Putin's Escalation Is a Test of European Will

Putin's Escalating War: Two Fronts, One Goal

Open any European intelligence briefing from the past eighteen months and a pattern emerges with alarming clarity. Russia is fighting two wars simultaneously — one conventional, one covert — and both serve a single strategic aim. The first, prosecuted with artillery and aerial bombardment across eastern Ukraine, seeks the physical subjugation of a sovereign nation. The second, conducted through sabotage, disinformation, cyberattacks, and assassination plots across the continent, seeks something subtler but equally dangerous: the erosion of European political will.

This is the architecture of Putin escalation Europe now confronts — and it is not random aggression. NATO's 2024 assessment of Russian hybrid activities catalogued more than 50 documented incidents across member states in a single year: undersea cable cuts in the Baltic, arson attacks on logistics hubs, coordinated disinformation flooding social media platforms. The Kremlin has industrialized political warfare.

The dual-front strategy has a brutal logic. Weaken European resolve at home, and Ukraine loses the material and political support it needs to survive. Moscow is betting that democracies are too fractious, too comfort-seeking, too divided to sustain a long-term commitment. The European response must prove that calculation catastrophically wrong.

Why Putin Believes Europe Will Blink

Vladimir Putin's conviction that European democracies can be intimidated rests on observable history. He watched the continent fail to respond meaningfully after the 2008 invasion of Georgia. He watched the sanctions-light reaction to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He watched gas dependency bind European governments to Russia even as Kremlin interference mounted.

From Moscow's vantage point, European unity looks brittle. Far-right and far-left parties with pro-Kremlin sympathies have gained ground in France, Germany, and Hungary. Disinformation operations — documented by the EU's East StratCom Task Force across hundreds of verified cases — have amplified these voices, deepening public skepticism about sustaining support for Ukraine. Energy price shocks, though partially absorbed, tested public patience in ways Russian state media eagerly exploited.

Putin's shadow war tactics exploit the specific vulnerabilities of open societies. Democratic governments must explain their decisions to publics exhausted by inflation and instability. Authoritarian states do not face this constraint. That asymmetry is itself a weapon. The Kremlin understands it does not need to defeat European armies; it only needs to defeat European patience.

Russia's Expansionism in Historical Context

The current aggression is not an aberration. German historian Martin Schulze Wessel, in his 2026 book Warum Russland nicht aufhören wird (Why Russia Won't Stop), traces Putin's behavior to a deep structural tradition in Russian statecraft: territorial expansionism fused with a quasi-religious conception of civilizational mission. The drive to dominate neighboring peoples is not a policy choice that a change of leadership would automatically dissolve. It is, Schulze Wessel argues, embedded in the political culture of Russian imperialism across centuries.

This historical lens punctures a persistent Western illusion — the hope that concession or accommodation will satisfy Russian appetites. The historical record refutes it consistently. Russian expansionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not pause when neighbors yielded territory; it accelerated. Appeasement of imperial ambitions rarely produces stability. It produces a revised baseline for the next demand.

Understanding this history also clarifies why Ukraine is not simply a regional conflict. It is the latest iteration of a centuries-old project to deny Ukrainian nationhood and absorb it into a Russian imperial sphere. Putin has said as much explicitly, in essays and speeches that question Ukraine's right to exist as a separate political entity. Schulze Wessel's analysis gives scholarly weight to what Ukrainian historians have long insisted: this is a war over whether Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future.

Why Ukraine Remains the Central Battleground

Every hybrid attack on European infrastructure — every severed cable, every disinformation campaign — is ultimately a flanking maneuver in service of the primary objective: breaking Ukraine. This point demands emphasis because the shadow war risks drawing European attention into a defensive crouch, chasing pinpricks across a continent-wide perimeter, while the decisive contest continues in the Donbas.

Former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller has argued consistently that deterrence credibility in Europe depends directly on what happens in Ukraine. A Russian victory — or even a frozen conflict on terms favorable to Moscow — would confirm that military aggression against a democratic neighbor carries manageable costs. It would invite further adventurism. The Baltic states, which share hundreds of kilometers of border with Russia and Belarus and maintain a combined population under seven million, understand this calculus with an urgency that some Western European capitals have been slower to internalize.

Military aid to Ukraine is therefore not charity. It is deterrence investment. The approximately €88 billion in total support committed by European nations and institutions since February 2022 — tracked by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy — has allowed Ukraine to sustain its defense far longer than Moscow anticipated. That investment is not yet sufficient, but it is demonstrably consequential.

What European Resolve Must Look Like

Resolve is not rhetoric. It requires concrete, sustained action across several dimensions.

Military support must be maintained and expanded. Ukraine's air defense capabilities remain critically strained. European nations with surplus Patriot systems and IRIS-T batteries should accelerate transfers rather than treating them as reserves for hypothetical future conflicts.

Hybrid threat response must be coordinated, not national. Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and France's SGDSN have both documented Russian interference operations on their soil. Sharing intelligence systematically across EU structures, rather than managing it bilaterally, is an operational necessity, not a procedural preference.

European defense budgets must reflect the actual security environment. Nineteen NATO members now meet the 2 percent of GDP defense spending threshold — up from just nine in 2021. That shift is meaningful. But the 2 percent figure was always a floor, not a ceiling, and several of the continent's largest economies continue to fall short.

Finally, political leadership must actively counter Kremlin influence operations rather than ignore them. The EU's Digital Services Act provides tools to demand platform accountability for state-sponsored disinformation. Those tools exist. They require political will to deploy at scale.

The Stakes: Democracy, Deterrence, and Europe's Future

The choice Europe faces is not between war and peace. Russia made that choice in February 2022. The choice now is between principled resistance and managed decline — between an international order where borders are protected by law, and one where they are redrawn by whichever army has the most ammunition and the most patience.

The Putin escalation Europe must answer is designed to make resistance feel costly and exhausting. That is precisely its purpose. A Europe that flinches — that reduces aid, accepts a partition on Russian terms, or retreats from sanctions — will not have bought peace. It will have purchased a brief intermission before the next demand arrives with greater confidence behind it.

Ukraine has already demonstrated, at enormous human cost, that Russian military power is neither invincible nor irresistible. What it cannot do alone is hold indefinitely without sustained European support. The historical moment calls for clarity. Moscow's imperialist calculation must be met with the one thing it is entirely unprepared for: a Europe that does not blink.

Source: Opinion | The Guardian