Russia’s provocations outside Ukraine demand action

Every airspace violation costs Russia a few thousand dollars in fuel.

Every NATO response costs millions in scrambled fighters and emergency meetings — and infinitely more in damaged credibility when the allies look weak and indecisive.

Moscow keeps offering the same choice: Act or fold.

And every time the West hesitates, the bluff gets harder to call.

Russian jets didn’t bomb Tallinn; the drones over Poland carried no payload.

The incursions over Denmark and near Alaska are shrouded in the fog of plausible deniability — serious enough to scramble fighters but ambiguous enough to dodge consequences.

And that’s exactly the point. Moscow is waging a different kind of war on the West. Not like the one it brought to Ukraine.

The point of poking NATO is to provoke nothing.

We’d all be better off if the Kremlin were merely testing NATO’s defenses.

Instead, it’s deploying reflexive control at scale: the art of making your enemies self-deter before they self-destruct.

Russia has no interest in kinetic confrontation but is eager to weaken our collective ability to think, act and mount a defense.

Drones and jets are deadly weapons, but in NATO skies, they’re fuel for a different sort of war — one Moscow believes it’s winning.

There’s no realistic path for Russia to defeat NATO on the battlefield.

Moscow invaded a country quarter its size and, as President Trump aptly put it, “has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”

But further westward, Moscow’s goal isn’t to fight but to have us wake up one day to find NATO’s guarantees void, European Union institutions ruined and transatlantic solidarity gone.

No need for Russia to fire a shot if it can convince Europeans that defending themselves isn’t worth the effort.

Just 32% of Russians and 41% of Americans would fight for their country, Gallup says — compared with 62% of Ukrainians. The European Union average is only 32%.

This is the psychological terrain where Russia is waging war.

NATO’s fragile element is political cohesion, above all on Article 5.

Discredit that mutual-defense guarantee, and the alliance will unravel into dysfunction and collapse under the weight of its own hesitation.

Article 5 doesn’t have to be revoked. Any whiff of uncertainty around it will turn NATO into Schrödinger’s cat: both alive and dead.

“Hybrid war” is absolutely the worst term for what we’re witnessing.

Every airspace breach met not with deep strikes on enemy airfields but with a carefully worded condemnation delivers exactly what Moscow wants.

In NATO skies, the kinetic violations are choreographed for Moscow’s foot soldiers in the West: the “Not our war” politicians, the “We mustn’t escalate” pseudo-scholars, the “What if they go nuclear?” commentators — the voices that drown out reason with fear.

The war Russia hopes to win is psychological, political and informational. And the West isn’t even showing up to fight it.

Moscow also keeps poking its neighbors to reinforce a narrative carefully cultivated at home: Russia is already at war with a scheming, ruthless, bloodthirsty West.

It can’t be at war with Ukraine because in Putin’s telling, Ukraine doesn’t exist. So Mother Russia must be fighting NATO.

That fiction needs evidence, and drones drifting into EU airspace provide it.

No matter what NATO does, the Kremlin’s spin doctors frame it the same way: “See? The enemy is at the gates.” This imaginary war legitimizes the real one in Ukraine.

It helps Putin turn failure into defiance, stagnation into strategy and a flailing invasion into heroic resistance against an enemy that was never there. It also creates a face-saving off-ramp.

If the Russian economy collapses or China pulls back support, the claim Russia fought NATO to a draw will fall on fertile ground.

Lastly, Moscow is poking NATO because it can — and because history says it pays.

Seventeen years of Western inaction, under four US presidents and an incalculable number of European governments, created the vacuum that keeps pulling Russian aggression in.

From Georgia to Crimea to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, each red line crossed without consequence taught Moscow the same lesson.

The Frankenstein state, a revanchist colonizer at heart, isn’t provoked by NATO’s strength but by its visible unwillingness to confront aggression — a criminal act under the United Nations Charter.

Russia also runs the numbers — and the results keep coming back in its favor.

What usually follows a Russian intrusion? Panic, confusion, maybe a strongly worded statement.

What doesn’t follow? A sense of urgency matching the stakes. Robust action. The kind of response that would alter Moscow’s risk calculus.

Every drone or fighter jet forces the Western alliance to choose between doing the hard thing and wishing the problem away.

Behold reflexive control in its purest form: presenting the adversary with a menu of bad options.

Shoot down a warplane that brazenly violates your airspace, and Moscow cries provocation.

Issue a press release instead, and NATO looks paralyzed.

Either way, Russia wins — because it set the terms.

Restoring peace through strength is the only viable path, but the free world keeps failing to take it.

Poland’s invocation of Article 4 may suggest movement in the right direction and so does Trump’s news-making post, but at the end of the day, actions, not words, will make a difference.

Andrew Chakhoyan is a University of Amsterdam academic director and served in the US government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation.