By Leon Vermeulen, Substack, 10/16/26
The Estonian prime minster, Kirsten Michal, ahead of the EU Council meeting: “The faster Russian refineries are blown to smithereens the better.”
Earlier this week, it appeared possible that Europe might awaken to the first building blocks of an end to the war in Ukraine.
The outline was incomplete, fragile and deeply contested: a reciprocal halt to attacks on Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure, the restoration of safe Black Sea trade, limited sanctions relief tied to Russian concessions and a negotiating process intended to prevent another catastrophic winter.
It was not yet peace. But it was an off-ramp.
That possibility has not merely been delayed. Europe’s hard-line security establishment is attempting to torpedo it before it acquires political momentum. The annual Warsaw Security Forum made that unmistakably clear.
While Donald Trump searches—however inconsistently and self-interestedly—for a transaction capable of reducing the conflict, Warsaw presented a competing vision. In that vision, peace does not mean rebuilding relations, establishing reciprocal security or ending the confrontation. It means freezing the battlefield while continuing sanctions, military pressure, political isolation and preparations for a future conflict.
Europe is being offered permanent confrontation and being told to call it peace.
Trump’s imperfect opening
Trump’s initiative deserves no romantic interpretation. His decision to ease sanctions on Russian diesel was driven partly by American fuel prices and domestic electoral pressure. His demand that Ukraine stop attacking Russian refineries was not initially matched by an enforceable demand that Russia stop destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure. His public attack on Volodymyr Zelensky and suggestion that Ukraine should find a new president were coercive and diplomatically crude.
But the motives of a negotiator do not determine whether an opening is useful.
Trump had identified several practical areas in which Russian, Ukrainian, European and American interests might temporarily overlap: energy security, Black Sea navigation, grain exports, sanctions relief and the prevention of further infrastructure destruction during winter.
Zelensky himself offered the essential reciprocal formula: Ukraine would stop striking Russian refineries if Russia stopped attacking Ukrainian energy facilities.
That was the opening to test.
Instead, the planned two-day Miami meeting ended after one angry day. Ukraine promised to continue attacking Russian refineries. European governments condemned the easing of sanctions and repeated that they would stand behind Kyiv. The possibility of a limited de-escalatory agreement was submerged beneath accusations of betrayal.
Then came Warsaw.
A peace designed to prevent peace
The Warsaw Security Forum’s 2026 report argues that Poland and the Nordic-Baltic countries should become principal architects of Europe’s future security order.
This is not yet official NATO or European Union policy. It is an advocacy report produced by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation with contributions from serving and former ministers, parliamentarians, diplomats, military figures and policy specialists. But it was launched in the Polish parliament, is being promoted across the region and is explicitly intended to shape government policy.
It must therefore be taken seriously.
Its proposed postwar order appears remarkably similar to Kyiv’s maximalist objectives. Sanctions against Russia should become effectively permanent. Dialogue must not be allowed to evolve into political normalisation. Russia must pay reparations. Frozen Russian assets should finance Ukraine’s reconstruction and integration into the European Union. Ukraine should be brought into both the EU and NATO.
These are not negotiating positions designed to meet an adversary somewhere between competing security interests. They are terms intended to formalise the permanent defeat, isolation and punishment of one party.
Whatever one thinks Russia deserves, Moscow will not voluntarily sign a settlement whose purpose is to preserve every mechanism of economic warfare, place Ukraine inside NATO and extend the strategic confrontation into Russian territory itself.
A peace proposal that no Russian government could accept is not a path towards peace. It is a justification for continuing the war.
The Kaliningrad gambit
The most dangerous proposal concerns Kaliningrad.
The report reportedly argues that an eventual settlement should include the demilitarisation of this Russian exclave, describing it as a strategic vulnerability within range of European missiles.
Kaliningrad is not occupied Ukrainian territory. It is internationally recognised Russian territory containing major military installations and serving as Russia’s principal strategic position on the Baltic Sea. Introducing its demilitarisation into negotiations over Ukraine transforms the prospective settlement from an attempt to end one war into an effort to restructure Russia’s defences under Western pressure.
Moscow has already warned that an attempt to isolate Kaliningrad could trigger the use of its entire arsenal, including nuclear weapons.
Such warnings are dangerous and coercive. But they cannot responsibly be ignored while European strategists discuss closing the Baltic Sea, neutralising Kaliningrad and striking the systems that support Russian military operations.
Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna recently stated that NATO could close Russia’s Baltic “lifeline” within hours if Moscow attacked the alliance. His statement was conditional upon Russian aggression, not a proposal for an immediate peacetime blockade. Yet describing the ability to create an “existential” crisis for a nuclear-armed state is hardly the language of cautious deterrence.
When each side openly discusses imposing existential danger upon the other, the distance between deterrence and catastrophe becomes dangerously short.
Manufacturing an Article 5 pathway
The report also recommends that sustained hybrid attacks should potentially be treated as an Article 5 contingency even when no single incident would justify activating NATO’s collective-defence clause.
This proposal could transform ambiguity into a pathway to war.
Cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage, electoral interference, damaged undersea cables and unidentified drones are serious matters. Some have been credibly attributed to Russia. Others remain disputed, incompletely investigated or supported principally by intelligence assessments that cannot be independently examined.
Combining multiple uncertain incidents does not automatically produce certainty.
Yet the proposed doctrine would allow governments to aggregate a series of individually insufficient events until a political threshold for collective military action had been reached. Attribution could become cumulative. Suspicion could become evidence. Events that do not individually constitute an armed attack could collectively be treated as one.
This is especially dangerous when diplomatic relations have been reduced, military communication is weak and political leaders face incentives to attribute every unexplained incident to the same adversary.
Article 5 was designed to deter unmistakable armed aggression. Transforming it into a response to an accumulating cloud of “hybrid” activity risks creating a mechanism through which governments can slide into war without any single decision or event appearing to have caused it.
From online claims to physical attacks
Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius went further, publicly suggesting that Zelensky should strike more Russian data centres to protect European elections from interference.
That statement should have caused outrage.
Data centres can support government operations, military activity and propaganda. They also provide ordinary civilian and commercial services. The claim that recent attacks significantly reduced Russian influence operations has itself been challenged by specialists who say the internet-traffic evidence has been misinterpreted.
Nevertheless, a European head of government casually advocated additional physical attacks inside Russia as a response to alleged information operations.
This illustrates the elasticity of hybrid warfare. Suspected online interference becomes grounds for kinetic strikes. Those strikes provoke Russian retaliation. The retaliation is then presented as another hybrid attack, supporting stronger NATO responses.
Escalation becomes self-justifying.
Deterrence without diplomacy
NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, used the Warsaw meeting to outline his “Theory of Victory.”
He promised that NATO would block, blunt and break any attack against an ally, striking not merely the attacking force but everything that supports, sustains and controls it. In formal military terms, this is a defensive doctrine. It does not amount to an explicit endorsement of attacks on Russian civilians. But its possible target set is extraordinarily broad.
Russian command centres, logistics networks, communications infrastructure and dual-use systems may also support nuclear forces. Striking them during a rapidly escalating conflict could be interpreted in Moscow as preparation to disable Russia’s capacity to retaliate.
The danger does not lie simply in NATO preparing to defend its members. Every alliance must plan for defence. It lies in combining expansive military doctrines with disappearing diplomatic channels, ambiguous thresholds and political demands that leave the adversary no acceptable path towards normalization.
Deterrence without diplomacy does not create stability. It creates two armed systems waiting for the other to make the mistake that confirms their worst assumptions.
The frontier becomes Europe’s centre
Poland and the Nordic-Baltic states have legitimate security concerns. Their geography, history and proximity to Russia understandably shape their threat perceptions. But proximity does not grant them the right to determine the acceptable level of risk for an entire continent.
The countries closest to a perceived threat may offer essential warnings. They may also possess the deepest historical fears, the strongest domestic incentives for confrontation and the least political room for compromise.
Making this group the principal architect of Europe’s relationship with Russia would place the states most sceptical of coexistence in charge of deciding whether coexistence may ever be attempted. That is not strategic balance. It is the regionalisation of fear into continental policy.
The larger European states would still retain formal influence. NATO decisions require political agreement, and neither Poland nor the Nordic-Baltic countries can independently activate Article 5 or impose their preferred settlement. But influence does not require formal control. It operates by defining the vocabulary through which every policy is judged.
Negotiation becomes appeasement. Normalisation becomes capitulation. Restraint becomes weakness. Escalation becomes deterrence. Permanent confrontation becomes peace. Once those definitions dominate the debate, governments may technically remain free to choose diplomacy while becoming politically unable to do so.
