Special Issue Of DFM: Russia’s Enduring Threat To Europe

This special issue of DFM brings together three long-form analyses that examine Russia’s enduring role as a strategic challenge for Europe and the West. The first article explores the structural roots of Moscow’s insecurity and explains why the Russian threat is persistent, sustaining long-term rearmament cycles and predictable demand for defence industries. The second provides a technical assessment of Russia’s conventional, naval, air, and missile forces, highlighting the capabilities that directly threaten European security. The third addresses the Russian concept of victory, showing how resilience, endurance, and the erosion of adversary cohesion define success in Russian strategic culture.

Together, these studies demonstrate why Russia remains a lasting factor in global defence planning and why the defence sector continues to represent a structurally stable asset for investors. Russian risk should not be framed as a cyclical or episodic threat that rises and falls with leadership changes or discrete crises; it is anchored in structural drivers that are unlikely to dissipate quickly. The country’s strategic culture treats war and security as a continuum rather than an exception, linking military planning to deep perceptions of vulnerability shaped by geography, history, and long-run institutional practice. This lens privileges resilience, depth, and the management of time over rapid, decisive campaigns.

The practical implication is that Moscow’s threat profile is not a spike but a plateau: it endures because the underlying variables—exposure on broad frontiers, recurring experiences of invasion, and the conviction that external coalitions will compress its strategic space—do not change fast. For Western policy and markets, this means the demand for credible deterrence is not a one-off procurement pulse but a sustained programmatic commitment. In other words, the persistence of the threat naturally maps onto the long duration of rearmament cycles, which in turn anchors the cash-flow visibility of the defence industrial base.