EP407 · Research · first published 2026-09-07
Russia's Unsafe Skies | Pekka Toveri | Neuvottelija 407
Member of the European Parliament and former chief of intelligence, Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri assesses the Ukraine-Russia war from Brussels on the edge of winter. Zelenskyi has declared Russian airspace unsafe, Putin is preparing a quiet mobilisation for after the Duma elections and Russia's monthly losses now exceed its recruitment, but the Iran war has taken the Patriot missiles and ballistic missiles are getting through. Toveri explains how Ukraine is restoring movement to the battlefield under cover of the drone bubble, why glide bombs are Ukraine's worst problem, and how Flamingo, ground robots and AI weapons are changing the war. It closes on the EU's 90 billion in financing, the growth of European defence budgets and the quality of Finland's conscript army. Published 7 September 2026.
Russia’s Unsafe Skies | Pekka Toveri
Summary: In episode 407 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Pekka Toveri — Member of the European Parliament, former chief of intelligence and Major General (ret.) — live from Brussels. The subject is the state of the Ukraine-Russia war on the edge of winter: Zelenskyi’s declaration that Russian airspace is unsafe, the quiet mobilisation Putin is preparing, and why the Iran war has made this winter exceptionally hard for Ukraine. Published 7 September 2026.
A note on reading this. The episode is a situation assessment of an ongoing war, not a retrospective. It contains forecasts, judgements about the other side’s intentions, and intelligence figures that can change quickly. Some of the claims about Ukrainian domestic politics come from Toveri’s own contacts and are marked as such in the text. The views are Toveri’s own.
The starting point: who is afraid to fly
The episode opens on very recent news, and Toveri’s assessment of it is favourable.
Zelenskyi announced that Russian airspace is not safe. A few years ago this would have been treated as a red line never to be crossed — Ukraine threatening civil aviation. Toveri thinks it is a good move, and the argument is symmetry: Ukraine’s airspace has been closed since the invasion of 2022.
Militarily it is cheap leverage. Ukraine lacks the penetrating cruise missiles with large warheads that would reach Russian heavy industry. So the strikes go where a small payload still has effect: unprotected distribution centres and oil refineries.
Paralysing airports is the purest form of this logic. A drone does not need to carry a warhead at all — it is enough that it circles above the airfield and civilian aircraft stay grounded. The timing, in Toveri’s view, is deliberate: the realism of war is being brought to the Russian public just before the Duma elections.
Quiet mobilisation
The second running theme is what Russia is preparing for after the elections.
Toveri finds it telling that Putin maintains the illusion of democracy at all — the result is known in advance, yet the performance is staged to demonstrate legitimacy. It is, he says, a habit left over from the Soviet era.
What matters is that mobilisation has been built with care, and the machinery is already in place:
- The details of anyone receiving call-up papers go simultaneously to the authorities, after which he may not leave Russia
- Registers have been combed through so that people are found more reliably
- There will be no grand declaration — it will be done as quietly as possible so unrest has no time to form
The targeting is familiar: it is the peripheries, the countryside, the Far East and minorities that are worked over, while recruiting the core population of St Petersburg and Moscow is avoided as far as possible.
Why Russians do not rebel
Miettinen puts the episode’s sharpest question directly: why does anyone accept this, when the expected survival value is so obviously poor?
Toveri’s answer is the changed nature of recruitment. At the start people were recruited with money; now more and more are coerced. The mechanism is debt: you have large loans — enlist and they are forgiven; refuse and you go to prison for non-payment, and we will take you from there anyway.
Treatment in the units is, he says, brutal in many places — hunger, missing equipment, non-existent training, beatings and threats. Toveri’s own characterisation of why this does not produce mutiny is the Russians’ “sheep-like attitude to authority”; Miettinen says he cannot believe Finns would accept such treatment.
Attached to this is the episode’s interesting side observation about whom the war now hurts. Strikes on Wildberries logistics, on refineries and now on air traffic land on the upper-class, oligarchic, urban Russia — the part that has until now been able to assume the war does not touch it.
Losses exceed recruitment
Here is the episode’s hardest single pair of numbers, and it is arithmetically decisive.
In July and August Russian losses were over 40,000 in each month, against a recruitment capacity of about 30,000. The shortfall is therefore around 10,000 a month, and it explains the need for mobilisation.
