Russian MiG-31 . Photo: Kremlin. CC BY 4.0

The story goes like this—and it is true. At 9:14 on a cloudless morning last week, Estonian radar caught the faint pulse of three Russian MiG-31s slicing towards Tallinn. Within minutes, NATO pilots lifted from Ämari air base, climbing hard into the blue to challenge them.

For twelve long minutes, the Russian jets circled above the Baltic—predators just outside the surf—before peeling away. In the control tower, tension presumably outlived the blips, lingering even after the screens went blank.

Poland, too, scrambled fighters after Moscow fired 579 fresh attack drones near its border with Ukraine. Copenhagen and Oslo airports complained of recent drones. Trump did that dance swivel again, the one nobody really knows the moves for.

Sun Tzu reminds us: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” These flights are not battles, only pressure—the steady testing of nerves with the showing of mettle. But are they working?

“NATO has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time,” wrote Wolfgang Munchau this week. “But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of NATO.”

So what, in truth, is the West up against?

Europe, if roused, holds a clear advantage. Not just because Richard Moore, outgoing head of MI6, has said Putin has bitten off more than he can chew. Certainly not because America’s gaze is shifting elsewhere, with Russian incursions and attacks rising sharply since Putin’s trip to Alaska. But the balance is written in numbers.

Europe’s economy—mocked regularly by bullish Americans—is nine times larger than Russia’s. It can bankroll weapons Moscow cannot replace. NATO pilots fly, carriers cross hard seas. Even under Ukraine’s hand alone, the Black Sea bends.

Since 2022, Ukraine has struck at least two dozen Russian vessels: the Moskva, landing ships, a troop carrier sunk off Kherson in June 2025, a $60-million support ship lost near Crimea three months later.

These blows forced Russia to retreat much of its Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol to safer waters in Novorossiysk—relinquishing, however reluctantly, a dominance once proudly claimed.

That retreat is emblematic. Russia’s room to manoeuvre narrows elsewhere too: Turkey blocks reinforcements in the Eastern Mediterranean, while NATO presses in the North Atlantic and Arctic.

Meanwhile, NATO drills in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean are sustained by logistics hubs from Spain to Germany. Napoleon’s maxim holds: “An army marches on its stomach.” Without logistics, the sharpest sword is dull metal.

On airfields from Poland to Italy, young crews hone their craft daily. In Russia, spare parts are stripped from grounded machines.

Yet Russia’s strength lies in numbers. It can summon them faster than Europe, and it tolerates losses democracies never would—even sending men with HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases to the front. A Carnegie Centre report in July 2025 described an “explosion” in HIV rates among Russian soldiers.

In provincial towns, young men climb onto buses for training camps. Families wave them off in silence. In Warsaw, planners study mobilisation timetables, knowing sheer numbers could shape the anxious first weeks of war.

Artillery remains Moscow’s most brutal instrument. Factories churn out shells by the million. Western production is catching up, but slowly.

The consequences fall daily.

In April 2025, a missile strike on Sumy killed 34 and wounded more than 100—shoppers, families, children in the city centre. In June, barrages tore through homes and markets. Playgrounds cratered. Apartment blocks fell to dust.

The latest mass attack, on September 20, struck multiple regions—including Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk—leaving at least three dead and dozens wounded.

For Ukrainians, this firepower is not abstract. It is rubble and grief. Zelenskyy condemned the strikes as a strategy of intimidation, an attempt to crush civilians and infrastructure alike.

Ukraine has stepped up its own long-range drone and missile strikes deep inside Russia, targeting strategic energy infrastructure such as oil refineries in Bashkortostan and Volgograd, as well as conducting large-scale drone raids on multiple Russian airbases—including in the ‘Operation Spiderweb’ attacks that hit strategic long-range bombers across several regions.

Overhead, at the same time, Russia’s S-300s and S-400s layer the sky with defences that would normally take time—and lives—to breach. Moscow has shown again and again it will pay those costs. Images from Kherson and Odessa—hospitals shattered, schools unroofed, streets split apart—testify to that resolve.

Against such destruction, Europe’s posture looks restrained. Smaller professional armies. Governments that demand consensus before escalation. Slow to act, but formidable once stirred.

A sudden clash near Russia’s borders would likely bring early shocks: mass artillery, mobilisation, sheer weight. But in a longer struggle, Europe’s deeper economy, superior fleets and air power, and—if it holds—the spine of American support would tilt the balance.

Thucydides warned: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The tragedy is that both strong and weak still suffer.

Another threat comes from within. Political winds and populist currents in Europe could erode the cohesion that has held for decades.

In The Hague last weekend, violence filled the Melieveld: dark-clad Dutch men striking against immigration. Water cannons and tear gas met them.

Street anger in one city, institutional strain elsewhere. In Britain, over 150 lawyers, rights groups, refugee and environmental organisations report rape and death threats from far-right, anti-migrant protesters. Many blame media and social networks for feeding the hatred.

Such fragility is as much a battlefield as any border. Russia has long courted these movements with propaganda, money, whispers of support. Nor is it alone in stirring anti-Islamic feeling. Illiberalism weakens institutions: courts, press, the quiet architecture of trust that resists meddling from outside—or within.

And always the American question hovers. With Washington, Russia is overmatched. Without it, Europe still holds the long-term edge, but faces harsher early storms. “No one can feel safe right now,” said a disappointed Zelenskyy at the UN in New York just now.

No, it has been years since I walked Tallinn’s cobbled streets. Yet I imagine its people glance skywards whenever engines roar—a reminder that their city, for all its medieval walls and Hanseatic charm, rests on Europe’s most fragile fault line.

Tallinn is not only a border city but a symbol of the choice confronting Europe as a whole.

As CC O’Hanlon posted from Rome, quoting Terence McKenna: “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

It is difficult to believe we are now contemplating this: a genuine risk of war.

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