2025-10-30 02:52:24
Imagine Europe wakes up tomorrow, and every American tech company vanishes — poof! What breaks? Everything from the cloud infrastructure running government services, to the smartphones in people’s pockets, and the chips in cars rolling off assembly lines. Europe would need to replace the hardware layer, the software layer, the services layer, and, crucially, the innovation layer that keeps generating new technologies.
Let’s do a so-called Fermi approximation and cost out the component parts of tech independence. As we will see, the price will prove prohibitive. Instead of pursuing a quixotic plan to detox from US tech, Europe needs to weave a tapestry of strategic partnerships that no single thread can unravel.
Start with semiconductors, since they’re the atoms of the digital world. Europe currently produces about 10% of global chips. The US, Taiwan, South Korea, and China dominate. The Commission proposes a Critical Raw Materials Act to catch up.
Building state-of-the-art semiconductor fabs? Taiwan’s TSMC spent at least $40 billion (€34 billion) on advanced facilities in Arizona. Europe would need, conservatively, a dozen such facilities to achieve genuine autonomy across different chip types. That’s €408 billion ($480 billion) just for fabs. But wait — you also need the entire supply chain: materials processing, packaging facilities, testing equipment. Add another €200 billion ($233 billion).
The running total? Let’s say somewhere around €680 billion ($791 billion).
Next, consider operating systems and productivity software. Microsoft Office, Windows, Adobe’s Creative Suite, and Google represent decades of iterative development, countless person-hours, and network effects that make them sticky.
Let’s be wildly optimistic and say a crash program could achieve in 10 years what took 30 years in the US. Microsoft spends about $30 billion (€26 billion) annually on R&D. Adobe spends around $3 billion (€2.5 billion). From March 2023 to March 2024, five tech firms spent $229 billion (€197) on R&D. If we multiply even one company’s annual R&D by 10 years, you’re looking at an investment of €300 billion ($349 billion) over a decade to reach competitive parity.
Let’s turn to the cloud and artificial intelligence. Here’s where it gets expensive. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud represent hundreds of billions in capital expenditure for data centers, networking, and software.
Google DeepMind has hundreds of top researchers. OpenAI raised tens of billions. Meta spent over $30 billion (€26 billion) on AI infrastructure in 2024 alone. For Europe to match the current capabilities of US big tech in cloud and AI, it would cost €500 billion ($582 billion) minimum over a decade.
Now think about all the services built on top: mapping (Google Maps), video (YouTube), social platforms, messaging, search engines, and app stores. Each represents billions in development and operates at scales that require massive ongoing investment.
Rough estimate for building European alternatives that people would actually use: €200 billion ($233 billion).
But wait — that’s just technology. What about talent? Here’s the really tricky bit — the part that makes this more than just an engineering problem. Silicon Valley didn’t emerge because of capital alone. It’s an evolutionary ecosystem where certain cultural conditions, risk tolerance, failure acceptance, and talent density create a self-sustaining innovation engine.
Let’s say Europe needs to attract and retain 500,000 additional top-tier tech workers over a decade. The salary and opportunity cost differential (people choosing European startups over US tech firms)? Perhaps $50,000 (€42,963) per person per year on average. That’s $250 billion (€215 billion) over ten years, from companies that do not quite exist yet.
And there’s a hidden cost we haven’t counted: while Europe builds all this, US companies don’t stand still. They improve, iterate, and create new markets. Every year of lag might cost another percentage point of GDP as European companies use inferior tools, infrastructure, and services.
For an economy of roughly €17 trillion ($19.8 trillion), a 1% annual competitiveness drag over 10 years equals €1.7 trillion ($1.9 trillion) in lag cost.
Let’s total our back-of-napkin calculation:
Grand total: Roughly €3.6 trillion (about $4.19 trillion at current rates).
To put these figures in perspective, that is equivalent to about 20% of Europe’s annual GDP, spent over a decade. That’s more than France’s entire annual economic output.
The Commission’s “Independence Moment” rhetoric misidentifies the problem. Europe’s vulnerability isn’t dependence itself — it’s concentrated dependence on a handful of actors whose interests may diverge unpredictably.
