military-Industrial Commission in Moscow on 18 September on the new State Armament Programme, President Vladimir Putin said certain European leaders were openly declaring that they were preparing for war with Russia.
In my view, they are merely trying to salvage their plummeting approval ratings by concealing the failures of their economic and social policies.
I want to say this again: Russia has no aggressive intentions regarding Europe or European countries. We simply have no reasons for this. We are ready for cooperation and restoring relations with our European neighbours.
He accused European governments of hypocrisy — lecturing others on international law while a recent Baltic drill, he said, had practised the seizure of civilian vessels, and denouncing events in the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb while preparing to capture ships themselves. His conclusion: “let’s live in harmony instead; otherwise, we’ll have to respond too.”
Two days earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had made the same denial at a youth festival in Yekaterinburg:
We’ve said repeatedly that we have no intention of attacking Europe... But if Europe, which talks daily about preparing for war against Russia, were to attack the Russian Federation, that would be an entirely different war, and it would be a very short one.
He repeated that the deployment of foreign troops in Ukraine would be treated as a declaration of war.
That same day as Putin’s address, Russia’s foreign ministry summoned Danae Dholakia, the deputy head of the British mission in Moscow, to protest the supply of drones and other systems to Ukraine. Any British facilities in Ukraine used to strike Russian territory, the ministry said, would be considered a legitimate target.
5. Civil-Defence and Military Preparations Across Europe
European governments have paired the warnings with planning and preparatory measures at home. Some are in force, some ordered, some still only proposals.
Germany
· Hospitals were inspected this month for wartime readiness, Bloomberg reported on 16 September.
· Health Minister Nina Warken said facilities were adding stocks of medicines and surgical supplies, protected spaces and physical barriers against drones.
· Surgeon General Ralf Hoffmann told Reuters in September 2025 that a realistic planning figure for an open NATO–Russia war from about 2029 was around 1,000 wounded troops a day, taken by five military hospitals and about 15,000 beds, with civilian hospitals required by law to take wartime cases.
· The Cold War medical bunker at Ulm is under review for reactivation. Benedikt Friemert, who commands that hospital, said in the September 2026 reporting: “Is our healthcare system prepared for this? The only answer is: no.”
· Medic Quadriga 2026, the largest Bundeswehr medical exercise in a decade, rehearsed in March the movement of casualties from the eastern flank into Germany.
· Merz has said parliament is changing the laws governing Germany’s security institutions.
· The government has pledged 100 billion euro to the states for civil and population protection.
· The service law now contains a legal power to bring back conscription if volunteer numbers fall short, with a decision due by July 2027.
Poland
· Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz ordered army engineers on 15 September to put Hesco barriers and extra observation posts at the Ukraine-border crossings.
· Tusk told the Sejm that 23 of 28 planned shelters at the crossings were complete, and that air defence would be installed at six.
· Precautionary air operations and ground-based air defence are on alert, with temporary flight restrictions at Rzeszów and Lublin airports when western Ukraine is under strike.
· Work continues on Eastern Shield, Poland’s border fortification programme facing Belarus and Kaliningrad.
· A defence-ministry draft sets 2027 planning maxima: up to 20,000 new professional soldiers and up to 200,000 reservists for exercises. Gazeta Prawna recorded the ministry’s own limit: the figures were an upper threshold, not to be exceeded.
· The forces already number above 220,000, aiming for 300,000 by 2039, on defence spending of about 4.8% of GDP.
Lithuania
A state-level evacuation plan, signed on 15 July, recirculated on 18–19 September after Tusk’s speech. About 75% of the population is expected to move independently. Vilnius, some 30 to 40 kilometres from Belarus, has three evacuation directions — north, west, and toward Poland. “One of the evacuation directions from the capital must be Poland,” said Žygimantas Solovjovas, head of the city’s Civil Protection Department, to Polish Radio. No evacuation is under way.
France
France has ordered a plan to protect critical infrastructure and sensitive defence-industry sites against drones and cyberattacks, and plans a voluntary ten-month national service — 3,000 participants in its first year, 10,000 by 2030, 50,000 by 2035.
United Kingdom
The Cabinet Office is rewriting Britain’s classified crisis plans — the War Books — under a home-defence programme announced in July, with a public resilience campaign later in 2026 and a home-defence exercise planned for 2027.
Estonia
Estonia has cut crossing hours with Russia and imposed full customs checks. Prime Minister Kristen Michal said the crossings could close very quickly if needed, with further scenarios under review should Moscow announce a broader mobilisation.
Finland
Finland has strengthened counter-drone and hybrid measures, and ran Gulf of Finland boarding drills on 18 September.
European Union
The Emergency Security Protocol and the European Security Council remain proposals from the Strasbourg speech. The Freya missile-defence project with Ukraine was announced there. The first EU purchase of American Patriot interceptors was approved the week before that speech.
Russia
Ukrainian intelligence and Western officials, per mid-September reporting, assess that Russia is laying administrative groundwork for a mobilisation of around 300,000 men this year and a further 300,000 in 2027 — an electronic summons register, exit bans on those notified, and expanded contract recruitment — ahead of a Duma vote in progress on 18–20 September. Western officials have questioned whether Russian equipment and training could sustain a surge of that size. No Kremlin decree has been published.
Conclusion
European leaders spent the period warning that a run of drones, airspace incidents and sabotage on allied territory was a deliberate Russian campaign, conducted below the level of armed attack. Moscow denied any aggressive intent, attributed the alarm to governments hiding domestic failure, and warned that a European war would be short. Both sides are now planning for the possibility that the trend does not stop at rhetoric.