European spy chiefs warn Russia planning escalated NATO tests within months

Across Europe this week, intelligence chiefs offered a sobering assessment: the continent may be entering a period in which Russia tests the limits of collective defense not through open war, but through drones, sabotage, and the slow erosion of certainty. The warnings carry the weight of a lesson already learned — that dismissing such signals has consequences — yet the nations closest to Russia's borders counsel that fear itself can become a weapon in the Kremlin's hands. What emerges is a portrait of an alliance trying to hold two truths at once: the threat is real, and panic serves the adve