The European Union's defense ministers met this Monday with a question on the table: how can a coordinated response be provided to the hybrid warfare that Russia is posing as part of its strategy to prevent European partners from continuing to assist Ukraine in its war effort? The meeting coincided, by the way, with a strong Russian attack on the center of Kyiv that had nothing hybrid about it, but rather showed the horror of war in all its dimensions: bombed buildings, civilian victims and, what is worse, the feeling that this is just the beginning.

The center of Kyiv filled with dense black smoke this Monday afternoon. The Russian army bombed the center of the Ukrainian capital in broad daylight, leaving at least one woman dead and 21 injured, including three children. The city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, reported that Russian drones attacked non-residential buildings in three districts of the city at four in the afternoon. One of the bombed buildings is the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the country's main public scientific research institution, located in one of the most central areas of the city, very close to important monuments, such as the National Opera and the German embassy.

On July 30, Viktor Kalinin, aged 14 years and three months, became the youngest person to be included in Russia's list of terrorists and extremists. His crime: having set fire to a railway signaling system box. Although he stated that he had acted under coercion, the police accused him of terrorism. That same day, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, was also accused of collaborating with terrorism, in the latest episode of his war with the secret services.

Denmark has joined this Thursday the increasingly frequent and more serious warnings about a potential Russian military attack against NATO territory. Just a week ago, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was the first to warn that Moscow is planning missile attacks against border countries, and the next day it was French President Emmanuel Macron who assured that the Russian threat to Europeans has intensified and announced a protection plan. Today, the Danish intelligence services have joined in, stating that Russia will likely intensify its hybrid war in the coming months and adding that a military attack against a NATO country cannot be ruled out.

After a tough negotiation, representatives of the European Union member states managed to approve new sanctions against Russia this Tuesday evening. The agreement, which until now was renewed every six months, includes sanctions against 3,000 Russian citizens and will be extended for the next three years. However, it leaves off the list two Russian billionaires close to the Kremlin, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman.

Three people have died and six others, including two minors, have been injured this Sunday in the Moscow region due to a Ukrainian drone attack during the main day of the parliamentary elections in Russia. The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, stated that the fatalities are a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man who were in their home at the time of the attack.

Bombarded energy infrastructures. Hydrocarbon exports at discounted prices. Public finances stressed by the war effort. High inflation. This has been, for four and a half years, Russia's economic outlook since the president, Vladimir Putin, ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has led to one of the longest conflicts in the history of a country that is no stranger to belligerence.

The Russian pacifist opposition is debating between boycotting, protesting, and pragmatism in the legislative elections that end this Sunday and in which no one doubts the victory of Vladimir Putin's party. Voters opposed to the war have seen how the authorities removed the only anti-war formation, Yabloko, and how all candidates potentially dangerous to the regime were disqualified. In addition to the usual strategies to coerce public workers into marking the official list –the “administrative mobilization”– and to prevent the presence of independent observers, this time the Kremlin has generalized electronic voting, a system that analysts denounce as facilitating the manipulation of results.

In this Sunday's parliamentary elections in Russia, there will be no candidacies from the liberal Yabloko party, excluded by an unexpected Supreme Court ruling in the middle of August. History repeats itself: Yabloko has been erased from the Russian political scene just as the Kadet party, the historical liberals, was erased, who in 1917 tried to block the path to the Bolshevik coup d'état.

Vladimir Putin has already achieved the popular endorsement he so desired for his war and that no one doubted he would obtain. His party, United Russia, has received almost 58% of the votes in the legislative elections, with more than 95% of the results counted, and will have the highest number of deputies in history: 355 out of the 450 in the Duma. Figures higher than those of five years ago, when it scraped 50% of the votes, and which will even allow him to expand the constitutional majority, but which does not correspond to the unrest expressed by the population in recent months.

The Russian government has ordered the temporary transfer of the management of the assets of the Swiss food group Nestlé, the French supermarket chain Auchan –Alcampo in the Spanish market– and the also French Leroy Merlin, specialized in DIY material, to the company L.E.V. Management. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is thus responding to the sanctions of European countries against the Russian regime for the invasion of Ukraine, in particular Switzerland, a traditionally neutral country.

