🇪🇺 🇷🇺 There’s been a change in how European governments speak about the Russian threat. Within 48 hours, a wave of statements and mobilization across NATO’s eastern flank has coalesced into a clear and worrying pattern. 🇵🇱 Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk says intelligence shared by Poland, Ukraine and NATO indicates Russia could eventually conduct drone or missile attacks against countries supporting Ukraine while attempting to portray them as accidents. 🇫🇷 In Paris, Emmanuel Macron emerged from a three-hour meeting with France's intelligence chiefs and political leaders warning that the Russian hybrid threat has intensified. France is reinforcing protection of critical infrastructure and defense-production sites. 🇩🇪 Those warnings are not emerging in a vacuum. Germany has formally attributed the attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russia, with subsequent investigations reportedly tracing the operation toward Russian military intelligence. German authorities are also investigating a professionally prepared weapons cache discovered in woodland near Berlin, two handguns and ammunition that officials say were intended for future attacks, including possible links to a foreign intelligence service. 🇪🇪 Further north, Estonia's security cabinet is preparing for another contingency: a possible Russian general mobilization. Prime Minister Kristen Michal says such a move could change Estonia's threat assessment sufficiently for Tallinn to close its border with Russia immediately. 🇱🇹 Lithuania, meanwhile, has detailed evacuation planning for a major military emergency. One of the evacuation routes from Vilnius leads toward Poland, where authorities in Podlaskie are preparing the region to serve as a transit corridor for evacuees from the Baltic states. That planning predates this week's warnings and should not be interpreted as evidence that an attack is believed to be imminent. But the regional context has deteriorated. 🇧🇾 Belarus is currently conducting military exercises near the Polish and Lithuanian borders, including areas around the strategically critical Suwałki Gap. And earlier this week, a NATO fighter shot down a suspected Russian attack drone after it entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. None of this establishes that European governments expect a Russian attack in the immediate future. What it does show is something more concrete: governments from Warsaw to Paris to Tallinn are publicly preparing their populations and institutions for contingencies that until recently largely remained inside military planning documents.

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Hours after Steve Witkoff praised Vladimir Putin as “a humanitarian,” Russia launched three waves of ballistic missiles at Kyiv. Twenty-one missiles. Two people killed. Thirty-four injured, including five children, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Residential buildings, energy facilities, railway and metro infrastructure, shopping centers, businesses and even a monastery were damaged. Twelve Ukrainian regions came under attack overnight. The strikes followed Witkoff's meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg, where the Kremlin expressed willingness to resume trilateral negotiations with Ukraine and the United States. Zelensky responded with unmistakable sarcasm, referring to the attackers as Russian “humanitarians.” He also delivered a warning about the diplomatic process: Moscow's willingness to discuss negotiations has yet to produce any meaningful restraint on the battlefield. Ukraine continues to seek a negotiated end to the war. Zelensky says that effort must be accompanied by stronger air defenses, faster missile deliveries, sanctions and the capability to destroy Russian ballistic missile launchers. For now, the contrast is stark: Washington is discussing a new diplomatic opening with Moscow while Ukrainian emergency crews search damaged buildings and treat the wounded in Kyiv.

