Ukraine’s president says Kremlin checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies following new drone sightings
Vladimir Putin will expand his war in Ukraine by attacking another European country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has predicted, and accused Russia of recent drone incursions that he said were an attempt to test Nato’s defences.
Speaking in Kyiv after his meeting with Donald Trump at the UN in New York, the Ukrainian president said Russia was preparing for a bigger conflict. “Putin will not wait to finish his war in Ukraine. He will open up some other direction. Nobody knows where. He wants that,” he said.
Ukraine’s president said the Kremlin was deliberately checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies, after drone sightings in Denmark, Poland and Romania and the violation of Estonian airspace by Russian fighter jets. More drones were spotted on Friday night above a Danish military base, and over a Norwegian base on Saturday.
Sounds like an efficient way to lose Königsberg, Karelia and Crimea very quickly.
Apparently, Putin never learned to swallow your food in manageable chunks before moving on. I think he will end up choking to death.
It’ll work as long as Russia is still useful for China.
Russia’s joint military drills with Belarus has caused Poland to shut down Poland / Belarus border crossings. A lot of Chinese goods are shipped to Europe via rail that goes through one of these crossings, so China is taking notice.
Is it Cambodia?
That would suck cause they just endend that war with Armenia.
Is this you, Ken M?
Moldova is for sure not safe right now.
Yeah, I was reading earlier about Russian misinformation networks relating to Moldovan elections. Scary stuff.
But why? They can’t even do one front well, Russia sucks at war
I have a pet theory that Putin is attempting to get a big reaction from NATO, so that he can then internally use that as an excuse why the war in Ukraine did not end well, and why they had to ultimately concede points they earlier held they wouldn’t in the eventual peace negotiations.
Not winning against Ukraine would be shameful for him, especially after all the messaging done about Ukraine not even being a real country.
Not winning against the entirety of NATO, on the other hand, sounds reasonable and understandable. But just saying that isn’t very persuasive. He needs imagery of destroyed Russian equipment in another NATO country or something concrete like that, to show that NATO truly is involved and waging war against Russia. That’s would also justify the initial reasoning for this misguided excursion — NATO is indeed warring against us, it was all justified! See these images of dead Russians in the Baltic Sea! The flaming Russian jets! See the havoc the big bad NATO wreaks on us poor Russians! We stand no chance, we have to settle for peace, those bullies are too strong now, and they are evil in their ways! In order to survive, we must concede a bit, lest NATO comes and bombs you and your family in the night like the thugs they are! gesturing at the constant dramatized imagery of destroyed Russian equipment in some NATO region
I’m convinced the economy, despite currently running on the war, is finally slowly collapsing to the point of it being visible to the peasants, perhaps showing inconvenient signs of that with the gas shortages across Russia, whatever else they are trying to keep under wraps. I think it’s starting to get embarrassing unless something changes and they can play victim to some bigger baddie yet again terrorizing good pious Russians. Maybe they have determined they can’t keep the effects contained no longer, and the seams will start to burst soon, so they need something that justifies the peace negotiations and conceding some of their strict conditions for the peace. Otherwise the people might just start seeing how fucked they are and rise up.
Because they’re hoping to pull other “axis” countries into the fold. There’s a wider conflict on the horizon, and Russia has its side it is looking to pull in to assist them. Large scale maybe even world war looms around the corner.
Not saying this is why… but in theory if he can go through another country to do an end around on Ukraine, he can trade that other country to keep Ukraine. Or even if nato needs to defend itself, it might not spend as much on defending Ukraine. Just guesses though. And they still seem like bad reasons.
He’s grabbing as much as he can for leverage, so he can trade back part of it for peace, but not all of it. Thus he still grows his empire despite having an army at its breaking point.
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
He’s really demonstrated Russia’s lack of capability to the world.
If a bull steals three kid’s lunches, you dont force him to give back 2 but keep the third.
Well, it’s obvious why Zelensky would say something like that. I don’t blame him, they’re at war after all. What’s less obvious is why Russia might be up to something like that. I don’t see any good reason.
