Stanislav Boiko and Olena Davlikanova, Senior Fellows of the Sahaidachnyi Security Center, have published a new analysis in the journal Ethics and Armed Forces of The Institute for Peace and Military Ethics, asking how an attack on Europe might be carried out and why much of the Western debate starts from the wrong premises.
Many forecasts point to 2029–2030 as the moment Russia could threaten a NATO member directly. The authors are wary of these timelines, as knowing when Russia might have the forces in place says little about when a decision to use them would come. The question they put forward concerns the point at which Moscow sees the surrounding conditions as favorable enough to move.
That distinction matters because Russia can claim success without winning a conventional fight. What Moscow requires is an outcome it can frame as a win, and territory in Ukraine or a NATO state is not the only thing that would qualify. Weakening the Alliance by revealing its divisions and lack of readiness would answer the same purpose.
Russia still cannot push past many Ukrainian villages, yet it can strain transatlantic ties and shape how European governments and voters think about defence. The airspace intrusions over Poland and Romania made the point: the reaction was slow and uncertain, and that visible weakness may tempt Moscow to act sooner than experts assume.
Beneath all this lies a challenge to a habit of mind — the assumption that Europe is currently at peace. In the article, Stanislav Boiko and Olena Davlikanova draw on two of the Center’s resources to counter it: the Everywhere War Tracker and the Denied War analytical report, which show that, consistent with Russia’s own doctrine, hybrid pressure is not a substitute for war but a preparatory stage of it.
Russia frames the confrontation as civilisational and existential, and its aim reaches past reclaiming Soviet-era influence toward corroding democratic societies and unravelling the European project. The Tracker‘s record of cyber operations, sabotage, airspace violations and infrastructure disruption reads as scattered incidents one at a time, but together shows both a rising count and a change in kind.
As they put it directly:
“Russia may not be preparing for war against Europe. It may already be conducting one.”
On the shape of an attack, Stanislav Boiko and Olena Davlikanova warn against expecting a twentieth-century conventional campaign. What they anticipate is a blend of Russia’s inherited doctrine with the new-generation capabilities forged in Ukraine, unfolding as a sequenced campaign designed to blind, immobilise and drain the defender before major ground combat.
It would run through four phases:
- Crossing the threshold — coordinated cyber and physical sabotage against critical infrastructure, paired with information operations to make the whole system feel like it is collapsing at once.
- The air offensive — an almost simultaneous multi-domain campaign against operational depth, drawing on missile stocks and masses of cheap drones to knock out NATO airpower on the ground.
- The kill zone — if Western forces answer back, a deep, densely defended engagement area saturated with electronic warfare and unmanned systems.
- Territorial anchoring — ground troops moving last, in small tactical groups under constant drone cover rather than armoured columns.
By forcing a long, bloody, close-quarters war on NATO soil, Russia would press on Europe’s intolerance for heavy casualties, aiming to humiliate the Alliance rather than seize large areas.
The report also weighs where an attack might come, from most to least likely (e.g. the Baltic states from land reinforcement; Gotland, Saaremaa, Hiiumaa or the Arctic).
The analysis also makes the case that NATO’s aggregate strength conceals a Europe that may in fact be more exposed than Ukraine because:
- Rearmament still runs on peacetime timelines while Russian industry works on a war footing.
- The gap is less about stockpiles than about new technology and the trained personnel to use it, which barely exist across much of Europe.
- Threat perception is uneven between the northern and eastern flanks and the rest of the continent; and the United States, tied down with Iran and wary of China, remains a question mark.
Above all, Stanislav Boiko and Olena Davlikanova return to perception, on which deterrence rests as much as on hardware:
“Moscow does not require certainty of success. It only requires sufficient doubt regarding Western unity and response.”
The takeaway for policy is that the readier Europe looks, the less likely an attack becomes — and that Europe should prepare “for a strategic environment in which the distinction between peace and war has already become increasingly difficult to identify.”
Read the full analysis by Stanislav Boiko and Olena Davlikanova in Ethics and Armed Forces.