After a Russian drone struck a Romanian apartment building, Moscow’s former president issued his most explicit warning yet to EU citizens. Is this propaganda, or something more?
By Stephen Atkins | May 30, 2026
On the morning of May 29, Dmitry Medvedev posted a message on X that landed like a cold bucket of water over European capitals. “Citizens of EU countries,” he wrote, “you should realize your authorities have unilaterally entered into a war with Russia. So be vigilant and don’t be surprised by anything. The peaceful sleep is over.” The post was terse, measured in tone, and precisely aimed. Unlike much of Medvedev’s bluster, it was addressed not to governments but to ordinary people.
It did not arrive in a vacuum. Hours earlier, a Russian drone had struck a residential apartment building in Galati, a Romanian city situated near the border with Ukraine. Two people were injured. The Romanian president, Nicusor Dan, convened an emergency meeting of his national defence council and called it the most serious incident on Romanian soil since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. Romania is a NATO member state. The drone was part of a wider assault on Ukraine’s power grid involving 232 drones and a ballistic missile, several of which crossed into Romanian territory.
Medvedev’s X post was the restrained version. On Telegram, he went considerably further, dropping any pretence of diplomatic language. He accused European governments of being “direct participants in the war against Russia” on the grounds that they supply Ukraine with weapons, drone components, and intelligence. He singled out European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer by name, referring to them collectively in terms that fall well outside the bounds of conventional political discourse. His central warning was blunt: “This will not be the last time. There is a war going on. And citizens of EU countries, as the population of nations at war, should not go to sleep expecting peaceful nights. Especially around drone factories supplying the Banderite forces.”
He also revisited an earlier provocation from earlier in the week, in which he had warned EU diplomats remaining in Kyiv that Russia could not guarantee their safety. When the EU said it would maintain its diplomatic presence regardless, Medvedev responded on X with sardonic contempt: “Apparently they’ve got diplomats to spare and need to trim the headcount.”
Medvee has issued inflammatory threats to European countries so frequently since 2022 that many analysts have learned to tune them out. He has made over a dozen references to nuclear weapons in the context of a potential confrontation with NATO. None have been followed by the action he implied. His role within the Russian state apparatus is widely understood to include a psychological warfare function: generating fear and division among European publics while giving the Kremlin plausible deniability, since Medvedev holds no direct military command.
Taken in isolation, this week’s post fits that pattern. But the context separates it from his usual output in one crucial respect. This time, the words came after a physical event. A drone did cross into NATO territory. A building did get hit. Residents were pulled from rubble. The rhetoric is not floating free of reality; it is anchored to a documented incident that European governments are struggling to categorise and respond to.
That matters, because one of the central techniques of Russian information warfare is to use real events as launching pads for maximalist political messaging. By framing the drone strike as an inevitable consequence of Europe’s own choices, Moscow is constructing a narrative in which future strikes on EU soil are pre-justified. The logic runs: you armed Ukraine, you entered the war, therefore what happens next is your fault. It is the same pattern of narrative preparation that preceded Russia’s escalation against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in 2022.
NATO’s response was careful and calibrated. Secretary-General Mark Rutte spoke with the Romanian president and posted on X that the alliance would “continue to enhance readiness to deter and defend against any threat, including from drones.” That is the language of institutional resolve, which is appropriate. It is also, deliberately, the language of deterrence rather than escalation.
The harder question for European governments is what comes next if incidents like Romania’s become more frequent. Each individual drone incursion can be attributed to navigational error or fog of war. A pattern of incursions is something else. At what point does repeated violation of NATO airspace constitute an act that demands a formal response? That threshold has not yet been defined in public, and Russia knows it.
For ordinary Europeans, Medvedev’s message is designed to do one thing above all else: make them feel that their governments have made them targets without their consent. Whether or not Russia ever intends to act on its threats, the fear itself is the weapon. The question European leaders must answer is not only how to defend their borders, but how to reassure their citizens without either dismissing a real danger or amplifying the panic that Moscow is actively trying to sow.
The peaceful sleep, as Medvedev put it, may or may not be over. But the era in which Europe could treat this war as something happening somewhere else clearly is.
