On Friday, President Macron took a bold step.

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Convening a meeting at the Élysée Palace, the French President brought together leaders of France’s political parties to brief them on the rising Russian aggression in Europe.

The meeting came amid an increase in sub-threshold attacks against key NATO members. At the start of August, a drone was discovered at Leipzig Airport near a cargo plane used to transport weapons to Ukraine. Last week, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish helicopter in the Baltic Sea. Shortly afterwards, an Italian jet shot down a drone that had entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus.

Against this backdrop, panic is setting in across European capitals. Are these increasingly aggressive sub-threshold attacks the starting gun for a more significant horizontal escalation, in which Russian troops step onto NATO territory? According to the Telegraph, the United States has warned that Russia could strike NATO’s eastern flank within weeks.

But there is another possibility. The growing sense of panic created could itself be the aim of the Kremlin’s tactics.

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has had one overarching aim: to divide NATO and sow discord........

© LBC