The solution simply can’t be building a €3.6 trillion fortress of technological self-sufficiency. It should instead forge resilient partnerships. Ties with US states create multiple channels resilient to US federal whiplash. Joint ventures with India’s booming tech sector split costs while building mutual capability. Trade frameworks with ASEAN’s fast-growing Asian countries position Europe as the standards-setter for digitizing economies seeking alternatives to Chinese infrastructure or American platform dominance. Redundancy through diversification beats isolated strength every time.
Economics tells the story. Complete independence costs ten times more than strategic network-building, and that calculation doesn’t even capture the opportunity costs of going it alone. For roughly €300 billion ($349 billion) over a decade — invested in joint research facilities, coordinated standards bodies, co-investment funds, and institutional capacity (open up public procurement!) for partnership orchestration — Europe could position itself as an indispensable node connecting multiple tech ecosystems.
The continent should shape how different tech ecosystems integrate, looking outward, not inward. When US states need regulatory frameworks that work across the Atlantic, when India seeks partners for semiconductor development, when Southeast Asian nations digitize their economies, Europe could choose to become an architect of the research programs and standards.
This partnership model represents genuine resilience. You cannot recreate Silicon Valley through sheer spending, no matter how many zeros you add. But you can create conditions where European cities become places where Indian engineers, American researchers, and African entrepreneurs want to collaborate. You can make Europe the place where different technological traditions meet and hybridize. That’s a comparative advantage that no amount of semiconductor fabs can buy — the advantage of being trusted, curiosity-driven ground where different players can build together.
In the coming years, the real test of leadership is whether Europe’s politicians can resist the emotional appeal of “independence” and embrace the hard work of strategic interdependence. Independence sounds strong; partnership sounds weak. But ask yourself: which is more fragile, a fortress with walls you must constantly defend, or a network where you’re the hub that everyone needs? Europe’s “independence moment” might actually be a moment of interdependence.
Nicklas Lundblad is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He has spent more than 20 years analyzing, shaping, and debating technology policy, most recently leading Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind’s work on public policy. His writings can be found at unpredictablepatterns.substack.com.
Self-Sufficiency Path: €3.6 trillion (10 years)
Strategic Partnership Path: €300 billion (10 years)
Cost Ratio: ~10:1 advantage for partnerships
Scope: Meaningful resilience (Europe at ~20% of critical technology markets with viable alternatives), not total autarky.
Calculation: With costs at $27.5 billion per advanced fab complex, our estimate of €25.5 billion (at 1.10 FX) is conservative.
Context: Independent estimate of €1 trillion ($1.16 trillion) to achieve complete autonomy; our €680 billion ($791 billion) estimate targets 20% market share.
Primary Sources
Context: Microsoft alone spends $32.5 billion (€27.9 billion) annually. Our entire 10-year estimate is 10x one company’s annual R&D.
Scale: €208 billion ($242 billion) annually from five firms; our 10-year total is 1.44x their single year.
Primary Sources
Context: AWS alone invested €70.6 billion in 2024; therefore, our €500 billion estimate for European hyperscalers is a comparable, if not conservative, estimate.
Scale: Five companies are spending €150 billion annually; European competitors need similar infrastructure.
Primary Sources
Excludes: Content moderation (€20-50 billion), creator payments (€100-250 billion), licensing.
Context: Google and Meta spent a combined $91.7 billion (€78.7 billion) in 2024 for global services; European alternatives at a regional scale require substantial ongoing investment.
Primary Sources
Requirement: Retain 500,000 technical specialists competing against Silicon Valley Salaries.
Calculation:
Validation: US tech wages are roughly 40-60% higher than wages in Europe across all roles. The salary and opportunity cost differential (people choosing European startups over US tech companies) is perhaps $50,000 per person per year on average.
Primary Sources
Concept: While Europe spends 10 years building infrastructure, competitors advance 3+ technology generations. European firms use inferior tools, falling further behind.
Calculation:
Primary Sources
Application: Our 1% drag is the center of the observed range (0.8-1.5 percentage points) for countries falling behind in digital infrastructure according to the OECD Digital Economy Outlook.
Warning: Winner-takes-most dynamics prevail; laggards face exponential divergence.