🇷🇺 As Putin hosts Witkoff, Russia scholar Dmitry Adamsky warns in Foreign Affairs that Moscow now sees Europe as its main enemy and may keep striking even while it talks peace On the day Vladimir Putin received Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg and, according to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, agreed in principle to resume three-way talks with Ukraine and the United States, Foreign Affairs published a warning about the mindset across the table. Dmitry Adamsky, a professor at Reichman University, an associate at Harvard's Project on Managing the Atom and the author of "The Russian Way of Deterrence," argues that the Kremlin's "mental map" has changed since 2022. Influential Russian defense intellectuals, he writes, now treat Europe, rather than the United States, as Russia's principal adversary, the main source of Ukraine's "military capacity, political resolve, and strategic resilience." Their answer is a concept borrowed from chess: "castling." In Adamsky's account, it means directing coercive pressure at Europe's elites, decision-making centers and critical infrastructure to instill a "deterring fear" of backing Kyiv. Russia's goals, he stresses, have not changed: no NATO enlargement to Ukraine or other former Soviet states, a rollback of NATO's eastern flank and limits on allied exercises and deployments near Russia. Moscow reads Washington as pivoting to Asia and the Western Hemisphere, and sees the Iran war as an "unintended deviation" from that course. He adds that Russian strategists are fixated on Europe's "nuclear curiosity," naming Germany, Poland and the Nordic-Baltic states, and that from Moscow's view any new European nuclear power would cross a redline and could become a casus belli. The sharper shift, he argues, is in how Russia deters. Its military thinkers are building a doctrine of "nonnuclear strategic deterrence": massive, deep precision strikes with missiles such as the Oreshnik, drones, hypersonics and "weapons based on new physical principles," a Russian catchall for electromagnetic-pulse and microwave weapons, aimed at Ukraine and its European backers. Since 2025, he notes, the Russian general staff's journal Military Thought has run several articles on it, and each military branch is building its own version. He judges the concept more escalatory than the hybrid sabotage campaign Russia already runs in Europe. The bottom line: Adamsky expects Moscow to keep using force during negotiations, including precision strikes on infrastructure and "even possible decapitation attempts," and warns that "stepped-up efforts to terminate the war may coincide with heightened security risks in Europe." A deal that settles the battlefield but leaves Russia's wider quarrel with Europe untouched, he writes, likely buys "only a temporary pause." His advice to Washington: learn to "choreograph negotiations amid ongoing military action," and do not mistake coercive moves for a rejection of diplomacy. Source: foreignaffairs.com/russia/ho… via @ForeignAffairs

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🇺🇦 Kyiv. A russian ballistic missile strike has destroyed homes across several streets in a residential area on the Left Bank. 📹 @CrimeanVoyager

⚠️ 🇷🇺 Kyiv tonight

⚠️ 🇺🇦 Kyiv is under Russian ballistic missile attack tonight, just hours after Vladimir Putin agreed in principle to resume peace negotiations with Ukraine and the United States. Ukraine's Air Force has warned of multiple ballistic missiles heading toward the capital. Explosions have been reported across Kyiv. Earlier today, Steve Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” and welcomed the Kremlin's willingness to return to negotiations. Tonight, Ukrainians are once again running for shelter. The Trump administration is easing pressure on Moscow, pursuing Russian energy deals and pressing Kyiv for concessions, even as Russia continues its attacks. Putin talks about peace while his military fires ballistic missiles at Ukraine's capital. Washington should be demanding that the missiles stop. Negotiations mean little to the families sheltering underground tonight unless they produce an end to the killing. 📹 @CrimeanVoyager

⚠️ 🇺🇦 BREAKING: Russia has launched a missile attack on Kyiv, firing more than 10 ballistic missiles, reportedly including Iskander-M, Zircon, and S-400 missiles. The attack comes as Moscow signals its readiness to resume trilateral peace talks with Ukraine and the US. 📹 @YourAnonCentral

Trump said the United States gave Russia nothing in exchange for Stephen Hubbard's release. Then Kaitlan Collins asked him about the sanctions he had waived. “If I didn't do that, you wouldn't have him coming back,” Trump replied. “So you did give something,” Collins observed. The president responded by calling her a “low IQ person” and a “dummy.” The exchange exposes a central contradiction in the White House's account. There was no prisoner swap, and Hubbard's release is welcome news. But Trump has now explicitly connected the decision to withhold sanctions against Moscow with securing the American's freedom. Whether the sanctions waiver was part of an agreed exchange remains unestablished. What is clear is that Trump considers withholding economic pressure on Russia essential to the outcome, while continuing to insist Washington gave nothing in return.

President Trump called a CNN reporter a “dummy” and a “low IQ person” after she questioned his decision to delay new sanctions against Russia during negotiations for the release of American Stephen Hubbard. Trump argued that imposing the sanctions would have destroyed any chance of securing Hubbard's freedom. “If you would have put those sanctions on, you could forget about him,” he said. The exchange exposes an important distinction in the administration's account of the negotiations. Trump says no prisoner exchange or direct concession was required, but he has also explicitly linked Hubbard's release to his decision to hold back sanctions on Moscow. Hubbard's freedom is a significant diplomatic achievement. Whether delaying economic pressure on Russia was necessary to secure it remains the administration's explanation, rather than an independently established fact.

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