Agog
Gogland has never belonged to anyone for that long. The island sits in the eastern Gulf of Finland, 35 kilometres from the Finnish coast and 180 from Saint Petersburg. It is small, forested, strategically inconvenient for whoever does not hold it. It has been Swedish, Finnish, Russian, and briefly British, when four Royal Navy vessels silenced its Russian batteries during the Crimean War before rejoining the Anglo-French fleet heading for Sveaborg. Peter the Great built its first lighthouse in 1723.
The Battle of Hogland (Gogland) was fought in its waters in 1788 as Russian and Swedish fleets contested dominance of the Baltic approaches. It changed hands again after Finnish independence and again after World War Two. Since that point, it has belonged to the Soviet Union and then Russia. History kept returning to it because geography kept making it relevant.
In 2014 Russia began building a radar station on Gogland and constructing helipads. Paratrooper and special forces exercises increased in the area. More recently there are signs the Russians are laying fibre optic cable from Vyborg to the island, connecting a militarised forward node to the mainland with hardened, jam-resistant communications infrastructure.
In December 2025 Russia formally expanded its 336th Naval Infantry Brigade, based in Baltiysk in Kaliningrad, into a full division and the ninth new manoeuvre division it has formed since 2022. The Leningrad Military District was reconstituted, officially in response to Finnish and Swedish NATO accession.
The conversation Russian activities ought to generate is about what this trajectory means and what Europe’s actual capacity to respond to it is. The conversation we are having instead is whether Narva is next.
Admittedly, I have a vested interest here. I am very fond of Narva, of its abandoned House of Culture, of the beautiful sea vistas to the north, and even of its familiar (to me) roll call of khrushchevka apartment blocks. But ‘is Narva next’ is the wrong question and the way that it dominates so much commentary tells us quite a lot about how much people are, even as they attempt to address a potential risk, still trying to avoid the core problem.
Twelve years ago, it was just Crimea. Then it was just Donbas. Then it was just Ukraine, not quite real Europe, not quite us, the threat always small enough to be someone else’s. Narva is the latest version of that habit. Whether or not Narva specifically is next matters far less than the pattern, which is consistent and observable: Russia is reconstituting offensive capacity on its western flank, and Europe’s ability to respond to the environment this war has already created is, in theory adequate and in practice not.
Two weeks ago I was in London at a series of small closed talks with senior Western military figures. One gave me genuine hope, though it felt too slow. The others left me close to tears of frustration. There is something particularly enraging about hearing British military personnel explain, with calm authority, why they could not possibly do this or that, when Ukraine is doing all of it. Ukraine is doing it without being a major economy, without nuclear capability, without the geographical cushion of being an island.
The reluctance is not entirely cynical. Most of the people making these decisions, military and civilian, do not have a clear picture of how exposed we actually are. If drone warfare came to European territory tomorrow, the kind of persistent, low-cost attritional pressure Ukraine has lived under for three years, most European countries could not respond coherently. The systems are not in place. The protocols do not exist. The trained collective reflexes are absent. We saw all that with the attack on Galați and some of the weird psychological defence mechanisms that tried to blame a Russian drone hitting a Romanian apartment block on Ukrainian jammers. I guess because if it is Ukrainian jammers, there is the option to talk to the Ukrainians, use leverage, etc. much less scary than facing the reality that Russia is attacking Ukraine and pretty interested in seeing what it can get away with in the rest of Europe too. It is Trumpian reasoning: blame the person you can (or hope to) bully rather than the person who is to blame.
Ukrainian commentators have suggested one of the reasons the Romanians were unable to intercept the incoming drone was because some of the land is privately owned and permission has not been given for military activity in this airspace. Peacetime regulations meet Shaheds and the Shahed wins. And this is just in isolated cases. What about if there are 50 drones? Or 950 ?
During my meetings in London, it was very clear that the basic procedural architecture for deciding who goes after which drone, how fast, on whose authority, has not been built in allied militaries. The technology is largely available. The knowledge of how to use it under pressure, distributed across units that have practiced it until it is automatic, is not.