Strategy: Diversified independence through multiple partnerships — preventing any single actor from cutting Europe off.
Scaling: Industrial open source costs €30-50 billion compared to €300 billion for proprietary development.
Primary Sources
Conservative Assumptions
What We’re Costing
Limitations
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-10-30 01:33:56
NATO has invested heavily in cyber defense since 2016, but most of its members remain focused on protecting national networks rather than taking the initiative.
Starting in 2020, the alliance found itself in an unbalanced position: threat sharing is improving, but offense and contesting NATO’s very active adversaries in cyberspace is the responsibility of only a few. This gap matters because cyberspace is a domain of constant contact, where passivity cedes advantage.
Five years on, little has changed: NATO’s cyber posture remains weak, anchored in passive defense, while a handful of states shoulder the burden of offensive operations in cyberspace.
NATO recognizes cyberspace as an operational domain, but its members diverge sharply in practice. Most allies focus on network defense — fielding incident response teams and resilience frameworks built around “protection” and “security”. Few explicitly mention offensive action. Only a few, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, “counter,” “contest,” and “deliver effects” through military-led offensive cyber forces. The result is an uneven posture: many defend, but few fight.
A handful of members have inched toward a more active cyber posture but still stop short of persistently disrupting adversaries. The Netherlands, for instance, recognizes the constant nature of foreign interference yet confines its response to intelligence sharing and coordination — an upgrade from wartime-only operations but still reactive. Russian-backed groups exploit this hesitation. Like it or not, NATO is already in a cyber conflict — it’s just refusing to admit it.
Offense matters. Cyberspace is always shifting — every patch, update, and new application alters the terrain. Waiting to respond cedes initiative to the adversary. Offensive operations can disrupt ransomware infrastructure, dismantle command-and-control nodes, and prevent adversaries from crawling around in allied networks, causing damage. Until this offensive capability is embraced, NATO will continue to surrender the initiative to its opponents.
Let’s be clear. Aversion to offensive cyber operations is political, not technical. Many allies treat offense as legally or ethically off-limits, embedding a defensive bias in doctrine and mission.
NATO’s official stance is to encourage member states to pursue the alliance’s interests in cyberspace, making the alliance’s cyber warfare a voluntary activity. As a result, few step forward while others free ride. The result: a politically cautious alliance that relies on the offense of a few to defend the many. And considering the onslaught of cyber-attacks NATO states are subject to, this approach clearly isn’t working.
By staying passive, many NATO states invite adversaries to push harder. As Michael Fischerkeller, Emily Goldman, and Richard Harknett argue in their 2022 book Cyber Persistence Theory, cyberspace is a domain of constant contact — probes never stop, exploiters never rest.
Deterrence isn’t a strategy that actually works in the cyber domain: attacks fall short of the threshold of war, attribution is murky, and consequences rarely follow. When allies are limited to passive defense and resilience, that in itself signals a lack of political will. Hackers keep trying because offense pays. What is the point of intelligence agencies collecting threat information if militaries cannot swiftly act on it?
This imbalance has real consequences. NATO’s cyber posture relies on a few states to carry the fight, while others settle into a defense that in truth offers only the illusion of safety. Smaller allies may think this is enough, but it really isn’t. It both fails to provide an adequate defense and fails the broader alliance. Size is no excuse; in cyberspace, even small states can pack a punch.
It’s time to clear the obstacles: outdated laws, rigid organizations, and thin resources. Cyber conflict between NATO and its adversaries is already here. Attacks occur daily.
The absence of effective counter-action allows adversaries to erode NATO members’ sources of strategic power. They exploit the seams between member postures.
This is a path to potentially enormous costs and continuing defeat in the cyber-sphere. NATO needs to do this better, at scale, and require all its members to participate.
Emily Otto is a non-resident fellow at CEPA. She is an Alperovitch PhD Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, after transitioning from military service, where she spent a decade working in threat intelligence and cyber operations.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-10-29 01:46:55
The spy agency has drafted legislation that would allow FSB officers to take part in the work of juvenile commissions across the country and to feed intelligence on so-called “troubled youth” into government blacklists and databases.
