Debate continues with regards to Europe’s readiness for a potential war with Russia. While politicians talk about rearmament, it is important to remember the need for wider societal resilience. After all, there may be no need for a repeat of the events of February 2022.

July 24, 2025 –
Valerii Pekar
–
Articles and Commentary

Damaged buildings after Russian shelling and rocket attacks in Bakhmut. Photo: Dmytro Larin / Shutterstock

The answer to the question posed in the title of this article depends on how you assess the current international situation. Do you consider Russian aggression in Ukraine a local war or the first act of a global war? Do you have full confidence that the United States will immediately come to the rescue? Do you consider NATO’s level of deterrence against Russia to be sufficient? Are you sure you understand Russia’s goals and strategies? Are there vulnerabilities in the current system that invite an aggressor?

Lately, we have been hearing that Russia will be ready to attack Europe around 2030, and by then the continent needs to be fully prepared and rearmed. But is Russia obliged to wait for such a moment of European readiness? After all, it is appropriate to strike at the moment of least readiness. Why not now?

To understand this, we need to answer three questions: What is Russia’s strategic goal? How has war changed? And how can Russia use the new nature of the war to achieve its goal?

As I wrote in a previous article, in the new world of the “right of force”, American, Russian and Chinese interests coincide. They would all like to see Europe divided and weak, incapable of making strong joint decisions. They want a Europe that is not an independent centre of power but only a set of markets in which they can trade profitably. This leads to steps that can even be seen as a certain American-Russian rapprochement.

Thus, the Russian strategic goal is not to seize a part of European territory as was expected during the Cold War. It would be enough now to sow panic and chaos; create a humanitarian crisis; generate refugee flows; and collapse and overthrow governments. This could create a domino effect that could bring radical Eurosceptics to power, destroy European unity and (last but not least) cut support to Ukraine.

To understand how this could happen, we need to look at the face of modern war.

The new face(s) of war

The nature of modern warfare has changed radically over the past three years. While the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 looked like the Second World War, radical innovations since then (some of the most important were mentioned here) have changed the battlefield every few months. This has influenced not only tactics but also strategies. And generals (in a phrase attributed to Churchill) are always preparing for the last war.

One of the typical delusions is that the war in Ukraine is a “poor country’s war” that is forced to use a large army, while NATO can wage a “rich country’s war” with a small professional army and high-precision weapons. This concept from the days of Operation Desert Storm is outdated. As one of the leading Ukrainian military experts, Taras Chmut, says, “You don’t need to have the best equipment. You need to have sufficient equipment in enough quantities.”

At the same time, war is not only high-tech, but also multi-domain. More than ever before, it includes other types of confrontation, in addition to kinetic engagement. It now covers the economic, humanitarian, diplomatic, political, demographic, cyber, information, psychological and cognitive (semantic) spheres alongside other domains.

The third important feature of war is the significant expansion of the amplitude of operations. In addition to clearly hostile actions, modern war includes (and Russian military doctrine emphasizes) so-called liminal operations. These involve activities that are not obviously (at least initially) hostile until they achieve their goals, or those that, in the opinion of the other side, do not cross the threshold of reaction. Examples include the appearance of militants in eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014 who initially seemed unserious. Following this, recently we have seen the repeated infringement of the Polish border by missiles and drones (seemingly by accident); the inexplicable death of American soldiers in Lithuania; the recent fires involving military equipment in Germany and Belgium; a fire affecting telecommunications networks in Poland; and the dangerous use of electronic warfare in the Baltics.

Finally, the fourth important feature of war is that it is taking place for the first time in the postmodern world, which affects all other dimensions. I will only list the most important theses here:

  • The emergence of cognitive (semantic) warfare to the fore, with the main battlefield becoming consciousness itself and what people think.
  • A full-fledged reflection of war in the media and social networks in real time, which completely changes the perception of war within societies.
  • The active use of fakes aimed at the creation of an alternative reality for the opponent and third parties: it does not matter what has happened, what is important is what is said about events.
  • Post-heroic societies that do not approve of mass mobilization, despite the fact that war still requires huge armies.

From the point of view of European security, the question arises whether the continent’s countries are ready for such a war — high-tech, multi-domain, liminal, postmodern. This means that there must be readiness of not only armies, but societies.

Russian strike

Most likely, we should not expect a Russian strike as a ground operation, featuring powerful tanks and motorized columns aimed at Baltic countries or the Polish-Lithuanian Suwałki corridor. Instead of this, just imagine an attack on Poland that combines:

  • massive missile and drone attacks on energy, infrastructure and logistics facilities (by the way, drones can be marked as Ukrainian);
  • cyber-attacks on government and infrastructure facilities;
  • a navigation collapse due to the large-scale use of electronic warfare;
  • sabotage and terrorist groups creating sudden “ecological” and man-made disasters;
  • the destabilization of society (already heated) through social networks;
  • the use of a “fifth column” and “useful idiots”;
  • crowds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees released across the Belarusian border.

I am not saying that everything will necessarily be like this. I just want to emphasize that the war could be completely different from the one Europe is preparing for. And such a war requires significantly fewer resources than a Second World War-style one, resources which are available in Russia today.

In such a situation, the key issue is not the quantity and quality of weapons, but the readiness of the political and military leadership to react quickly. It is also important to assess the readiness of society to take balanced, mature and responsible actions.

Dear reader, ask yourself: what would the political leadership of your country do in such a case? Will governments be at a loss, not knowing how to respond? And what would you and your family do personally?

Conclusion

The increasingly frequent statements by Russian representatives that Russia is not going to attack Europe sounds like a wake-up call for European politicians.

Russia will neither wait for European readiness nor attack where it has long been expected. It will also not use the strategic approaches of the Second World War.

This raises a number of questions that go beyond the military dimension. Relevant issues now include the unity and cohesion of societies; control of the domestic information space; the ability of NGOs to support governments and societies in moments of extraordinary challenges; and the preparedness of political leaders to make decisions in a pre-threshold liminal war. Learning the lessons of Ukraine, for which Ukrainians paid with their own blood, is recommended here.

Purchasing tanks and armoured vehicles is not enough to oppose a Russian strike. They will not even leave the hangars. Superbly trained and brave soldiers will have no targets to acquire with this equipment. There will be no more wars like February 2022.

Europe has all the necessary resources to defend itself. The problem is that governments and societies do not see that war is already on their doorstep. They do not understand that Russia should not be deterred or stopped but defeated.

Some will say I am causing panic. I already heard this in early February 2022.

Valerii Pekar is a chairman of the board of the Decolonization NGO, the author of four books, an adjunct professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a former member of the National Reform Council.

New Eastern Europe is a reader supported publication. Please support us and help us reach our goal of $10,000! We are nearly there. Donate by clicking on the button below.


geopolitics, Russian invasion of Ukraine