Sabotaging the American off-ramp
This is why Warsaw must be understood in the context of Trump’s initiative. The report positions Europe’s eastern and northern flank to resist any American-Russian arrangement that does not preserve maximal pressure on Moscow and guarantee Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership. It attempts to establish in advance the boundaries of an acceptable settlement—and those boundaries exclude the concessions that any negotiation would require.
Trump may respond by reducing American intelligence support, restricting weapons deliveries or negotiating directly with Moscow over European objections. If he does, European leaders will face an impossible contradiction.
They will promise to sustain Ukraine without the United States while lacking the intelligence, air-defence stocks, logistical systems and industrial capacity necessary to replace America quickly. They will demand greater military expenditure while social services, infrastructure and household security deteriorate. And they will ask increasingly sceptical citizens to pay more because Europe rejected the most visible attempt to explore an end to the conflict.
Europe may possess sufficient theoretical wealth to prolong the war. It does not possess unlimited political consent.
Every additional billion will compete with healthcare, pensions, housing, industrial renewal and public services. Every further mobilisation measure will deepen public anxiety. Every refusal to negotiate will strengthen parties that argue Brussels has placed its geopolitical ambitions above the welfare of its own citizens.
The home front will become the decisive front.
The road returns to catastrophe
The Warsaw meeting does not prove that all Europe is calling for war. It demonstrates something almost as dangerous: the European security debate is increasingly dominated by people who call permanent confrontation “peace,” escalation “deterrence” and the exclusion of diplomatic normalisation a prerequisite for security.
The carefully guarded dream of an off-ramp has therefore not merely encountered another delay. It has been struck deliberately.
Europe has returned to the dead-end street: more sanctions, more weapons, more attacks, more military exercises, more nuclear signalling and less diplomacy. The remaining distance between that dead end and catastrophe is becoming alarmingly short.
War is not yet inevitable. But Europe is systematically dismantling the mechanisms through which war might be prevented.
A sustainable peace cannot be built by demanding Russia’s permanent isolation, inserting Kaliningrad into the settlement, expanding the meaning of Article 5 and treating diplomatic normalisation as a security threat. Nor can it be built by demanding unilateral restraint from Ukraine while Russia continues attacking its infrastructure.
Peace requires reciprocity, verification, compromise and an acknowledgement that security cannot be achieved by making the other side permanently insecure.
Trump’s initiative may be imperfect, transactional and motivated by American self-interest. It may ultimately fail. But the responsible European response should have been to test it, improve it and insist upon reciprocal obligations. Instead, Europe’s hard-line security establishment is attempting to ensure that the opening closes.
If it succeeds, Europe will not have defended peace against appeasement. It will have rejected an uncertain road away from war in favour of a familiar road towards catastrophe—and then insisted that there was never another route.
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Poland eases engagement rules for pilots guarding against Russia
Politico, 9/28/26
Poland plans to make it easier to shoot down objects violating its airspace, Deputy Minister of Defense Cezary Tomczyk announced on Monday [9/28].
The change would add to tensions between Warsaw and Moscow, which are already running high after Russia has tested Poland’s defenses with a number of aerial incursions in recent weeks.
Speaking to journalists in Dęblin, Poland, Tomczyk said that pilots now have to not only “read the radar,“ but also “visually identify” an aerial threat before engaging it. “This means that the pilot must fly up to the target and see what exactly the object is,” Tomczyk explained.
The Ministry of Defense now plans to cancel the “identification“ requirement. “After the changes, the pilot or operational commander will only need to read the radar to make a decision about the shot,” the Polish minister noted. The change will save time, which means that “Polish fighter jets will shoot down drones and missiles flying into us from the direction of Russia faster.“
On Sept. 23, a Russian Mi-8 helicopter briefly entered Polish airspace from Russia’s Kaliningrad region. It penetrated about 300 meters into Polish territory and remained there for 42 seconds. Poland scrambled fighter jets in response.
“The nature of the incident indicates that Russia is once again testing the readiness of our air defense,” The Operational Command of Poland commented on the occasion.
Poland has previously shot down Russian drones over its territory.
This time last year, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław said Poland would shoot down Russian jets if they breached Polish airspace, saying: “You have been warned.”