Toveri also gives a telling illustration that Russians themselves know how the system works: the target for standing up their own drone units was around 30,000 recruits, and two months past the deadline less than a third had been assembled. However much drone duty is advertised as easy and safe, everyone knows that once you are in the system anything can be done to you — even air force mechanics have been put into the front line as infantry.
Ukraine’s political crisis
The episode does not gloss over Ukraine’s situation, and reports a recent government crisis. This section is partly what Toveri’s contacts have told him, and he marks it as assessment himself.
The trigger was Starlink. The Russians had been able to guide glide bombs, ballistic missiles and drones through Starlink directly to their targets, and this was cut off: use now requires a Ukrainian identifier. Toveri corrects, during the episode, a theory in circulation that the arrangement was a bilateral deal between Fedorov and Elon Musk — in his account it was not Fedorov’s doing alone. Some circumvention is still possible by buying links from abroad, but the restriction has been refined to work on location and speed: a link moving fast is in a drone, and the connection drops.
The real quarrel, though, was about people and power. Fedorov had been defence minister for about six months, made many reforms and was popular — and quarrelled bitterly with the commander of the armed forces, Syrskyi, whom Toveri calls a “Soviet fox”, an old-school general who holds that a soldier’s job is to fall when ordered.
According to Toveri’s contacts, the view in Zelenskyi’s circle was that Fedorov had to go for two reasons: he was becoming a political challenger, and he was extremely effective at rooting out corruption — which did not suit everyone in that circle. When it blew up, the unpopular Syrskyi was also sacked as a kind of emergency rescue.
Toveri’s assessment of Fedorov’s own mistake is clear: after leaving he refused the posts offered to him and publicly demanded elections be held despite the war. Since a clear majority of Ukrainians consider wartime elections impossible — the people in occupied territories, those abroad, the soldiers at the front — he spent his own support doing it.
Movement back to the battlefield
Here begins the episode’s most interesting section on the art of war, and its thesis is simple.
The Ukrainian command’s goal is to get movement back onto the battlefield, because sitting in a foxhole under fire settles nothing — and because they know they are better at it: the Russian armed forces have no capacity for manoeuvre warfare, and their advance is “a hundred metres a day of infantry work”.
Tanks have not been abandoned, contrary to the general impression. Russia still has about 3,000 main battle tanks in line — as many as at the start of the war — though the losses have been made good with equipment 40 to 50 years older.
The solution that has restored movement is the drone bubble. On the southern front, where Ukraine holds more of the initiative, company and reduced-battalion mechanised attacks to a depth of 5–6 km have been carried out. The method is this: your own drones shoot down the Russian drones, the enemy’s eyes are taken away, and under that cover an armoured force drives through.
Toveri notes there is nothing new in this in principle — shaping the battlefield and destroying the enemy’s reconnaissance, surveillance and command systems has been in American doctrine for decades. What is new is the equipment. And the West’s conclusion is clear: we do not want Ukraine war 2.0, nor a war of attrition on Russia’s terms — movement must be secured, by combining existing mechanised forces with the new capabilities.
Artillery did not disappear, the tactics changed
Miettinen puts the proposition that artillery is being squeezed out now that the kill zone has widened by tens of kilometres. Toveri corrects the picture.
Russia still fires an estimated 600,000 shells a month. What has changed is how. No longer an artillery regiment placed to fire for a couple of days, but single guns, a rapid fire mission, and out.
Ukraine’s advantage is Western artillery: longer range and accuracy. When the system is accurate enough, two or three shells at 40 kilometres achieve what used to take two hundred.
In this context Toveri recalls where drones came from: drones arrived because Ukraine ran out of artillery shells and someone worked out that grenades could be dropped from them. They filled a gap — but an FPV drone’s half-kilo charge is no match for a 155 mm shell. The problem is not which is better; it is how to get the 155s onto the target.
Glide bombs: Ukraine’s worst problem
This is Toveri’s own emphasis, and it is set up precisely as the counterpart to drones.
A drone’s explosive effect is so small that even light fortification protects against it — especially in a built-up area. A glide bomb offers no such option. Russia has an endless stock of old aerial bombs — 200, 500 and even 3,000 kg — to which fins and a guidance system are added, and they are fired in their thousands each month.
