This brief opens a series based on the Everywhere War Tracker (https://sahasec.org/tracker/), an OSINT tool developed by the Sahaidachnyi Security Center to document Russian hostile activities against Europe since 2022. Upcoming briefs will cover Northern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe.
Between January 2022 and September 2026, the Tracker recorded more than a hundred incidents in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, ranging from airspace and maritime incidents to sabotage, cyber operations and GNSS jamming. The authors trace how Moscow moved from reactive signalling in 2022–23 to sabotage in 2024 and more overt military pressure in 2025–26, with hostile activity becoming monthly since March 2025. The brief also examines a new tactic: spoofing Ukrainian drones into Baltic territory.
Its central finding is that this pressure is structural, not mere spillover from the war in Ukraine. The political effect of such operations can far exceed their physical damage. For instance, the May 2026 drone incident in Rēzekne caused little material harm but led to school closures, a NATO response and a change of government in Latvia.
The authors therefore call for a shift from managing individual incidents to deterring Russia’s campaign as a whole, and propose a set of actions for the governments of the Baltic States, the EU and NATO.
Authors:
- Olena Davlikanova – Senior Fellow at the Sahaidachnyi Security Center and the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA); Research Fellow with the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
- Marija Golubeva – Founder of the Baltic Initiative on European Reform and of the crisis-simulation platform Meleys; Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at CEPA. She served as Latvia’s Minister of the Interior from 2021 to 2022.
- Polina Istomina – UK-Ukraine Programs Specialist at the Sahaidachnyi Security Center.
- Vladyslav Panov – Junior analyst specialising in security and defence policy at the Sahaidachnyi Security Center.
- Ilia Torkanievskyi – European Student Think Tank Ambassador to Lithuania, specialising in European security, disinformation policy and hybrid threats.
This publication was prepared with the support of the Prague Civil Society Centre. Partners: Serpens Center for International Security and Baltic Initiative for European Reform. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Prague Civil Society Centre.