Across Europe the pattern holds. The obstacle is not money or even, up to a point, political will in any simple sense. It is the learned helplessness of institutions that have not had to fight for their survival in a very long time, combined with a genuine failure to grasp how far behind we already are.
Under lethal selection pressure, Ukraine has had to build what we might call an epistemic infrastructure for modern warfare: the collective cognitive architecture that allows units to operate in a fully surveilled, fully contested battlespace. The drone is the most visible part of this and consequently absorbs most of the attention. But the drone is not the point. The point is everything that has grown up around it. Who calls which intercept. How decision authority moves when the threat picture changes in minutes. What signature management looks like at the level of an individual soldier. How a unit reads an airspace and decides collectively, fast, whether to move or freeze. How operational coherence is maintained when every action is visible and the margin for hesitation is zero.
None of that can be manufactured via a wonder weapon. It lives in people who survived by learning it and in units that developed the right reflexes through contact with the actual threat. It was built mostly from the bottom up, through volunteer formations under genuine selection pressure. Groups that developed bad collective cognition for this environment failed. Groups that developed good collective cognition survived, attracted better people, and iterated faster. The flat, decentralised, fast organisational logic that resulted was not designed. It was selected for, in the most direct sense of that phrase.
European defence establishments have watched this happen. They have often taken briefings, commissioned reports, visited Ukrainian units, and returned home to announce procurement frameworks and capability reviews that will theoretically deliver results sometime around the end of the decade. Some of the people giving those briefings know exactly what is being missed. Some of the people receiving them know it too. What follows is performance of learning rather than learning itself, because the institutional incentives point elsewhere. Long procurement cycles, high-end platforms, relationships between ministries and large contractors that are politically durable regardless of battlefield relevance: these are what European defence bureaucracies are built around. A Leopard or an F-35 is legible as serious defence spending in a parliamentary debate. Investment in the distributed, fast, cheap, iterative capability this war has shown to be decisive is harder to present on a slide and serves fewer institutional interests.
The cultural problem runs deeper than procurement. European military institutions are still organised, in their bones, around the idea that uncertainty should be resolved before action is taken. Ukrainian tactical culture has been forced into the opposite. Decisions get made fast, under incomplete information, because waiting for clarity is its own form of defeat. That adaptation cannot be trained into existence in an exercise environment. The consequence structure is different. People attend differently when inattention kills them. The knowledge is in the body as much as the mind, and it accumulates through contact with the real thing.
The most direct way to begin closing this gap would be to get large numbers of European military personnel into Ukrainian units as participants rather than observers, and to bring that knowledge back distributed through the institutions in people whose intuitions have been recalibrated by the actual war. Nobody with an official position will say this in public. The political reasons are not trivial. But the cost of not doing it is real and it compounds every month.
Russia is reconstituting offensive capacity on its western flank. It is hardening forward infrastructure, expanding its Baltic Fleet ground forces, and building the communications architecture for sustained operations in the Gulf of Finland corridor. The pace is constrained by Ukraine, which means time remains. The trajectory is not ambiguous.
Europe is rearming. It is spending more, meeting targets, announcing commitments. It is also rearming for a version of war that no longer fully exists, on procurement timelines too slow for the rate at which this conflict is evolving, and without the epistemic infrastructure that fighting in this environment actually demands. The gap is institutional, cultural, and cognitive, and it is not closing at anything like the required speed.
The serial containment habit, it is just Crimea, it is just Donbas, it is just Ukraine, it is just Narva, has never been analysis. It has been permission. Permission to treat the problem as bounded, as someone else’s, as not quite real enough to require waking up. That permit ran out, years ago. Gogland in the Gulf of Finland has a radar station, helipads, and perhaps soon a new fibre optic cable running to the mainland. It is high time for Europe to get out of bed and open the curtains. We are already late for work.