Munich Airport suspends operations for the second time in 24 hours following more drone sightings

This is a tricky one, and I'm sorry in my answer turns out long. Apologies also if my wording is bad, English can be tricky.

In the old days, there was a document all the European powers signed called the Treaty of Westphalia. This is what gave us modern day nation states. It used to be when someone wanted a bit of another state, or someone took a bit of another state, the belligerent would pre-emptively declare war out of politeness, or the defender would declare war in response.

This all got messed up at the end of World War 2 when it became clear that being at war meant someone could use nuclear weapons on you. So (I'm trying to think of wars that Canada was involved in), the Korean War was a 'police action' theoretically led by the UN, Afghanistan was a counter-terror/counter-insurgency operation by UN charter.

I don't know if you remember, but a lot of leaders were avoiding the W word about Ukraine for the first couple of years. Putin obviously called it a Special Military Operation, but as you say, a lot of people wanted to avoid the W word until absolutely no other word described it. There have been wars that are called wars since 1945, but only small ones tend to be 'declared'. If you look at the flags in that table, other countries are generally making the determination of the 'existence of a state of war' because the small countries can't get angry and expand that war to the broader international community.

So I started with Europe not to be boring but to make a point. Because of the history of conventional war on the European continent, we have a very binary way of looking at conflict. If somebody uses their military on you, that's war, and your allies pile in. That is what NATO is founded on, and article 5 in particular - if anyone is attacked, everyone is attacked.

I don't want to lump the two together, because the way they do it is very different, but Russia and Chinese expansion in the 21st century has broken this model. Hybrid war is something that (personal opinion) European nation states still struggle mightily with. I attended one international conference with lots of table top exercises about a decade ago where we were all trying to figure out 'What kind of cyber attack would be the equivalent of a missile strike or a bombing?', just to try and jam hybrid operations into our traditional mental model.

The short answer is unless NATO invokes Article 5, European leaders will continue to call out Russian non-traditional military aggression (drones, cyber attacks, election interference, fake news, information operations, assassinations) without calling it the W-word. Theoretically, Poland could have triggered Article 5 a number of times as their sovereign airspace has had armed incursions from Russian fighters and drones. But preventing war with a nuclear superpower whilst not putting up with continued attacks against society and infrastructure is the great challenge facing the EU and other states at the moment.

PM Frederiksen has actually gone quite far here by stating plainly that many parts of Europe are engaged in a hybrid war already. In the same week, the ex-head of the UK's domestic Security Service stated plainly that the UK may be at war with Russia already, because of the severity of cyber attacks, other hybrid activities, and the assassination using chemical weapons of people on British soil by Russia.

So the PM calling it a hybrid war doesn't mean war is declared or a state of war exists, to the Western European and Baltic leaders. But Russian leadership may well think they're at war with everyone bar their allies anyway, and many security theorists have been trying to argue this since about 2010. There are similar arguments made about China and the South China Sea/Northeast Asia hybrid activities, but that is less relevant to this conversation.

• Sorry that was so long. I do want to caveat it with that is deliberately based in traditional European thought because that's what's causing people to be so worried at the moment, as that model of 'war/peace' doesn't fit anymore. I would argue even in the 17th century it didn't, as European colonialism was nothing to my mind but one large series of invasions featuring all the key hallmarks of a war, just not called war because the colonised were not signatories to international treaties. Different cultures conceive of war in very different ways, and I would like to acknowledge that.

• India ordering the assassination of a Canadian citizen would have been a classic cause for war under the old system, at least pre-nuclear weapons. In an alternate history where that happened while the British empire was still a thing, it probably would have led to a declaration of war by the Crown, a short war on the Indian subcontinent to show that That's Just Not The Done Thing Actually, and then a peace agreement saying 'Let's Not Use Our Intelligence Services To Kill People on Each Other's Soil Now'. But, Canada's great and powerful friend is in the middle of a frothing fascist meltdown, India has nukes and a billion people, so all PM Trudeau could do was say 'We don't like that very much' and respond with diplomatic measures.

• Getting things to a stage where everyone agrees 'okay, war time' is probably harder than it has been in modern history, and autocratic or illiberal states are much better equipped to take advantage of this than liberal democracies who are used to fighting 'fair'.

• The very very simple answer to 'when is it war' is when uniformed personnel and intelligence officers get paid extra to go to a particular area of operations. It has many different names in European militaries, and I think in Canada it's called 'Warlike Service'. Even though theoretically Afghanistan was a nation-building operation (🫥), CAF personnel and intelligence people getting deployed got a bunch of extra money because of the likelihood of getting blown up or shot.