Russia’s advance has rested largely on exactly this: glide bombs destroy the strongpoints, then infantry go into the depth. And because they are launched beyond the reach of Ukrainian air defence, they are hard to answer.
With F-16s Ukraine has occasionally managed to surprise and shoot down a few of the bombers, but not enough to seriously erode Russia’s capacity. Ukraine has now received comparable equipment from the West and is doing the same to the Russians.
On the attrition of air power Toveri adds two refinements. Operation Spiderweb destroyed aircraft even at distant airfields, and Fire Point’s systems add to the tally from time to time. Russia has been unable to replace its losses for a couple of years, particularly in strategic bombers. AWACS aircraft are the other irreplaceable class — “worth more than gold” — and central precisely to protecting glide-bomb sorties, because they give early warning so an aircraft does not fall victim to AMRAAMs. Operational usage is also punishing: the aircraft fly far more than in peacetime, and they wear out.
Over half of Ukraine’s air fleet is now F-16s or Mirages — the shift to Western equipment has happened almost unnoticed.
Winter, ballistic missiles and the Patriot shortage
This is the episode’s bleakest section, and it is a direct consequence of another war.
Ukraine has done well against fuel logistics — a large part of Russia’s refining capacity has taken hits, as far as the St Petersburg region. But jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles are getting through.
The interception numbers are stark. Ukraine downs about 95% of conventional piston-engine drones, but only about 60% of jet-powered ones. Against ballistic missiles the only working answer is Patriot — and in Toveri’s words that capability “is not created in a kitchen and a garage”, unlike counter-drone work. Ukraine is developing jet-powered interceptor drones and Toveri believes the drone problem will be solved; the ballistic missile problem will not.
And that is exactly where the shortage bites. The US armed forces had about 2,200 Patriot missiles when Iran was attacked; now, by estimate, a little over 600. One case illustrates the consumption: around 100 Patriots were fired to defend against a single strike on a base in Jordan. Iran has the capacity for dozens more such strikes.
Production is not catching up: Lockheed Martin produced about 600 missiles this year, with a target of 2,000 by 2030 — which Toveri considers uncertain.
Attached to this is the episode’s most cynical observation. When Trump promised Ukraine licensed production, the manufacturer took fright: if the Ukrainians are allowed, they will produce them far faster and far more cheaply, and the market is gone. The brakes went on, and what was offered instead was a Patriot at half the price whose only problem is that it also performs half as well. Toveri’s conclusion is blunt: the defence industry does not always think about the common good, but about shareholder interests.
Miettinen adds his own observation from the United Arab Emirates: interception is not a tidy event — a great deal of metal comes down even when the missile is successfully destroyed.
Putin’s three fronts
Toveri’s assessment is that Putin is trying to force a resolution by spring and is attacking on three fronts. The pressure is real, because Russia’s economy is in poor shape — state, macro and micro — and the elite is more isolated than ever. Even allies are moving: India’s prime minister has said the war ought to end, the Chinese have taken some distance, and Trump has indirectly supported Ukraine by saying he is fine with strikes into the depth.
The three fronts are:
- The ground front. A quiet mobilisation might produce half a million men to break Ukraine’s defence and finally take Donbas — which Putin has, in Toveri’s account, ordered at least six times.
- The deep-battle front. Production has been weighted towards Iskanders and ballistic missiles: destroy the defence industry, then, as winter comes, the energy industry, and interfere with maritime traffic. The aim is both economic collapse and a humanitarian catastrophe that would break Ukraine’s spine.
- The Western front. Hybrid warfare is being tightened so that Western states turn to their own problems. Toveri says Western intelligence chiefs do not rule out a limited military operation in the near term — precisely so that attention moves off Ukraine and nobody dares give away their Patriots.
Miettinen points out how cheap this is: a single drone threat at a German airport brings a whole country to its knees.
The axis of evil is learning
This is the episode’s most strategically important observation, and it concerns more than Ukraine.
Russia is training North Korea and Iran in warfighting, and the effect is measurable. When the first North Korean ballistic missiles arrived in Russia, about 40% broke up in flight and the rest had an accuracy on the order of a kilometre. In the newest versions accuracy is already 10 metres. The same holds for Iran: the accuracy and penetration rates of Iranian missile strikes have improved, because the Russians are teaching them what they have learned in Ukraine.
