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Finnish President Alexander Stubb has thrown cold water on the drumbeat coming from Europe’s war hawks, telling Spain’s El Mundo that there is no evidence Russia is preparing a direct military attack on NATO. "Do we expect Russia to attack? The answer is no. We have no evidence of this," Stubb said.
Coming from the leader of the country that shares NATO’s longest border with Russia and whose intelligence services watch the frontier closely, the assessment carries weight. Stubb argued that some European leaders are wrongly conflating hypothetical military scenarios with the actual threat picture on the ground — mistaking what could theoretically happen for what intelligence actually shows.
It is a pointed rebuke of the alarmism that has gripped much of Brussels and several European capitals, where officials have floated warnings of a Russian incursion "in months, not years" and used the specter of a looming conventional war to justify ever-larger defense budgets and deeper involvement in Ukraine. Stubb, by contrast, said Russia lacks both the interest and the capacity for a full-scale clash with the alliance.
The more immediate danger, he said, is hybrid warfare. Stubb described Russia as increasingly willing to take risks through sabotage, cyberattacks, information operations, attacks on infrastructure, drone incidents, and other gray-zone activities spread across Europe — a campaign in which geographic distance means little and no country is truly out of reach.
His prescription is to stay "cool, calm, and collected" rather than overreact to each provocation — a warning that panic itself serves Moscow’s aims by destabilizing Europe and eroding the public’s patience. For a continent whose political class has leaned hard into worst-case rhetoric, a NATO head of state saying plainly that the evidence does not support an imminent attack is a notable break from the script.
