Russian President Vladimir Putin has been stepping up his drone invasions (they aren’t incursions; they’re deliberate and deliberatively provocative), sabotages, cyberattacks, election interferences, and on and on of Europe’s NATO member nations. The reason, Remigijus Bridikis, Lithuania’s State Security Department Director, says is this:

Russia is looking for ways to reduce support among NATO countries for Ukraine and, one of the secondary effects they are also pursuing is spreading panic[.]

The barbarian’s efforts to cow the Ukrainian people into submission with his terror bombing of houses, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping malls, and on and on is failing miserably. Those folks are too fresh from the Soviet jackboots on their necks to be intimidatable.  The populations of other nations are long gone soft and morally weak, he thinks, coddled as they’ve been, in fact, by American defenses and expenditures, so he’s starting to try those populations.

Putin isn’t far wrong regarding central and western Europe’s populations and government men and women. He’ll find the Baltic and Polish people, though, to be made of the same sterner stuff as Ukrainians and for the same reason.

The question becomes, then, how Germany, France, Spain, Italy, UK, Netherlands, Brussels, et al., will respond to Putin’s lower-key—journalists are pleased to call them “gray zone”—attacks. Those nations and their peoples have two paths along which to respond. One is to slowly back away and reduce support for Ukraine’s fight for its existence, hoping the barbarian at their gates will move on.

The other path is for them to have the moral courage and associated morale to step up their support for Ukraine and to do so materially, not just rhetorically.

That’s an open question, unfortunately.