On April 14, 2022, Russia warned it would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles to the Baltic if NATO admitted Sweden and Finland. Both joined anyway. The pattern is consistent: a dramatic threat, a period of noise, then nothing. That pattern works because Europe keeps rewarding it.
The Pattern of Unanswered Threats
Moscow downplayed the nuclear threat after its June 2022 exercise. The promised deployment never materialized as a military fact on the ground. Every warning that goes unanswered becomes a benchmark for what Moscow can say next.
GPS jamming over the Baltic is an attack on civil aviation that has been running for years. It disrupts approach paths into Finland, Estonia, and Latvia and forces airlines to suspend routes. Drone incursions over Poland and Romania, sabotage cases in Germany, and cable damage in the Baltic Sea follow the same logic.
Each one is calibrated below the threshold of Article 5 while still imposing real costs on NATO members. The calculation in the Kremlin is simple arithmetic: if the cost of an operation is lower than the prize, run the operation. In Moscow, restraint reads as permission.
Kaliningrad and the Fear Machine
Russian officials have repeatedly stated that anyone advocating a blockade or strike on Kaliningrad should have no illusions about the consequences, and that any British or NATO military action against Russian territory would be met with all means at Russia's disposal. But NATO has no plans to attack Kaliningrad. The exclave is a tripwire Moscow built for itself and then pointed at its own foot.
The threat exists to make Europeans believe that any firm response, even a legal blockade in response to jamming and drone incursions, is escalation toward nuclear war. That is false. A blockade is a proportionate answer to attacks that are already happening.
The Kremlin needs fear, not territory. Kaliningrad becomes a wasteland only if Moscow keeps treating its own exclave as a nuclear tripwire.
Air Defense and the Closing Window
Moscow's ballistic missile production cannot keep pace with its consumption. The window to intercept what is still coming closes only if Ukraine gets PAC-3s now, not PAC-2 leftovers. FREYA, the European air defense initiative, cannot remain a slide deck.
Ukraine has the engineers and the will to build Europe's air shield. The EU needs to fund it as though the war is already here.
The Blockage Among the 32
Some among the 32 allies are brave. The Baltics and Poland have pushed for real intercepts for years. The blockage sits with a handful of capitals still running a doctrine of deter-without-provoking, a posture Moscow reads as an invitation.
Every swallowed drone incursion, every sabotage case left unanswered, every red line turned pink tells the Kremlin the cost is low. Force that answers attack makes the next move costlier than the prize.
Moscow will keep going until it gets punched. The invoice has to be sent before the disaster, not after.
Europe should avoid starting a war. It needs to remember it has balls. Use aviation to shoot down drones before a catastrophe happens, not after. Protect civilians with real interceptors and real funding. Answer jamming with a blockade.