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Is the war's shadow spreading across Europe's borders?
Summary
A look back at 2 November 2022, when reports from Washington, Warsaw, Oslo and Chișinău showed the war's effects reaching beyond Ukraine.
Was the war in Ukraine still a war confined to Ukraine? By 2 November 2022, the reports said otherwise. Neighbouring states were adjusting their security posture, and Washington was pointing to new foreign support for Moscow's war effort.
Supply lines
On 2 November 2022 the United States said that North Korea was secretly supplying artillery shells to Russia for use in Ukraine. The claim, as reported at the time, placed another state in the supply chain of Russia's invasion.
Borders and airspace
The same day, Poland's Minister of National Defence, Mariusz Błaszczak, announced the construction of a barrier along the border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Poland believed that Russia would use that border to transport African and Asian immigrants illegally into Europe. That was Warsaw's stated assessment, and the announcement showed the war's tensions reaching a frontier far from the fighting.
Other states were also reacting. On 31 October 2022, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced that the country's military alert level would rise the next day, in response to military drone sightings near offshore oil rigs over the previous few weeks.
The same day, a Russian cruise missile that Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire had reportedly shot down crashed on the outskirts of Naslavcea in Moldova. The Moldovan government reported no casualties, though some houses were damaged by the blast.
The pressure inside Ukraine
Inside Ukraine, the pressure on civilians was direct. On 31 October 2022, Russian forces again damaged critical infrastructure in Kyiv, leaving parts of the capital without energy and water. Energy facilities were also damaged in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Cherkasy.
What the day showed
Taken together, the reports from 31 October and 2 November 2022 showed two layers of the conflict. One was the continued strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. The other was a widening circle of consequences: an alleged arms supply route involving North Korea, a missile landing in Moldova, drone sightings near Norwegian oil rigs and a new border barrier in Poland. Each government responded in its own way, with an accusation, a heightened alert or construction. None of these reports describes a single coordinated development, but all of them tied events well beyond the front line to the war.