Toveri’s broader point is that Europe does not seem to grasp what this means: “we are in practice already in a world war”, when Asian troops arrive to fight a European state.
Revenge copies revenge
The episode’s description of escalation logic is symmetrical and precise: both sides copy each other.
Ukraine struck into the Sea of Azov and the northern Black Sea, sinking over 200 vessels and halting Russian oil and grain shipping — Russia struck back at Ukrainian maritime traffic. The Russians had hit supermarkets and shopping centres — Ukraine hit distribution centres. Russia has struck fuel stations.
In energy the position is asymmetrical as regards learning. Ukraine has learned through three cold winters: distributed systems, local generators, trained repair capacity, and work with the EU since spring to improve the resilience of the infrastructure. Russia, by contrast, has grown comfortable with centralised super-units that nobody can touch.
Even so the situation is serious: 80% of Ukraine’s energy production facilities have taken hits, and last winter collapse was close. Toveri expects Ukraine to strike back, and it has given warning of it — the western border regions of Russia are going to get cold.
Toveri also notes a historical premise that applies to both sides: the massive city bombing of the Second World War did not break the spine of the German people or paralyse its defence industry. Miettinen draws the conclusion: Russia is wasting capability blowing up apartment blocks, which only raises morale.
Crimea as an island
The Crimea section is the episode’s clearest example of logistical thinking.
Crimea is no longer properly supplied. Rail links have been cut, the bridges from the mainland side have been struck, maritime traffic has been halted in the Sea of Azov, and the Kerch Strait bridge has taken enough damage that it cannot carry heavy traffic. As a result there is food and fuel shortage on the peninsula, and supplies are being trucked along the land corridor — trucks the Ukrainians succeed in destroying.
The most interesting point is Toveri’s assessment of why the bridge has not been blown, though it looks easy: the Ukrainians have allowed it to stand so that the Russians can leave along it — “it is a good route for getting the Russians out of the area.”
Toveri is nonetheless explicit about the limit: Ukraine cannot occupy Crimea yet, because that would require a land connection, and that is a long way off. What has been achieved is something else — Crimea’s usability as a support area for the fighting on the southern front has been significantly degraded, its airbases have been struck, and the main body of the Black Sea Fleet has been withdrawn.
The defence industry moves west
Out of this comes one of the episode’s neatest strategic symmetries, which Miettinen formulates.
As Ukraine reaches ever deeper into Russia’s strategic rear with systems like Fire Point and Flamingo, so correspondingly the West has become Ukraine’s strategic rear — and weapons production is being moved there. Miettinen mentions that a large Finnish delegation was in Kyiv a few weeks ago discussing what could be produced here.
According to Toveri this infuriates the Russians. They have been able to strike Ukraine’s defence industry and forced it to disperse and hide — but more and more production has been moved west into joint projects, or into plants that produce only for Ukraine. Equipment maintenance also partly happens on NATO territory, where Russia cannot strike.
It is precisely for this reason that the most significant targets of hybrid operations are supply transports and the plants where weapons bound for Ukraine are made.
Russia’s own difficulty is coverage: before the war it had the world’s strongest ground-based air defence, but the country is large and not everything can be protected. It has lost over a hundred missile launchers and dozens of radars that it cannot replace. And when the Ukrainians get French and American intelligence support for targeting, along with information on the layout of Russian air defence, those positions can be avoided and the depth penetrated.
Moscow and Putin as air-defence sinks
This is the episode’s funniest and simultaneously sharpest insight.
Toveri says two targets tie down a significant part of Russian air defence: Moscow and Putin. Every place where Putin spends time has an incomprehensible concentration of air defence deployed to it. Miettinen notes that the battle for Moscow is especially bad for Putin because it rests on the prestige of the capital — and Trump has spotted this, asking Zelenskyi whether it would not be rather funny to bomb Moscow a bit.
It follows logically that once Russian airspace has been declared unsafe, the next step is nudged towards Moscow’s airport.
Attached to this is the episode’s most laconic detail: that famous photograph of an oil tank’s lid flying off spectacularly was caused by a Russian air defence missile hitting the tank. Toveri’s comment: “These things happen to those who do things.”
