Putin wants us to panic

Convening a meeting at the Élysée Palace, the French President brought together leaders of France’s political parties to brief them on the rising Russian aggression in Europe.

The meeting came amid an increase in sub-threshold attacks against key NATO members. At the start of August, a drone was discovered at Leipzig Airport near a cargo plane used to transport weapons to Ukraine. Last week, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish helicopter in the Baltic Sea. Shortly afterwards, an Italian jet shot down a drone that had entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus.

Against this backdrop, panic is setting in across European capitals. Are these increasingly aggressive sub-threshold attacks the starting gun for a more significant horizontal escalation, in which Russian troops step onto NATO territory? According to the Telegraph, the United States has warned that Russia could strike NATO’s eastern flank within weeks.

But there is another possibility. The growing sense of panic created could itself be the aim of the Kremlin’s tactics.

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has had one overarching aim: to divide NATO and sow discord across the alliance. Fear is a powerful means of achieving that. Sub-threshold attacks are not necessarily designed to achieve an immediate military objective, but to influence the behaviour and beliefs of governments and populations, encouraging them to take decisions that serve Russia’s interests.

By generating and amplifying fear of escalation, Moscow seeks to create conditions that make it easier to achieve its objectives, most notably restoring a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, starting with Ukraine. It wants to deter support for Ukraine, force populations to stand against increases in defence spending, and ultimately raise questions about the validity of NATO itself.

The use of fear as a tool of statecraft has intensified throughout the war in Ukraine. Since February 2022, Putin has warned that if NATO supports Ukraine more directly, Russia would respond with consequences unlike anything previously seen. The language used was widely interpreted as a threat of nuclear escalation. Indeed, Russia altered its nuclear doctrine in 2024 in an apparent effort to prevent NATO states from allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles against targets inside Russia.

There is evidence that such threats have influenced Western decision-making. Even after the United States authorised the use of ATACMS on targets inside Russia, Germany under Olaf Scholz refused to provide Taurus missiles out of a fear of escalation.

That same logic has been directed towards the Baltic states, some of Ukraine’s most committed supporters. Between January 2024 and October 2025, Estonia allocated 2.8% of GDP to bilateral military and economic aid for Ukraine, with Lithuania providing 2.3% and Latvia 2%. Only Denmark, at 3%, provided more.

Moscow has sought to deter this commitment to Ukraine by increasing anxiety among Baltic populations. Disinformation has portrayed Baltic governments as pawns of the Anglo-Saxon states, supposedly intent on provoking conflict with Russia. The Kremlin has likewise argued that the UK and US would simply use their populations as cannon fodder in a war with Moscow.

Putin wants to increase fear by suggesting that NATO membership and close relations with Western allies make Baltic states less secure. Doubts are sown among populations, trying to convince citizens that unless they push back against NATO and support for Ukraine, they risk finding themselves on the front line facing Russian tanks and troops. But Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, who have been experiencing sub-threshold attacks since 1991, have seen right through the Kremlin’s deceit.

In this context, the increase in sub-threshold attacks should be seen as a sign that the war in Ukraine is not going Russia’s way and that Western support for Kyiv is working. But the danger is that by allowing ourselves to be consumed by fear and hysteria about an imminent Russian invasion of a NATO country, we inadvertently help Moscow achieve its objectives.

Panic, in other words, is precisely what the Kremlin wants. Sabre-rattling intends to make us question the costs of supporting Ukraine and increasing our own defence spending. We should not allow it to succeed. The response should be the opposite: continue to support Ukraine, strengthen our resilience against disinformation, and invest more heavily in our own armed forces. That is exactly what the Kremlin wants us not to do, and exactly what we must.

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Thomas Nurcombe is Research Manager at the Coalition for Global Prosperity

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