NATO defense ministers gathered in Brussels on Wednesday for the first time since late June, when they agreed to raise national defense spending targets to five percent of GDP under pressure from the Trump administration. While such meetings occur at least twice a year, this one drew particular attention: in addition to marking the defense ministers’ first “check-in” since the alliance confirmed plans for European members to take greater responsibility for the continent’s security, the meeting also came in the wake of a spate of Russian violations of European airspace. Meduza unpacks what the meeting revealed about NATO’s efforts to deter and counter Russian threats.
Heightened vigilance
With a rogue and reckless Russia on NATO’s eastern border, the bloc’s European members have spent the year trying to prove to Washington that they’re serious about pulling their weight. As U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated at Wednesday’s meeting, the Trump administration expects a “European-led NATO” that can “translate goals into guns, commitments into capabilities.”
Against this backdrop, the wave of Russian incursions and suspected hybrid operations in the weeks before the summit was, in a sense, well-timed: it gave Europe a chance to show that its defense commitments go beyond spending pledges and capability targets on distant timelines.
In mid-September, roughly two dozen Russian drones entered Polish airspace, prompting Warsaw to invoke Article 4 of the NATO Treaty — which allows members to call for consultations — for just the eighth time in the alliance’s history. Estonia invoked Article 4 over a Russian fighter jet incursion less than two weeks later.
After the Polish incident, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced the launch of Eastern Sentry, an air defense mission redeploying member states’ assets to the alliance’s eastern flank. So far, at least nine countries have agreed to contribute helicopters, fighter jets, air defense systems, and other capabilities to the initiative.
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One of the hurdles of moving towards a “European-led NATO” is the difficulty of integrating various types of weapons and systems from a range of countries. But a NATO military officer, speaking on background, said the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line (EFDL), announced in July, is designed to address precisely this issue through emerging technologies.
According to the officer, the EFDL aims to build “a layered network of sensors integrated with a common AI-enabled command and control system to detect and then out-target an adversary using a combination of unmanned and manned assets.” He added that NATO’s Allied Land Command is using Eastern Sentry as a “test case” to experiment with cutting-edge counter-drone tools.
Eastern Sentry is NATO’s second major vigilance operation launched in response to Russian activity in the past year. In December 2024, the alliance announced Baltic Sentry, a mission to monitor and protect undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea after a series of cable disruptions were linked to the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet” — hundreds of aging, poorly maintained tankers illegally transporting sanctioned Russian oil.
According to Arlo Abrahamson, head of public communications at NATO Maritime Command, Baltic Sentry has already delivered results. Speaking on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting, he confirmed that there have been no incidents of “malign damage” to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea since NATO launched the surveillance operation in January.
Beyond protecting infrastructure, the mission has also constrained Russia’s maritime capacity overall. “We see that the Russian Navy in the Baltic is taking measures to guard their own shipping [in response to Baltic Sentry], which requires assets, and that can have an indirect effect on their ability to deploy their navy elsewhere,” Abrahamson noted.
As an example, the military officer pointed to the Novorossiysk, a submarine belonging to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet that surfaced off the coast of France last week after it was reported to be experiencing a fuel leak. Moscow has denied that the vessel had any technical problems.
NATO chief Mark Rutte commented on the submarine incident earlier in the week, quipping: “What a change from the 1984 Tom Clancy novel The Hunt for Red October. Today, it seems more like the hunt for the nearest mechanic.”
Support for Ukraine
Since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump has also pressed Europe to shoulder a larger share of support for Ukraine. To that end, in July, Trump and NATO’s Rutte launched the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a mechanism enabling third countries to purchase urgently needed U.S. equipment for Kyiv.
More than three years into a war of attrition in which Ukraine’s partners have tried to balance support for Kyiv against fears of Russian escalation, it wasn’t initially clear that PURL would be anything more than the latest in a long line of acronyms and vague commitments. But according to a NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the program has already had concrete benefits at the front.
“Ukraine has confirmed consistently that the equipment is making a real impact now on the battlefield,” the official said. “The equipment [that was pledged in August and September] has been delivered, and Ukraine has indicated that it has helped them retake territory and defend their skies and citizens.”
Before this week, six countries had purchased approximately $2 billion in equipment under the scheme, including Patriot and HIMARS missiles. After Wednesday’s meeting, more than a dozen other countries joined the initiative, according to Sweden’s defense minister.
These new sign-ons came two days after a report from a German think tank that found that even with the new PURL program, Europe’s average monthly military aid to Ukraine fell by more than 50 percent in July and August compared to the first half of the year.
Whether the additional pledges will help bring assistance to Kyiv to its previous levels remains to be seen, though one country has already put a number on its commitment. Germany pledged on Wednesday to contribute a new aid package worth more than 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) — more than half of the amount contributed by all European countries put together in July and August.
A ‘learning ground’ for war
The new PURL pledges, and the short timeline from promises to deliveries under the program so far, may reflect growing recognition among NATO’s European members that Russia poses a concrete threat to their national security — one that could escalate dramatically if Ukraine doesn’t receive the support it needs to hold the line.
“Ukraine is certainly a learning ground for what warfare is really like in the 21st century,” a senior NATO official told journalists on the sidelines of the meeting. “I would love to tell you that the Russians aren’t really learning very quickly, but unfortunately they are.”
Russia, he explained, is systematically testing tactical changes in small units before scaling them up across its forces — a “professional approach” to learning the lessons of 21st-century warfare. China and North Korea, he added, are also drawing valuable insights from the conflict.
At the same time, he noted that as Russia has depleted much of its Soviet-era weapons stockpiles, it has militarized its economy, potentially making it a more formidable opponent than it was in 2022. “This means that at the end of the conflict, there are some areas where Russia will actually have a more modern, more capable force than it had when the war in Ukraine started,” the official said.
Last month’s airspace violations, whether deliberate or simply reckless, are reminders that Europe is already dealing with this militarized Russia. And it’s preparing to do so for years to come: officials stressed in Brussels that the vigilance operations launched in 2025 will continue indefinitely, and NATO’s new defense spending targets are set for 2035. But what the Russian threat looks like then will depend heavily on the war’s outcome.
“Everyone understands that if Ukraine comes under Russian domination, or is even absorbed into a kind of reconstituted Russian empire, then we have a challenge that is so much larger,” another senior NATO official told Meduza. “Because Russia will turn Ukraine’s resources against us. And then we might have to look at those defense spending figures and take them up a little more.”