Toveri also puts the proportions honestly in both directions: Russian air defence is capable and shoots down perhaps over 99% of what comes at it — but Ukraine fires far more drones east than come west, and “in quantity there is quality”. The longest-reaching drones, copied from Chinese designs, stretch at best to nearly 3,000 kilometres.
On the economics of air defence he makes two further observations. The Russians have built a “Swiss army knife” — systems carrying every possible gadget — and when one launcher is destroyed a lot of money goes with it; nearly a hundred Pantsirs have been lost. And the S-400 has been used in a ground-attack version: it is not a precision weapon, but it will hit an area the size of a city block, and because it arrives on a ballistic trajectory it is hard to intercept — good for terrorising civilians. Now that launchers have been lost and more must be moved to protect Moscow, that pressure has eased somewhat.
Flamingo, and what to think about a wonder weapon
Ukraine’s own strike capability gets a realistic rather than an enthusiastic treatment.
Flamingo is the size of a bus and carries a 500 kg warhead, but Toveri notes it has the same problem as Kalibr: if the other side has an air picture and can hold the target, it is relatively easy to shoot down. So Ukraine uses exactly the same tactic as the Russians: Flamingo strikes are combined with masses of hundreds of drones, saturating the air defence and opening gaps through which the Flamingos get through.
Ukraine is additionally developing at least two ballistic missiles, apparently fired at Moscow a couple of times as tests and intercepted by the Russians. The aim is serial production and numbers that exhaust the defence.
When Miettinen asks whether Fire Point will produce a “Ukrainian Kinzhal”, a hypersonic wonder weapon, Toveri is cool about it. He has not heard of Ukrainians developing a hypersonic missile, and explains why it would not be worth it: even the Russian Kinzhal has a poor power-to-weight ratio, it is expensive, and while it is hard to intercept it is not impossible — some have been shot down, whatever Putin says. And since an expensive system can only be produced in small numbers, the same result is available from a conventional ballistic missile more cheaply and more easily.
Ground robots and AI weapons
Miettinen’s “favourite hobby horse” produces the episode’s most concrete section on the future, and the numbers are larger than one might assume.
Ukraine has over 20,000 ground robots in use, with a target of 30,000–50,000 next year. Two world firsts have been achieved with them: a piece of terrain has been taken by robots, and a fully unmanned amphibious landing was carried out, in which a small vessel took a couple of ground robots across a river.
The purpose is clear and it is humane: to reduce the number of infantry in the front line, because that is where the casualties fall. The figure discussed is a reduction of up to 70% on certain sectors of the front.
Toveri makes an important distinction, though: these are mainly remotely operated, not AI-driven. AI weapons exist separately — the Russians have them too — and they fly to the area, find the target independently and strike it. Their advantage is decisive: electronic jamming does not work, because the machine needs no satellite link and follows the terrain by camera.
The alternative to jamming is fibre optic — Miettinen describes what forests covered in optical cable look like — but that has its own range and terrain limits, and the cable breaks.
The constraint on AI weapons in the front line is pattern recognition: it may not distinguish a Russian infantryman from a Ukrainian one reliably enough, producing friendly-fire losses. And here Toveri makes the episode’s coldest observation: on the Russian side this is not a problem — you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs — whereas on the Ukrainian side it is.
The EU’s 90 billion and the Hungarian veto
On financing the episode has a recent turn, and here Toveri speaks as an MEP.
A year ago the situation was tight: Trump was not friendly, nothing was coming from Europe. Because of Hungarian opposition the money was running out entirely, and it was only resolved after the elections, when Magyar announced that Hungary would not oppose loans to Ukraine. After that the 90 billion in financing went through.
Toveri does not present this as the solution, however. Ninety billion does not last even to the end of next year, and on top of it at least around 30 billion in bilateral aid is needed from Canada, Asian countries and elsewhere.
The significance is different, and in his view more important: for the first time Ukraine has a financing profile stretching about eighteen months ahead. Hand-to-mouth existence ends, larger projects can be planned, and the EU has already begun preparing what comes next — so as not to be two weeks from running out again. The options are loan financing, IMF money or Russia’s frozen assets. And it is also a signal towards Russia: there is more where this came from.
