Anna Linford At the Helsinki Security Forum on 3 October 2026, Moldovan President Maia Sandu told European leaders that Russia will remain a major threat even after a Ukraine settlement — regardless of whether Vladimir Putin stays in power — and urged Europe to rearm faster, speed up EU enlargement and treat Ukraine as a pillar of continental security, according to the Kyiv Post. Finnish President Alexander Stubb, on the same stage, said Russia's hybrid campaign should draw more support for Kyiv, not less.
A day later, the EU's ambassador to Ukraine, Katarína Mathernová, told EUobserver that "Putin understands only one language — the language of strength" and called for tougher European air defences and a harder hybrid-war response. She cited Russia's newer jet drones, which Ukraine cannot yet shoot down in the numbers it manages against older Shahed drones, letting a handful of them harass a city the size of Kyiv for a whole day at little cost to Moscow.
Two structural analyses published the same week reach a similar conclusion from a different angle. Writing in The National Interest, analysts Andreas Umland and Lesia Bidochko argue Russia's war inside Ukraine will likely stay conventional while its campaign against the rest of Europe stays organised around three pillars — subversion, coercion and sabotage — built to probe allied thresholds whatever happens on the front line.
EL PAÍS describes the same shift inside European governments: after decades of treating the continent's interior as a safe rear area, officials now assume that interior is itself exposed — to sabotage, cyberattacks, espionage and strikes on infrastructure. The paper notes Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned on 17 September that intelligence pointed to possible Russian drone or missile strikes on states backing Ukraine, staged to look accidental.
Hypothesis: together, these threads describe a war that outgrows any ceasefire reached in Ukraine. Sandu's claim that the threat survives a settlement, the three-pillar framework that treats Europe-facing operations as a separate campaign from the battlefield, and Tusk's warning about deniable strikes all point the same way — toward hybrid war as Europe's new baseline, not a wartime spike. Supporting this: three independent sources converge on the same verdict without citing one another. Against it: none can yet show what actually follows a ceasefire, because none exists to test the claim.
What to watch: whether a future Ukraine ceasefire brings a measurable drop in sabotage and cyber incidents inside the EU, which would weaken this thesis, or no drop at all, which would confirm it — and whether the EU's hardware-buying phase scales into the harder deterrence Mathernová is now demanding.
