cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/44322530
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Today, the Kremlin’s strategy increasingly favours hybrid means – drones, cyberattacks, disinformation, and energy blackmail – over warfare. These are not random provocations, but a coherent campaign of testing.
Each incursion and attack serves a diagnostic purpose: Can Europe detect? Can it coordinate a joint response? Can it enact this response swiftly and efficiently?
As Belgian officials admitted after a recent spate of drone sightings, the continent needs to “act faster” in building air-defence systems. Every such admission emboldens Moscow’s conviction that Europe is unprepared and divided.
Back home, these moments are curated into propaganda clips for state television, where pundits mock European “weakness” and frame the continent’s disarray as validation for the Kremlin’s confrontational stance. This manufactured crisis, in turn, is the latest application of a well-honed strategy.
With regard to the West, the aim is exhaustion, not conquest – a “permanent test” designed to drain resources and unity through constant, low-level pressure.
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In a landscape of heightened tension, even a minor incident – a drone shootdown, a cyberattack gone wrong – could spiral into wider confrontation. A deliberate war between Nato and Russia is still improbable, but no longer unthinkable.
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The Kremlin seeks to force the West to accept a redrawn security order through a blend of coercion, probing, and perpetual testing. The tools may vary – from tanks to drones, from overt invasion to a hybrid war of attrition – but the aim endures: to undermine European unity and restore the sphere of influence lost by Russia in 1991.
Europe’s challenge is equally clear. It has to resist the fatigue of endless crisis and demonstrate that resilience, not fear, defines the continent’s future.
Moscow’s provocations will continue until the costs become prohibitive. Only a unified, prepared Europe can make that happen.