Miettinen offers the counterweight, and Toveri concedes it: Russia is a dictatorship and can immiserate its citizens and take their money, so the war can continue. But the pressure grows — if there is already pressure from public dissatisfaction, what happens when their savings are taken. Toveri adds that it is an entirely new situation for Russia to be importing petrol from neighbouring countries or India, because the refining capacity is not there.
NATO’s 3.5% and the shift to capability thinking
On defence financing the episode makes an observation more important than the percentages.
Trump is credited with getting 3.5% defence spending across Europe, plus a further looser one and a half per cent as a target — though Spain has not accepted this, and the closer you get to the eastern flank the more real money moves, Finland included.
The point Miettinen puts and Toveri confirms is where the money should go. Previously you built warehouses and filled them with ammunition, iron, guns and mines. Now technological change is so fast that materiel goes stale — it is more useful to build the capacity to produce. Toveri’s formulation: there is no sense in buying a million drones now, because in a couple of months they are obsolete — create the ability to produce quickly and at scale whatever is needed at that moment, along with a culture in which capabilities are developed fast and feedback is taken from the troops.
Miettinen draws the conclusion, which is also the episode’s most uncomfortable: Ukraine is “perversely the perfect laboratory”, and countries with good armies like Finland would do well to spend on capabilities and use the consumable part in Ukraine.
Why Europe is slower
Toveri gives a structural explanation for this, and it is not an accusation.
Turning an innovation into a product for the troops happens in Europe on peacetime terms. Before a piece of equipment is put into the hands of a Finnish conscript or a French professional soldier, there is verification, inspection and testing, so that the product is safe and nobody dies in a peacetime exercise.
In Ukraine the processes are more direct: the innovation goes to the field and is tried, and if it works, many are made. Toveri’s generalisation is that in countries at war military-technical development accelerates significantly, because the need is vast and war offers the chance to take risks that peacetime does not.
The EIB taxonomy: defence next to tobacco and pornography
This is the episode’s most concrete example of how attitudes have turned.
Miettinen relays an observation from someone on the fund side: in an earlier fund, dual-use projects or weapons required asking the investor separately for permission — now the setting has healthily reversed.
Toveri supplies the institutional counterpart. As late as 2023, in the European Investment Bank’s sustainable development taxonomy, the defence industry sat in the same box as the tobacco industry and pornography. In his words it was unbelievable how hard a fight had to be fought — it took over a year to get it changed, and this while a war was being fought in Ukraine.
The direction is nevertheless clear: EU member states’ defence budgets have grown around 250% since 2014 and defence investment around 500%, with about 180 billion going to materiel procurement. Toveri’s comment: that is starting to be real mass.
The extremes oppose, the centre supports
On the political map of the European Parliament, Toveri offers a symmetrical account.
Two camps oppose defence investment. The far right, because it is pro-Putin, and because it asks why we support Ukraine when we have problems of our own. And the far left, which in Toveri’s account talks in exactly the same way, by way of pacifism.
The large majority in the centre agrees that defence must be strengthened and Ukraine supported — though there is disagreement about how much.
Toveri himself adds an important qualification, which is the section’s most honest point: the people in the European Parliament are more European and look at the big picture. At national level the situation is different — in Germany 40% still think Ukraine should not be supported even after an attack, because there are enough problems at home. “There are still plenty of challenges here.”
Finnish conscription and the quality of leaders
The closing section turns to Finland, and Toveri’s argument is about quality, not patriotism.
The starting point is selection. When half of an age cohort does military service and 15% of conscripts are trained for leadership roles, recruitment into the professional cadre is made from that pool. The consequences show in applicant numbers: there are six times more applicants than places at the cadet school, and in units an NCO vacancy can draw dozens of applicants — reserve NCOs and sometimes reserve officers. According to Toveri no European country has a situation like this.
The comparison is the professional army. In countries with a purely professional force there are severe recruitment problems, especially for enlisted roles but also for officers and NCOs, and there is little scope to select. Toveri makes an important distinction here that stops the argument sliding into conceit: West Point is a highly regarded institution that you have to compete to enter — but alongside it are programmes in which civilian studies are paid for in exchange for three years as a lieutenant, and you get into those if you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
The claim Toveri makes is therefore a bounded one: the average quality of Finland’s professional personnel is higher than that of most, if not the great majority, of other armed forces. The same goes for reservists — watching the privates of professional armies in Bosnia and Afghanistan, he saw people who had few other options; some were good, but others had come for four years to get a line on their paper so they could work as a security guard. “We have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Bloc elections and a closing provocation
The episode ends on domestic politics, and the framing is worth noting: Toveri rose from Arkadianmäki to the European Parliament, and his replacement in the Finnish Parliament is Martin Paasi, who together with Wille Rydman has proposed bloc elections for Finland.
