Countering the propaganda stories about alleged Russian sabotage in Europe and a military build-up for an attack against it, former German Gen. Harald Kujat took to Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung with an assessment on April 18 that there is no solid evidence of that. “At the end of March, 15 foreign and security policy experts criticized the current discussion about Russia’s alleged aggressive plans toward the West, saying that the alarmism currently being spread is implausible and not based on any serious threat analysis.”
A similar assessment was given by U.S. intelligence experts already in 2024, Kujat recalls: “Russia almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with the U.S. and NATO forces and will continue its asymmetric activities below the threshold of military conflict worldwide.” The current threat assessment from March 2025 confirms the finding that Russia will continue to be able to use disinformation, espionage, influence operations, and cyberattacks, for example, “to compete below the level of armed conflict and create opportunities to advance Russian interests.”
Whereas there is no evidence, “fear and anxiety about the future are being generated among the population—especially by those whose earlier assessments of the war in Ukraine have not proven true and who now want to legitimize their position, at least morally,” Kujat says. Pointing to “the dual strategy of defense capability and political détente in the 1970s and 1980s (which) brought Europe security and peace for a long time,” Kujat warns, “An arms race, on the other hand, exacerbates an already tense situation, because an arms race has no winners and is the shortest route to war.”
