In the contested waters of the Baltic, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish military helicopter — a gesture that is neither war nor peace, but something in between. Denmark, a NATO member navigating seas where Russian assertiveness has become routine, chose to name the incident publicly rather than absorb it in silence. The episode belongs to a long, accumulating ledger of provocations that European governments are learning to read not as isolated miscalculations, but as a coherent language of pressure. How long such a language can be spoken before someone responds in kind is the questio