The FSB’s new prison-and-detention empire, relaunched only this summer, will also be folded into the system for “preventing juvenile crime.”
The Lubyanka openly admits that this latest move is a reaction to efforts by Ukrainian security services to recruit Russia’s young people.
Russian kids have routinely been caught attempting acts of sabotage since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Children are being recruited for various acts of sabotage — from setting fire to railway equipment to explosions on military bases. For instance, in September 2024, the FSB arrested two 16-year-olds for an arson attack on a helicopter at a military airbase in Omsk, Western Siberia. They admitted being offered $20,000 by an unknown man who contacted them on Telegram and provided instructions.
According to official statistics for last year, 308 teenagers were brought to court for “crimes against public safety”, including 48 for terrorism, and another 39 were punished for “crimes against the constitutional order”.
It appears the FSB is eager to reintroduce the KGB’s old practice of political crime prevention, known as profilaktika. In the Soviet era, this meant being summoned to a local government building, and into a room behind a fake-leather padded door designed for soundproofing, where a state security officer would lay out the options for a rebellious soul and the consequences of defiance — ranging from the destruction of any chance for a successful career to a prison term.
Nowadays, it seems, the role of those special rooms will be played by the offices of the juvenile commissions operating in every Russian region. But that is likely to be just the first step. If a teenager refused to comply, the next summons could well be to an FSB-run prison — to make the possible consequences clearer to both the child and the family.
The new legislation is part of a broader Kremlin crackdown on teenagers. Alongside the prevention and blacklisting of “potential troublemakers” among young people, there is now a push for harsher repression and punishment. A bill lowering the age of criminal responsibility for sabotage-related crimes from 16 to 14 has just passed its first reading in the State Duma and should soon become law.
In addition, the legislation will abolish the statute of limitations for all sabotage-related crimes, abolish suspended sentences for participation in sabotage organizations, and restrict the right to parole until three-quarters of a sentence has been served.
The FSB has also been adding minors to official lists of terrorists since the start of the war in Ukraine, alongside Islamist extremists.
Ever since 2022, Russian security services have been busy reintroducing Soviet methods, moving swiftly backward through history in search of inspiration — from the KGB of the 1980s to the post-Stalin agencies of the 1950s, and even to Stalin’s secret police of the 1940s.
This trajectory suggests the FSB may ultimately adopt the early practices of the Soviet security services for “troubled youth.” After all, the KGB and FSB always praised the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, for his supposed compassion toward street children made homeless by the revolution and the Civil War. Dzerzhinsky’s admirers rarely mention that in 1935, his successors pushed through a resolution entitled “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Delinquency,” which lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12. Punishments included the death penalty.
That brutal measure was prompted by a letter from Marshal Kliment Voroshilov to the heads of the Soviet state, in which he proposed the state execution of children, citing rising juvenile crime in Moscow — including an incident in which the son of a deputy prosecutor was wounded by a nine-year-old boy. To the Soviet authorities, it looked like an attack on the government official, i.e,. an act of terrorism. And this logic very much resembles that of the current regime.
The reintroduction of Soviet repressive practices toward teenagers is troubling enough, but that is hardly the end of the campaign — rather, it seems to mark the beginning of a new trend.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book ’Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation’ was published in June.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-10-28 20:59:59
President Donald Trump escalated US sanctions against Russia on October 22, placing Russia’s two largest oil companies on the US Treasury’s blacklist — a step his predecessor Joe Biden had rejected. The measures are rich in symbolic significance, marking the US administration’s journey to a more Russia-sceptical position, although the effect on the Kremlin may be slow to emerge.
The effectiveness of Trump’s gambit hinges on three critical factors:
At first glance, the sanctions pack a punch. Rosneft and Lukoil together account for half of Russia’s total oil exports — and 5% of global supply. Combined, they produce 5.3 million barrels of crude and refined products daily, exporting 3.5 million barrels.
Both companies and their subsidiaries now appear on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, barring all US firms and individuals from transactions without specific approval. More significantly, any countries or companies worldwide that continue doing business with the oil giants risk secondary sanctions. Under Biden, the US-blacklisted Surgutneftegaz and Gazprom Neft, Russia’s third and fourth largest oil companies. The new measures mean more than 75% of Russian oil exports fall under US sanctions.
