Britain, Russia, and Europe's awareness problem

Europe’s Russia policy has strong potential but lacks the domestic political conditions to effectively implement it. Sanctions architecture, defence commitments, and support for Ukrainian sovereignty all reflect a correct strategic reading of Russian behaviour and intent. However, the societal foundation that makes those commitments politically durable when they become economically costly is fragile. The temptation to reset seen across European politics is not evidence of bad policy, but evidence that the domestic infrastructure to sustain it was never properly constructed.

Lacking foundations

The 2025 Alaska summit was a pivotal moment for Europe. It was also a clear example of US-Russia bilateral engagement being normalized over European heads and a signal of US hesitancy to commit to Europe’s security. However, the meeting did not create the case for a softer stance on Russia. Instead, it legitimized a pre-existing trend within Europe’s domestic politics. This highlights Europe’s strategic complacency. People living in London, Paris or Rome have never had to feel the threat from Russia directly – it was absorbed by the US. This is no longer the case, but Europe has not managed to mitigate this issue.

The 2025 Alaska summit occurred within a broader political context that has been forming across Europe. Far-right populist parties have surged in support. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) reached 28 per cent in polls in April 2026. The party’s leaders have called for renewed engagement with Moscow.

With Russian offensive operations stalling in Ukraine, the conditions that make a ceasefire appear achievable are strengthening. Yet the structural conditions to make it durable remain absent. Russia’s war aims in Ukraine have not shifted throughout negotiations and neither have the conditions that make collective security necessary. The only shift has been European political willingness to implement current policy towards Russia.

If support for resetting relations with Russia is growing, it is not because the threat is misunderstood. Europeans have not concluded that Russia is benign, but that the cost of confronting it is theirs to bear personally through economic pressure while the threat itself remains distant and abstract. This is not a failure of policy design. It is a failure of the domestic political architecture needed to support it. Europe built a correct policy response to Russia. However, it did not build the civic and institutional foundations that would allow populations to sustain that response when it became uncomfortable. The perception gap is where that failure is most visible.

Writing from London, this is not a lesson for Eastern Europe. Citizens of Finland, the Baltic states, or Poland do not need to be told that Russian hybrid warfare is real; they have weathered it for decades. This argument runs the other way. Britain’s case is a clear example of this threat perception gap. A country that is one of Ukraine’s strongest bilateral supporters lacks the strong domestic foundation to guarantee its defence commitments.

Perception gap

As many as 77 per cent of Europeans perceive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a threat to Europe and 76 per cent agree with continued support for Ukraine. These are encouraging figures, but they measure awareness, not commitment. When the question over “guns versus butter” arises, whether it is through introducing trade-offs to an increased defence budget, or reductions to education, healthcare and welfare, public opinion shifts. This highlights increased concern over the economic impact. These findings suggest a disparity between abstract threat awareness and threat salience. Threat awareness, the understanding of a threat, is cognitive, whereas threat salience, feeling the consequences personally, is experiential. Information cannot close this gap without direct exposure or structured civic participation.

Polling on future security also reflects this issue. Forty-five to seventy-two per cent of Europeans believe that Russia would invade again within ten years of a peace deal. Despite awareness of the fragility of peace and the long-term threat that Russia poses to European security, we will not pay to prevent it. This is the perception gap in its starkest form.

An unwillingness to accept the cost of current defence commitments indicates a communication failure to translate an abstract Russian threat into a concrete threat. Public messaging concerning Russia’s hybrid warfare in Europe is being promoted, but it is not filtering through into a public threat salience to give governments the mandate to act without having to water down commitments to survive the next election.

Europe faces a strategic paradox. European security requires spending commitments that generate real fiscal pressure. This pressure has coincided with rising support for parties whose instinct is to soften the local stance on Russia.

Russian behaviour and war aims have not changed. The strategic logic behind sanctions, defence investment, and Ukrainian support remains intact and remains the correct template for future policy. What these figures reveal is that correct policy and sustainable policy are not the same. Policy is only durable with political will behind it, and political will is only as durable as the domestic conditions that sustain it. Europe has spent years building the right policy architecture and neglected building the public foundation it depends on.

Political exhaustion

The erosion of support for Ukraine amongst Europeans is most apparent among two demographics: those who consume news primarily through social media at a greater risk of exposure to Russian disinformation; and those who are economically insecure. The rise of radical far-right parties, with many advocating renewed engagement or a reset in relations with Russia, has been in part fostered by increased public frustration over economic conditions and distrust of centrist establishments. These demographic vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation, as the conditions that produce them are worsening. Increased economic pressure from global instability is looming and European households will absorb a significant portion of the strain.

The external environment compounds this issue. Russia continues to export energy through third parties, limiting the economic pressure of sanctions. Meanwhile, much of the international community is not aligned behind Europe, which is visible in abstentions at the UN and continued diplomatic engagement with Moscow. Russia's continued access to export markets and diplomatic partners has preserved its strategic endurance. Beyond the battlefield, the target is European political will itself. Without this, Europe’s containment of Russia collapses.

