DEAR READER,

In Ankara, NATO leaders gather amid tension and anticipation, as US intelligence hints at a possible Russian provocation against Poland. Scenarios include missile or drone strikes on infrastructure or minor cross-border incidents, aimed at creating discord within the alliance and influencing the West's stance on Ukraine. More on that in our top stories.

In our expert opinion, we feature an article from our latest issue by Callum Fraser, who argues that while Europe has developed a policy response to Russia, it lacks public consensus to support it. The resurgence of Russian threats directed towards Poland presents an increasingly perilous situation due to the existing disconnect.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

Europe’s Russia policy has strong potential but lacks the domestic political conditions to effectively implement it. Sanctions architecture, defence commitments, and support for Ukrainian sovereignty all reflect a correct strategic reading of Russian behaviour and intent. However, the societal foundation that makes those commitments politically durable when they become economically costly is fragile. The temptation to reset seen across European politics is not evidence of bad policy, but evidence that the domestic infrastructure to sustain it was never properly constructed.

Lacking foundations

The 2025 Alaska summit was a pivotal moment for Europe. It was also a clear example of US-Russia bilateral engagement being normalized over European heads and a signal of US hesitancy to commit to Europe’s security. However, the meeting did not create the case for a softer stance on Russia. Instead, it legitimized a pre-existing trend within Europe’s domestic politics. This highlights Europe’s strategic complacency. People living in London, Paris or Rome have never had to feel the threat from Russia directly – it was absorbed by the US. This is no longer the case, but Europe has not managed to mitigate this issue.

The 2025 Alaska summit occurred within a broader political context that has been forming across Europe. Far-right populist parties have surged in support. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) reached 28 per cent in polls in April 2026. The party’s leaders have called for renewed engagement with Moscow.

With Russian offensive operations stalling in Ukraine, the conditions that make a ceasefire appear achievable are strengthening. Yet the structural conditions to make it durable remain absent. Russia’s war aims in Ukraine have not shifted throughout negotiations and neither have the conditions that make collective security necessary. The only shift has been European political willingness to implement current policy towards Russia.

If support for resetting relations with Russia is growing, it is not because the threat is misunderstood. Europeans have not concluded that Russia is benign, but that the cost of confronting it is theirs to bear personally through economic pressure while the threat itself remains distant and abstract. This is not a failure of policy design. It is a failure of the domestic political architecture needed to support it. Europe built a correct policy response to Russia. However, it did not build the civic and institutional foundations that would allow populations to sustain that response when it became uncomfortable. The perception gap is where that failure is most visible.

Writing from London, this is not a lesson for Eastern Europe. Citizens of Finland, the Baltic states, or Poland do not need to be told that Russian hybrid warfare is real; they have weathered it for decades. This argument runs the other way. Britain’s case is a clear example of this threat perception gap. A country that is one of Ukraine’s strongest bilateral supporters lacks the strong domestic foundation to guarantee its defence commitments.

Perception gap

As many as 77 per cent of Europeans perceive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a threat to Europe and 76 per cent agree with continued support for Ukraine. These are encouraging figures, but they measure awareness, not commitment. When the question over “guns versus butter” arises, whether it is through introducing trade-offs to an increased defence budget, or reductions to education, healthcare and welfare, public opinion shifts. This highlights increased concern over the economic impact. These findings suggest a disparity between abstract threat awareness and threat salience. Threat awareness, the understanding of a threat, is cognitive, whereas threat salience, feeling the consequences personally, is experiential. Information cannot close this gap without direct exposure or structured civic participation.

Polling on future security also reflects this issue. Forty-five to seventy-two per cent of Europeans believe that Russia would invade again within ten years of a peace deal. Despite awareness of the fragility of peace and the long-term threat that Russia poses to European security, we will not pay to prevent it. This is the perception gap in its starkest form.

An unwillingness to accept the cost of current defence commitments indicates a communication failure to translate an abstract Russian threat into a concrete threat. Public messaging concerning Russia’s hybrid warfare in Europe is being promoted, but it is not filtering through into a public threat salience to give governments the mandate to act without having to water down commitments to survive the next election.

Europe faces a strategic paradox. European security requires spending commitments that generate real fiscal pressure. This pressure has coincided with rising support for parties whose instinct is to soften the local stance on Russia.

Russian behaviour and war aims have not changed. The strategic logic behind sanctions, defence investment, and Ukrainian support remains intact and remains the correct template for future policy. What these figures reveal is that correct policy and sustainable policy are not the same. Policy is only durable with political will behind it, and political will is only as durable as the domestic conditions that sustain it. Europe has spent years building the right policy architecture and neglected building the public foundation it depends on.

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— Callum Fraser, Research Analyst at RUSI