Yet neither the Kremlin nor global oil markets panicked at news of the measures. Brent crude prices rose nearly 9% the week sanctions were imposed, then stabilized. Compare that to 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent prices soaring by a third. Moscow’s stock market jittered and the ruble weakened slightly, but there was no panic selling or capital flight — reactions one might expect when an oil producer faces export restrictions.
Several factors explain this measured response to what appear to be punishing sanctions.
First, the sanctions may never fully materialize. With a month before implementation, Moscow has time to engineer some compromise without halting its invasion or appearing to capitulate.
Second, effectiveness depends entirely on enforcement. The crucial element — secondary sanctions on non-US entities trading with Rosneft and Lukoil — won’t be imposed automatically. That decision rests with US authorities, who will tread carefully to avoid spiking gas prices.
The fate of sanctions against Gazprom Neft and Surgut is instructive: after initial export drops, both companies successfully restored sales through intermediaries and traders, with no significant secondary sanctions against their partners. Unless Washington takes a harder approach, Rosneft and Lukoil products will likely continue flowing.
The day after the announcement, Putin addressed the sanctions in a cautious, if not conciliatory, speech. “No self-respecting country makes any decision under pressure,” he said — a message aimed not just at domestic audiences but especially at China and India, urging them to resist US pressure.
The big factor for Russia will be how its two main oil buyers respond. Between January and September, 84% of Russian crude exports went to China (2.1 million barrels daily) and India (1.9 million barrels daily).
But the initial response was promising.
The Financial Times quoted a source at India’s leading oil refiner, Reliance Industries, saying it “does not buy from organizations under sanctions.” Bloomberg sources suggested Indian purchases of Russian oil could fall to zero, and Reuters reported that Chinese state companies have stopped buying seaborne Russian oil, with Unipec, Sinopec’s trading arm, halting purchases even before the US sanctions took effect.
Of the two, India is the weaker link. Currently negotiating a trade deal with the US, it may abandon Russian oil entirely. Even so, questions remain about Nayara Energy, where Rosneft holds a 49% stake — not enough to trigger automatic sanctions. Unlike British sanctions, the US Treasury made no mention of Nayara Energy.
China presents a more complex picture. Previous experience shows that Chinese state companies with Western assets and contracts observe sanctions. But smaller operators eagerly snap up cheap, sanctioned oil.
China’s approach to Iranian oil — almost entirely purchased by Beijing using a system isolated from Western markets — could be replicated for Russian crude if deemed necessary. China is less concerned than India about a trade war with the US, and has both the experience and capability to handle sanctioned oil. That issue may form part of discussions between Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping in Seoul on October 30.
In the extreme scenario where Russian oil exports fell to near-zero, the budget would lose a quarter of its revenue, triggering an economy-wide crisis. At current prices, if seaborne exports ceased entirely, the economy would lose roughly 1.5% of GDP. More likely, if Indian refineries (excluding Nayara) dump Russian oil, the loss would approach 0.5% of GDP — potentially less if China absorbs some of that volume. Rising oil prices would also partially offset the loss.
The Russian budget would not feel the immediate effects. Government oil tax revenue is linked to production volumes and global prices, not company profits or export volumes. Falling exports would weaken the ruble — not necessarily bad for the budget short term — but would fuel inflation and keep interest rates elevated.
Oil companies themselves will suffer, though. Lukoil has already said it will sell its European and other foreign assets. The cost of sales would increase from the costs incurred in creating a web of traders and intermediaries, and the buyers would try to get wider discounts. Oil company profits would decline, forcing them to sell at steeper discounts while reducing investment. Eventually, they’ll pay less in profit taxes and cut output. However, that will not happen overnight.
If sanctions are fully implemented and India turns away from Russian oil, the most significant long-term consequence may be increasing Russia’s already significant dependence on China as its primary customer. That would give Beijing leverage to demand greater discounts, leading to even more Chinese goods flooding the Russian market and deepening Moscow’s reliance on its Asian neighbor; this hardly suits those in Washington hoping to decouple Moscow from Beijing.