The drift towards accommodation reflects political exhaustion more than strategic confusion. Again, most Europeans know that Russia remains a threat. It is a structural response to domestic conditions that make sustained commitment politically costly. Closing the perception gap is the only durable answer to it.

Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, is separated from Russia by only a river. For its citizens, civil defence is not a policy preference, but a lived condition. Residents know which buildings serve as emergency shelters, communications are relayed in Estonian and Russian to avoid translation issues, and the question of how to respond to a national emergency is a topic that families have discussed.

The Russian threat has penetrated the social consciousness most deeply on Europe's Eastern Flank states: Finland, Poland, and the Baltics, where resilience to Russian pressure has proved far greater. This is not accidental, but the result of proximity, historical memory, and institutional frameworks that make the threat personal rather than geopolitical.

Meanwhile, ten years after Brexit, Britain sits in an awkward position, functioning within NATO and outside of EU coordination mechanisms, but rhetorically committed to the security architecture they underpin. The United Kingdom views itself as a bridge between the US and Europe but now this is coming under strain on both sides. Washington’s strategic attention has been pulled away from Europe and Brussels holds less institutional leverage over British policy.

Britain is not an outside observer to a continental problem, as data points to the same perception gap within society. The British Foreign Policy Group’s 2025 public opinion survey found 71 per cent of Britons support increased defence spending, yet the British public has little appetite to absorb the domestic impact of budget trade-offs.

This is acutely felt among younger generations, with 83 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds not considering support to Ukraine a priority for foreign policy. This group often cites concern that Ukraine is overshadowing other global security issues. Britain is deeply interconnected with multiple global crises. News cycles move rapidly between Gaza, China and Washington. For a generation that has grown up with continuous global emergencies, the Russian threat is one crisis among many rather than the defining one. The answer to Britain’s political fragility is not going to be found in London, but in its allies to the East. Europe has begun to draw on Eastern Flank experience but the pace of institutional learning has not matched the pace of the threat.

Conditions for successful Russia policy

The UK’s Labour government has committed to spending 2.5 per cent GDP on defence by 2027 and 3.5 per cent by 2035. Cuts to overseas development, welfare and public services are being pursued in order to support this increase. The optics for this are challenging. The government is asking a financially strained public to accept domestic sacrifices in order to support a European security architecture. Increased nationalism has weakened the argument for “European solidarity” and this has been reflected in government messaging primarily justifying defence commitments as an obligation within NATO and a signal to Washington.

This is not a uniquely British condition, as governments across Europe are feeling the tension between domestic and foreign commitments. Europe's Russia policy does not need to be redesigned. The sanctions regime, defence spending commitments, support for Ukrainian territorial integrity – these remain the correct responses to Russia’s strategic objectives. Whether European governments retain the political mandate to implement them to full effect relies on the relationship between governments and their populations. Civil resilience frameworks are the most credible mechanism for doing that, not because they solve the military problem, but because they solve the political one. In low-trust environments, threat messaging alone does not close the perception gap. Knowing a threat exists and feeling exposed to it are very different cognitive states. 

Eastern European models stand in contrast to what exists in the UK, where societal resilience against Russian hybrid warfare has been dampened by distance, limiting public appetite for the resilience frameworks. Finland's 72-hour concept recommends Finns prepare to sustain themselves independently for three days during a crisis, with half of Finns meeting government recommendations. In comparison, the UK’s “Prepare” campaign has not breached wider public consciousness, existing passively as an online advice portal. 

Active participation can help to bridge this gap. Preparing a household kit, joining a reserve, or running a crisis exercise forces a person to visualize disruption as a personal possibility rather than an abstract geopolitical event. Civic preparedness works not primarily as operational readiness but as an update in beliefs.

This will not develop organically. Geographic and historic factors are not exportable, but the institutional framework is certainly in this case. Whole-of-society resilience models at the state level can provide the architecture for salience to develop through direct civic participation, naturally building support for existing European policy towards Russia. Europe's western states should be approaching Nordic, Baltic and Polish partners not merely as models to emulate but as the most experienced practitioners of the problem they are only beginning to confront. We need to consider making preparedness a routine part of how schools, local councils, energy companies and health services operate. It is also worth involving people within the resilience architecture, improving media literacy, and translating the threat into a tangible concept. After all, it cannot be something that happens to others on a map.

The window of opportunity to implement this is closing as domestic and external pressures compound. Economic pressure, far-right electoral gains across Europe, and US bilateral engagement with Russia will all shrink the space for building adequate foundations for a comprehensive resilience framework before it is needed.

Civil resilience frameworks are not a substitute for the policy commitments Europe has already made, but they are the most credible means of building the political foundation that everything else depends on. Europe cannot wait for Russian behaviour to make the threat feel concrete; the task is to build the domestic foundations before the pressure overwhelms. The answer is not to soften Europe's Russia policy, but to strengthen the foundations beneath it to implement it as effectively as possible.

 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. 

 

Callum Fraser is a research analyst in the international security studies department at RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. His research interests include Russian influence across the post-Soviet space, Russian hybrid warfare, and the geopolitics of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.