It had been three years since Vladimir Putin kissed children in public, a symptom that his popularity is wavering. The poor polls for his party, United Russia, have forced him to get involved in the campaign for the Russian legislative elections, which are being held between this Friday and Sunday. They are the first in wartime and the first in which the inhabitants of the occupied Ukrainian territories are participating, who have already begun to vote in ballot boxes guarded by armed soldiers. These are elections manipulated by the Kremlin, with the pacifist opposition banned, where the overwhelming victory of the ruling party is taken for granted and which, in a context of social unrest due to economic problems, internet blocks, and conflict fatigue, the authorities hope will pass without much notice or surprise.

The Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has raised his tone against Russia on the day the country commemorates the 87th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. "As we know, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and today we must read these rhymes of history with the due seriousness," said the Polish leader, who in recent months has been one of the clearest in denouncing the increase in provocations and attacks by Vladimir Putin's regime in the framework of thehybrid war against Europe. "I would prefer to speak only of the heroic deeds recorded in history books, but Russia's escalation of aggression does not allow me to," he said in a video on social media.

Russia is increasing pressure on Eastern European countries with a mix of hybrid warfare and airspace violations as part of its military strategy to weaken aid from NATO and EU partners to Ukraine. The reality is that, almost five years after the invasion, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, knows that his only chance of winning the war is to cut off this aid. How? By deepening European divisions, intimidating the population of border countries, and, above all, placing his far-right pawns at the head of as many European countries as possible. To achieve all these objectives, he is deploying a whole series of actions of which we have had quite a few examples in recent days.

Drone incursions and threats in NATO territory are no longer a novelty. They are part of a "broader pattern of Russian aggression and provocation against Europe" that puts the continent's "preparedness" and "determination" to the test. This was stated by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, after NATO fighter jets shot down a drone launched from Belarus within Lithuanian airspace early this morning. The unmanned aerial vehicle triggered alarms in the capital, Vilnius; meanwhile, Poland has activated its air forces as a preventive measure after recovering what it believes to be a Russian drone in the Baltic. "We are strengthening our collective deterrence and defense, together with NATO. And we are increasing pressure on Russia," the German leader affirmed.

Russia and Ukraine have maintained their cross-attacks against energy infrastructure in recent hours, despite the fact that this Monday the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced a ceasefire on attacks against these types of targets. Russia has attacked gas stations in Kyiv and energy and port infrastructure in other regions, while Ukraine has bombed an oil refinery in the Russian region of Samara.

At a time of special tension between Europe and Russia and amidst a constant escalation of attacks between Kyiv and Moscow, any suspicious movement in the airspace quickly triggers alarms. This is what has happened in the last few hours with a drone and the plane of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who would have been involved in a scare on his trip on Tuesday to Oslo to attend the funeral of King Harald V this Wednesday.

"Europeans are facing a harsh truth: that this is the new normal." This sentence from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, brings to mind that "new normal" of restrictions on individual freedom in favor of public health to which we had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement, however, is not from six years ago, but from this week. Now, the new normal to which we must get used to is that of systematic attacks by Russia. "We are in a new era of European security," insisted the leader of the EU executive. The message arrived after German authorities directly blamed Moscow for an attack with an explosives-laden drone at Leipzig airport at the beginning of August, one of the most serious sabotage attempts recorded so far on European territory, at a key NATO logistics center.

When last Saturday 38 people died near Kyiv in one of the deadliest Russian attacks of the entire war, many inevitably thought of the unstoppable destructive power of ballistic missiles. But what crashed into the ammunition depot in the suburb of Mila was not a fearsome Iskander, but a new-generation drone. The Geran-4 and Geran-5, the latest Russian evolutions of the Iranian Shahed, have also become the latest headache for Ukrainian air defenses, which see with impotence how, in addition to missiles, they now also have difficulties stopping this new Kremlin weapon.

"We are not at war, but we are a daily target of hybrid warfare." This is how German Foreign Minister Alexander Dobrindt summarized on Tuesday the moment that one of the main European powers is going through, and which is extensible to a good part of the region. After Dobrindt's words, Germany has recorded three violent acts in the last two days, which coincide with the German government's accusation against the Kremlin of being responsible for the attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport on August 4th. Amidst the uncertainty and waiting for police investigations to progress, Germany and Europe are debating between avoiding an excessive escalation that worsens the situation or taking a stand given the gravity of the incident in Leipzig.