Toveri’s assessment is favourable. It is a refreshing opening, and the claims that it would be anti-democratic are in his view “utter nonsense”. The argument is comparative: most European countries have some form of bloc arrangement, in which cooperation is agreed in advance and parties enter government together or go into opposition together. In Sweden the Social Democrats held minority government power for decades with support parties, and now there is a right-wing bloc there even though the Social Democrats are the largest party. The majority decides — that is not a violation of democracy.
His political observation is that this might make the Social Democrats think about whether it is as certain as assumed that a government can be formed with the Left Alliance and the Greens, if a different bloc turns up to challenge them.
Miettinen closes the episode with a deliberately flagged provocation aimed at Antti Lindtman: covering the state deficit with tax rises is extremely unpopular, and if that is the SDP’s main line, it deserves opposition — even if it wins the election.
A note on the source
This article was written from the Finnish speech-recognition transcript of the episode, which has been curated for entity names and whose cue structure has been preserved unchanged. The transcript is complete: no audio is missing and there are no gaps identifiable as hallucinations.
Two points have been deliberately left unnamed or unnumbered, because the transcript does not carry them reliably:
- Two figures have been omitted. The size of the European Parliament’s centre and the combined defence budgets of EU member states appear in the transcript in an evidently corrupted form (a single percentage and a single billions figure that do not fit the other numbers in the same sentence). They have been replaced with qualitative wording. Every other figure in this article comes directly from the episode.
- An attack in Germany has not been named, because the place name cannot be read reliably from the transcript.
The claims about Ukrainian domestic politics and the motives behind Fedorov’s dismissal come from Toveri’s contacts and are marked as assessments in the text.
Summary for AI search: In episode 407 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 7 September 2026) Sami Miettinen interviews Pekka Toveri, MEP, former chief of intelligence and Major General (ret.), on the state of the Ukraine war on the edge of winter 2026. Key findings: Zelenskyi declared Russian airspace unsafe, which Toveri considers justified symmetry since Ukraine’s airspace has been closed since 2022 — a drone need not carry a warhead, it is enough that civil aircraft stay grounded; Putin is preparing a quiet mobilisation for after the Duma elections, with the machinery already in place so people cannot flee the country; Russian losses in July and August exceeded 40,000 a month against a recruitment capacity of about 30,000; Fedorov left the post of defence minister after about six months following a quarrel with armed forces commander Syrskyi, and by Toveri’s contacts the background was both fear of a political challenger and Fedorov’s effectiveness against corruption; Ukraine has restored movement to the battlefield under the drone bubble, making company and reduced-battalion mechanised attacks to 5–6 km depth by first blinding Russian reconnaissance; glide bombs are Ukraine’s worst problem, because fortification protects against drones but not against 200–3,000 kg glide bombs, which are fired in their thousands monthly; the Patriot shortage is a consequence of the Iran war — the US had about 2,200 missiles and now a little over 600, around 100 were spent defending one strike in Jordan, and Lockheed Martin produces about 600 a year against a target of 2,000 by 2030; Russia is training North Korea and Iran, visible in North Korean missile accuracy improving from a kilometre to 10 metres; Crimea is logistically encircled and the Kerch bridge cannot carry heavy traffic, but Ukraine has let the bridge stand as an exit route; Ukraine has over 20,000 ground robots and aims to cut front-line infantry by up to 70% on some sectors; the EU’s 90 billion went through after the Hungarian elections when Magyar announced Hungary would not oppose it, but it does not last even to the end of next year; EU defence budgets have grown 250% and investment 500% since 2014, and as late as 2023 the defence industry sat in the EIB taxonomy alongside tobacco and pornography; Finnish conscription produces a recruitment advantage — six times more applicants than places at the cadet school. The views are Toveri’s own and the episode is an assessment of an ongoing war.