Russian oil exports are unlikely to simply stop. Financial workarounds exist, and the outcome depends on India and China’s willingness to face secondary sanctions and their corresponding risk calculations. If China stands firm, Moscow’s dependence on Beijing deepens. If sanctions are fully enforced against third countries, the ruble and budget will face pressure, likely pushing the economy into recession with sustained high interest rates. Notably, the 2026 budget baseline assumed no further meaningful sanctions.
For now, the sanctions’ formulation leaves Russia some wiggle room. If the US administration were determined to apply more damaging measures, it would make a greater effort to enforce existing sanctions against oil producers, join the EU’s price cap mechanism, and further target the shadow fleet.
The sanctions alone are unlikely to force Putin to negotiate or collapse the economy. However, they will create long-term consequences, add to the slowing of the economy, and put more pressure on the budgetary spending in the future.
Alexander Kolyandr is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), specializing in the Russian economy and politics. Previously, he was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a banker for Credit Suisse. He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and lives in London.
More on this and other aspects of the Russian economy in a weekly summary produced by the independent publication, The Bell.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-10-28 04:54:55
At great cost, in tight secrecy and with considerable risk, Russia is developing a nuclear-powered missile. Given NATO’s flimsy air defences, the latest test flight (reported but not confirmed) of the Burevestnik is certainly noteworthy. Countering a conventionally-powered missile is hard enough. If downing the intruder risks showering your country with nuclear waste, the stakes are even higher.
But another threat is far more pressing. For a tiny cost, with minimal secrecy and risk, Russia seems to have found an effective new weapon: balloons. These involve no high technology and carry no significant payload. Their normal use is for smuggling. With the right wind, they float cigarettes effortlessly and profitably across the Lithuanian border from Belarus. The only technological trick is ensuring that they crash-land in a suitable location, and can be found by the smugglers’ accomplices.
Using these balloons as weapons is even easier. They carry nothing, and nobody cares where they land eventually. Their only mission is to drift near an airport—and by their mere presence, close it. The decision is automatic: risk-aversion is embedded in modern aviation, not just out of respect for human life and valuable property, but because of the colossal insurance liabilities involved in knowingly breaching a safety protocol.
For a modern economy, airport closures mean huge inconvenience (just ask the Ukrainians, who have had no civil aviation since 2022). And the reputational damage is even worse. If a country is not safe to fly to, it is probably not safe to lend to, to invest in, to trade with, or to visit. For a cost of perhaps €100 each, balloons can cause untold economic harm, reflected in higher borrowing costs and cancelled deals.
That is what Lithuania faces now. Balloons from Belarus disrupted flights on two successive nights last week, leading to fourteen flight cancellations and seven diversions. Other instances were recorded earlier in the month. Officials are not yet blaming Russia or describing the flights as an act of “hybrid warfare”. These balloons could (just possibly, perhaps, maybe) be part of some intense but incompetent smuggling operation.
But it would be a big mistake to see this episode as a local problem, or a trivial one, or a one-off. Every European airport is vulnerable to this kind of attack. And the target is not Lithuanian aviation. It is NATO’s credibility. The Kremlin is systematically testing our decision-making, just as it has done in previous months with attacks on the sub-sea cables and pipes in the Baltic Sea, on energy and communication infrastructure in Sweden, and with numerous drone flights and airspace intrusions. The questions are simple. How do NATO countries react to these attacks? Do they attribute them? Who responds and how?
The answers are bleak. Allies are leaving Lithuania to bear the burden of trying to deter Belarus by closing border crossings, while the United States, Europe’s supposed security hegemon, is flirting with the regime in Minsk. If NATO cannot stop joke-state Belarus from launching toy balloons, how is it to deter Kremlin decision-makers, as they tinker with their new, nuclear-powered toys?
NATO countries’ decision-makers still do not (to use European foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas’s phrase) “join the dots”. In an excellent collection of essays published by Poland’s ABW security agency, Rafał Miętkiewicz of the Polish Naval Academy argues that the “creeping, staggered and difficult to immediately diagnose” threats in the Baltic Sea region require “far-reaching consolidation” of national and cross-border activities, with a new political emphasis on changing strategies, doctrines, laws, and institutions.
