Kallas says Russia uses hybrid attacks to frighten Europeans

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told ERR that Russia is intensifying hybrid attacks, acts of sabotage and drone incursions to frighten people in European countries and discourage them from supporting Ukraine.

“The security situation is not good,” Kallas told Vikerraadio. She said the incidents included what were no longer merely hybrid attacks but “real attacks”, as well as acts of sabotage, cyberattacks and drones straying into European territory.

“What we also see from the data is that Russia wants to escalate and make the situation even more tense,” Kallas said. “Why? Because it wants primarily to frighten European countries and their residents away from supporting Ukraine.”

Kallas was asked whether European leaders and the public had heeded her warning, made in The Times in early 2024, that Russia could need three to five years after the end of the war in Ukraine to rebuild its capacity to pose a serious military threat to NATO.

She said the proportion of European Parliament members who openly argue that Ukraine should not be supported and that there is no threat from Russia had increased.

“At the European level, we have actually taken many decisions to strengthen Europe’s defence capabilities,” Kallas said. “Similar decisions have also been taken at NATO level. But we must certainly also work with our own people so that they understand why this is necessary. And by that I do not mean only Estonia, but public opinion in different European countries.”

Asked whether increased discussion of the Russian threat in Germany or France could have the opposite effect and increase support for parties such as Germany’s AfD, which promises to end support for Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia and resume buying Russian gas, Kallas said the key question was the objective.

“If the objective is really to give Russia what it wanted to achieve through this war, so that there is supposedly peace, then that is not actually the case,” she said.

Kallas said she had believed that an attack in Leipzig, once it was clear it had come from Russia, would make the situation clearer in Germany by showing that the threat was not somewhere far away but could affect European people, including Germans.

She said the AfD’s reaction had instead been very different: “Let Russia take what it wants, and then there will be peace.”

“That recalls history, when there was no interest in what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain,” Kallas said. “But we are never talking about territory. We are talking about people.”