Then again, I didn’t see a good reason to attack Ukraine. I distintively remember that before the invasion, there were these reports of 180k Russian troops amassing at the border and I was damn sure, that Putin won’t attack, 'cause…you can’t conquer Ukraine with only 180k soldiers. But here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, who knows what that madman is doing for what reason.
Integrating Ukraine into Russia has been a core geopolitical goal of Putin and the Russian government for a very long time now. It’s not new, and while it might not make sense to us, it makes a lot of sense to them. And Ukraine seemed, at the time, like an easy target. They’d already stolen Crimea from them back in 2014 with nary a peep from the world, and Ukraine had basically no real defence agreements to call upon. While Putins plan for a three day war was laughable in hindsight, its easy to see why it was believable at the time.
OTOH, there are very few other European targets that aren’t already NATO members. He’s not going after Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland or Poland, because hitting any of them triggers a full scale war with NATO, and all of them have significant combined NATO forces already present. Any other targets are too far to realistically maintain supply lines. So I really don’t see what options there actually are for expanding the war.
We do know that Russia is trying to prepare, economically, for an increased scale of hostilities by 2030, but unless he can successfully jam up NATO in some big way that basically assures mutual defense is out the window I just don’t see what their options are.
I’ll just be over here quietly cheering “two fronts” because I’m sure it’ll go well for them
They should try their luck in Afghanistan again.
Or Japan.
That would put them in direct competition with us now that Trump wants the air base back and says he is willing to go to war with Afghanistan to do it.
I’m not a history guy, when was the last time invading Afghanistan went well?
They call that place the graveyard of empires for a reason, I don’t think it’s ever gone well.
I think it was back in 1219. It lasted until just 1227. Does 8 years count as went well? Or is that too short?
That may sound cheer worthy, but considering they very obviously can’t handle even 1 front, attacking another country would have to be for a different reason, a more problematic reason.
Can you expound on the later part of your thought? I’m struggling to picture a scenario in which the Kremlin purposefully opens a second front. The purpose of these airspace raids is to saber rattle and make it so Europe beefs up its defenses and is less likely to give equipment to Ukraine and instead use it domestically.
Russia haven’t been able to fully mobilize their population for war. If Putin can convince Russians that they are in an existential war with NATO then he can introduce conscription. If he’s able to double/triple the bodies on the front line in Ukraine then there a real possibility of overwhelming the defenders.
Except NATO could and would do the same, and even without the US the European members of the alliance have far greater manpower reserves than Russia. And better tech. And a larger manufacturing base. And more money. And better access to global markets. And navies to protect that access.
Attacking Ukraine was stupid. Attacking NATO would be nothing short of suicidal. Russia would lose a conventional war, and nobody wins a nuclear war.
Russia is already facing severe logistical and manpower issues that cannot be stemmed by importing foreign workers at this point… But I’m sure the factories can continue to produce munitions with children in them, right?
munitions with children in them
That doesn’t sound particularly effective.
Russia is already using conscription in the war
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/02/europe/putin-russia-spring-conscription-ukraine-intl
The main distinction is that there are laws (ha!) against sending improperly trained conscripts into “active combat”. And while that can be potentially accelerated by claiming it is an emergency, it is much easier to just change the definition of “proper training”… which they already (allegedly) are.
But also? Russia already has massive morale and corruption issues. Giving even more untrained men guns is just a good way to have more mutinies and to have even more military gear show up on ebay/temu.
And also? Even if they triple the boots in Ukraine, having a second front (or one really giant front if it is all of NATO…) is not at all a worthy trade. Especially when those are fresh militaries with all the gear they had been holding back from Ukraine in case of this very scenario.
Nah. This is most likely the normal probing that putin does as standard practice with the added goal of scaring the EU into not wanting to support Ukraine in case Russia retaliates. Zelenskyy is just spinning this as the kind of bogeyman that would get his people much needed support.
Russian morale is absolutely dogshit right now. Among other things, soldiers are being forced to bribe their commanders if they want to leave the front (when they’re scheduled to be rotated out). Those who refuse to pay up get detailed to under-equipped suicide attacks.
Oh, and soldiers who die are being marked AWOL so their families don’t get death benefits, because the government has barely any money left to pay them, and they’re being forced to offer huge signing bonuses just to get the manpower they need.
