Winds of war are blowing dangerously in the east, where the Eurofighters of the Italian Air Force have also taken off to carry out a double interception of Russian planes in the Baltic Sea. The alarm, launched from the NATO command center in Uedem, Germany, was triggered by an unidentified aircraft flying over international waters. Once the aircraft were identified, the Italian F-2000s - deployed in the 4th Wing Task Force operating in the Polish base of Malbork - returned.
Episodes follow one another and tension is now growing every day in the eastern skies of Europe. A new "night of hell" for Russian raids in Ukraine has rekindled the fear of the war encroachment into Poland, also pushing Warsaw to take off its fighters and those of NATO to "guarantee the safety of the airspace". But it's not just Poland that is on the front line: in Romania, "drone fragments" were found on a farm near the Danube after Russian attacks. Already last December, a UAV crashed in an uninhabited Romanian area after a Russian raid on the Ukrainian ports on the river.
Even before that, in September, other drone debris had also been found in the border area.
"War is no longer a concept of the past, it is real", is the alarm sounded by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in an interview with a series of international newspapers, including Repubblica. "The most worrying thing is that any scenario is possible. I know it seems devastating, especially for the younger ones, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. It is the pre-war era," the chief said bluntly of the Warsaw government, worried that Europe "still has a long way to go" to strengthen its defense and is therefore not at all ready to face the looming threat.
Tusk's words are the indicator of a general alarm growing on the continent regarding Vladimir Putin's real intentions regarding Ukraine and beyond. The war is not going the way Kiev wants, which incessantly requests Patriot, ammunition, missiles and planes to defend itself from the Russian advance, which in 5 months has conquered 500 square kilometers of Ukrainian land, according to the American think tank ISW. The numbers give the measure of an unequal war also according to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian forces Oleksandr Syrsky: "A few days ago the enemy's advantage in terms of ammunition fired was about six to one", he admitted in a rare interview, ensuring however that although the situation at the front is difficult, the army will mobilize fewer people than the 500,000 initially proposed by Zelensky.
If the situation at the front remains complicated - and Kiev expects a new Russian offensive between May and June - things are no better in the rest of the country: a hail of attacks has once again targeted energy infrastructures in this third spring of war. The bombing of Moscow with dozens of drones and missiles has "damaged thermal and hydroelectric power plants" in central and western Ukraine. According to Zelensky, among the targets were "the Kaniv and Dniester hydroelectric power plants", because "the terrorist country wants a repeat of the ecological disaster in the Kherson region. But now not only is Ukraine threatened, it is also Moldova". As a result of the attacks, the national operator Ukrenergo was forced to introduce emergency planned blackouts in the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovograd regions.
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