Quite right. But we see little sign of it. And we are already out of time.
Edward Lucas is a Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. Lucas has covered Central and Eastern European affairs since 1986, writing, broadcasting, and speaking on the politics, economics, and security of the region.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-10-28 01:05:17
The mercurial nature of the US President Donald Trump seems to be driving the Kremlin’s leading mouthpieces mad. After a bewildering year veering between euphoria and despair, Russia’s propaganda commentariat has finally concluded that the administration is not a friend.
Appearing on the state TV program 60 Minutes on October 24, head of the National Energy Security Foundation Konstantin Simonov conceded: “Last spring and summer, many of my colleagues often said, ‘Trump doesn’t need Ukraine, he will withdraw from this conflict, he has more interesting topics to deal with, and everything will be handed to us on a silver platter.’ It isn’t going to happen, let’s understand it at long last.”
Host Olga Skabeeva observed that during the first nine months of his presidency, Russia had fallen in love with Trump. That reflected the belief in some quarters in Moscow that the American president would hand them Ukraine and relieve them of the consequences of their invasion. It’s worth noting that this never extended to respect for the US leader — government-run outlets incessantly and cruelly mocked the US leader and the First Lady.
Trump’s admirers might argue that he’s had the last laugh by masking his goals behind on-again, off-again pronouncements like the provision of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. And that the propagandists have looked slightly foolish as they rejoiced and exclaimed, “Perhaps Trump is ours and not theirs.” Their delight was short-lived. The news of the October 22 sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies, was a bitter pill to swallow for state-funded outlets that had previously praised Trump as a brilliant businessman who would help realize Russia’s maximalist demands.
This egg-on-face sense of disappointment was nowhere more visible than with Vladimir Solovyov, the prominent and Kremlin-decorated state mouthpiece whose show ranks among the top three most-watched TV programs. The boisterous presenter had decided that the delivery of Tomahawks wouldn’t happen and had consistently hinted that Trump remained firmly in Russia’s pocket courtesy of a secret deal supposedly reached with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, during their August meeting. The sanctions announcement against Russia’s energy companies left Solovyov — and his talk of covert deals — in a shambles.
It’s not the first time Solovyov has been forced into a U-turn before his viewers and listeners, who number in the hundreds of thousands. On October 23, his radio show Full Contact, Solovyov furiously proclaimed that relations between Trump and Putin were now ruined: “The bromance is over!”
He demonstrated an updated Trump-o-meter, a popular meme in Russia, where the American president was downgraded from “our elephant,” depicted in a Russian military uniform, all the way down to “their pindos,” a derogatory slur Russians frequently use to insult Americans.
What’s next? Now that the pretense of Russia’s friendship with America is no longer useful, state TV’s propagandists — and Putin himself — are back to threatening the West with military force. As if on cue, during a meeting with the chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, and other military commanders on October 26, Putin announced that Russia has successfully tested its nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile and is getting ready to deploy it.
During multiple broadcasts, Solovyov repeatedly asserted, “They have to fear us,” as well as “We don’t need their love, we need their fear. Fear!” Appearing on The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov on October 24, military expert Mikhail Khodaryonok — previously considered by many to be a more measured pundit — proudly described himself and his fellow panelists as “rabid warmongers” and “nuclear maniacs.” He claimed that the West is forcing Russia to use nuclear weapons, and that it simply has no other choice.
The political scientist Sergey Karaganov, who heads the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, appeared on The Right To Know program with the same message. He argued that Westerners, especially Europeans, have lost a sense of “animal fear,” and it is now up to Russia to bring it back.
He asserted: “They have no intellectual functions, they have no sense of the Motherland, they have no sense of gender, they have no sense of love — they have nothing . . . they are the dregs of humanity.” Karaganov asserted that by making Westerners fear Russia, the Russians will be “saving them and the world.” He proudly concluded, “This is our historic mission.”
Karaganov surmised: “We have no other option. Either we will destroy ourselves and then destroy the world, or we will win and save humanity.”
Julia Davis is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the creator of the Russian Media Monitor. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild, and Women In Film.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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