The warnings are coming thick and fast. Over the past week, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has said that, when it comes to Russia, “we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the FT: “We are now in the most difficult situation in Europe since the end of the second world war.” She warned “we are running out of time”. And Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former British intelligence head, mused that it “may be right [in saying] we’re already at war with Russia”.
All three were responding to a wave of Russian “hybrid warfare”— aggressive acts that stop short of actually killing people. As Frederiksen explained, it is “drones one day, cyber attacks the next day, sabotage on the third day.”
European concerns have risen sharply in recent weeks, following the incursion of Russian drones over Poland and a sustained violation of Estonian airspace by Moscow’s jets. Both the Copenhagen and Munich airports were temporarily shut in response to drones. The Danes seem pretty certain that Russia was the source of their problem.