Russia doesn’t act logically and there’s a positive feedback loop in the command - where each commander reports situation to his commander as better than it actually is, so what Putin hears from his yesmen, may as well be something like:
- Yeah, we decided not to capture entire Ukraine immediately, but to delay things a bit, so that NATO will send more stuff to Ukraine and have less for itself before we attack them too.
So yeah, it may be that they’re just all bark no bite now, but after enough time doing that there’ll be real question “are we actually gonna do it or chicken out?” and that will be solely a question of leaders fragile ego.
Im curious if this is true in any way, or is just armchair chatter. Are there actual reports of this?
Kinda yes to both variants.
Russia inflates battlefield gains after a costly summer offensive
It’s kinda been the thing at least since Soviet times where the tendency to report higher efficiency overcame any logic, and it wasn’t just production plans in with those famous “5 year plans”, it also creeped in into military, where there’d be, for example, tank hangar overseer reporting 50% of machines being battle ready to his commander, his commander would report 60, then up next it becomes 70, and like that until defence minister gets “we’ve got entire 100% machines ready”.
What We Can Learn from the Soviet Collapse in: Finance & Development Volume 31 Issue 004 (1994)
I can speculate it could be to frame this war as a war against nato, or to get a reason for full scale mobilization, or to get a reason to use nuclear weapons.
“Nuclear weapons use” is an element of their doctrine for foreign policy influence.
They are not fucking idiots. But they do recognize that “nuclear blah blah” works well with cowardly westerners.
They are not fucking idiots? They absolutely are fucking idiots. And they are being backed into a corner. A lot of stuff can happen.
How much do you know about russian history? If your life was on the line, do you think you could write 3 key bullet points (since your life is on the line, you wouldn’t have access to a search engine or an LLM) about every decade of 20th century russia? Basic things like 1906 protests, implementation of NEP, Khrushev and so on. No one is asking for in-depth knowledge.
Do you speak russian? How do you know they are not playing you if you don’t speak russian?
Your message about “backed into a corner” is exactly what they want you to think. They got you “hook line and sinker” as the North Americans like to say.
Haha. I don’t think you have any idea what you are talking about.
What are you thinking exactly?
My main idea on why they’d escalate is because they’re sure the EU and NATO will fold this time, definitely, for certain.
Escalate just so much that NATO won’t act and cracks might form in nato. That was the strategy all along. Maybe this is a part of that.
lots of these events that have occurred might have happened out of inertia. It might be that russians miscalculated and the war in Ukraine should have ended by now, and all these actions are part of a bigger plan
Russia isn’t planning to invade Ukraine
- Zakharova on Feb 8 2022.
One guess is all that it should take, given the existing historical precedent.
1939? You mean when Poland was being occupied by the Nazis? Also, everything up to 1907 would have been done under the empire that was toppled by the Russian revolution in 1917. The formation that resulted is the one that poland would have been attacking in 1921, before they had officially formed the USSR in 1922, which altogether was dissolved 35 years ago in 1991. You realize geopolitics is about more than just monolithic masses of land?
The US maintains a defensive contingent in Poland. Even with how much Trump loves the taste of Putins cock, I don’t see how he could justify doing nothing about dead American soldiers. And even if the US, stays out of the fight, Poland itself is armed to the fucking teeth and has the rest of NATO backing them. Does Putin want unsupervised Canadians in Moscow? Because this is how you get unsupervised Canadians in Moscow.
Haha. Which is also why Poland is trying to be able to shoot down objects in Ukraine airspace.
Sounds plausible. We should listen to this guy.
They can have Hungary or Slovakia
I understand what you mean, but I’d prefer Hungary and Slovakia changed course, and went full in for Europe and democracy.
Anyways it’s not ours (EU or NATO) to give away.As a friend of both a Hungarian and a Slovakian (and also a few people from a few other niched European nations) I gotta say: nobody deserves to get fucking bombed just because their leaders are twats. Even if they voted for them. Although it’s tempting sometimes to let yourself think it, innit.
Sadly, both Hungary and Slovakia are in the same predicament: the governments control all MSM / terrestrial radio and television, and the older, voting generations are entirely captivated by it.
Hopefully the tide will turn come next election in Hungary. Orbán is on thin fucking ice right now.
