The moment Russia's OSCE ambassador says nobody will name

When Dmitry Polyansky wants to make a point at the OSCE Permanent Council — the weekly security meeting in Vienna where Russia still holds a seat — he says he is trying to be “very vocal.” The formulation is telling. Polyansky, who moved from New York’s United Nations corridors to Vienna at the start of 2026, is not in an organization where Russian arguments are landing. He knows this. What he is doing instead is building a record: a documented assertion, week by week, that Europe is already inside a conflict it has not yet named. In a conversation with Glenn Diesen’s podcast — the same program that recently hosted Sergey Karaganov — he develops that assertion with precision. The question he poses is not whether direct war between Russia and NATO will happen. The question is whether anyone will be able to identify the moment it already did.

The diplomat and his frame

Polyansky is a Russian official doing exactly what Russian officials do in 2026. Reading him usefully means knowing what he is before reading what he says.

Dmitry Polyansky is a career diplomat with thirty years in the Russian Foreign Ministry, an Orientalist by training who speaks eight languages including Arabic, Polish, and Chinese. He served as Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations in New York from 2018, where he became known for combative press statements and a fluency in Western media’s own rhetorical conventions. In December 2025, Putin appointed him to Vienna as Russia’s permanent representative to the OSCE, replacing Alexander Lukashevich, who had held the post for a decade.

Everything Polyansky says in this conversation is Russia’s position, framed through Russia’s analytical categories. He describes Ukraine’s government as a “Kyiv regime,” traces the war’s origins exclusively through Western betrayal of post-Cold War commitments, and presents Russia’s territorial demands as self-evident conclusions. None of this disqualifies the conversation as a source — understanding how a senior Russian diplomat frames the current moment for a Western-adjacent audience is itself informative — but it shapes what the piece can and cannot claim. Where Polyansky asserts, this piece uses “Polyansky argues.” Where sources conflict, the conflict is named.

He is speaking to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway who specializes in Eurasian geopolitics and has conducted extended interviews with Karaganov, Scott Ritter, and other figures critical of Western policy toward Russia. The audience self-selects for a degree of skepticism toward NATO framing.

The line that keeps moving

Polyansky’s central argument is structural, not dramatic: not that war will be declared, but that the threshold for “direct” conflict is migrating backward through events that have already occurred.

The escalation ladder, in Polyansky’s account, does not have a single decisive rung. It has a sequence of incrementally crossed thresholds, each one normalized before the next is reached. He identifies several that he considers already crossed: the provision of long-range missiles by the UK and France that require Western specialists to operate; the passage of Ukrainian drones through Baltic airspace; and, most recently, allegations that Latvia is permitting or enabling drone operations against Russian territory.

On the missile point, Polyansky argues that weapons like the UK’s Storm Shadow can only be employed with direct assistance from British or French specialists who help select targets and, in his formulation, “physically push the button together” with Ukrainian operators. Western governments confirm that their personnel provide training and technical assistance; they dispute characterizations that this amounts to co-piloting individual strikes. The distinction matters practically, but Polyansky’s point is less about the precise mechanics than about the political trajectory: what was once described as support has become, in his framing, participation.

The Latvia situation is more concrete and more current. Since March 2026, a series of Ukrainian military drones — fired at Russian oil infrastructure in the Baltic region — have strayed into the airspace of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. On March 25, a drone from Russian airspace hit the chimney of an Estonian power plant and another crashed in Latvia. On May 7, two drones entered Latvia from Russia; one exploded at an oil storage facility in Rēzekne, touching off a political crisis that cost Latvia its defense minister.

Latvia’s government position is firm: these are Ukrainian drones that lost their bearings while targeting Russian infrastructure, redirected toward Latvia, as one Latvian MEP put it, “as a result of Russian actions.” The Baltic foreign ministers issued a joint statement in April rejecting Russian allegations of permitted overflight as a disinformation campaign. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, responded on May 19 — the day this conversation was recorded — by claiming Ukrainian drone units had already deployed to five Latvian military bases, a claim Latvian officials immediately dismissed.

The reader should hold both the claim and the Latvian denial simultaneously. Polyansky is presenting the SVR’s assertion as established fact; Latvia is describing it as fabrication. What is not in dispute is the underlying sequence of incidents — drones crossing borders, crashing in NATO territory, triggering investigations and political consequences — that gives the Russian framing its traction regardless of its accuracy on any specific point.

A sea with no neutral waters

The Baltic is, for Polyansky, the most likely theater for the miscalculation that turns incremental confrontation into something that has to be named.

The Baltic discussion in this conversation covers three overlapping pressures. The first is political rhetoric: Polyansky singles out statements from a Lithuanian defense minister about demonstrating NATO’s capacity to strike Russian positions, calling it the most irresponsible he can imagine. The second is institutional: some NATO voices have spoken about treating the Baltic as an exclusively NATO-controlled body of water, which Polyansky describes as a casus belli — a pretext for war. The third is operational: the UK’s announced leadership of a Baltic naval grouping designed to confront what Western governments call Russia’s shadow fleet.

Polyansky’s argument is that these moves, taken individually, might appear containable, but their aggregate is sustained pressure on a constrained geography. Kaliningrad — the Russian exclave on the Baltic coast, separated from mainland Russia by Lithuania and Belarus — sits at the center of these concerns. Any effective NATO dominance of Baltic maritime lanes would complicate logistics to and from the exclave in ways that Russian military planners treat as a strategic tripwire.

European countries are trying to test the limits of our patience — and they will quite easily find themselves in the situation I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, when we are already in direct confrontation.

— Dmitry Polyansky, Vienna, May 2026

Whether this reading of Baltic tensions reflects genuine military concern or serves as a deterrence argument — telling European audiences they are closer to catastrophe than they realize — cannot be determined from the outside. Both can be true simultaneously.

A taboo that became a debate

The most carefully calibrated moment in the conversation is Polyansky’s answer on nuclear weapons — where he neither endorses nor dismisses what Karaganov has been saying for three years.

Diesen raises Karaganov directly, noting that in an earlier appearance on the same program, Karaganov claimed his position — advocating strikes on European targets to restore nuclear deterrence — had shifted from a minority view to a majority one in Russian expert circles. Polyansky’s answer is worth parsing closely.

He confirms that “the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons is no longer a taboo” in Russia’s expert community, and that many people share these ideas. But he draws a line between that community and the decision-making circles — the people who actually control the arsenal — and insists the shift is visible in the former but has not yet migrated to the latter. This, he says, is a big difference.

The significance of Polyansky’s answer is not that it changes the nuclear calculus — he is explicit that it does not. It is that a serving Russian diplomat, speaking on the record, declines to characterize the position as fringe. What was three years ago an intellectual provocation is now, in his telling, a visible current in serious Russian strategic debate. He adds the pressure: people are frustrated, they are asking what Moscow is waiting for, and this question is being pronounced “louder and louder.”

The calibration is deliberate. Polyansky is neither endorsing nuclear use nor insulating Russia’s leadership from the pressure building toward it. He is describing a political environment in which the option has become thinkable in new circles — and leaving the listener to calculate the implications without giving him anything quotable as endorsement.

What normal neighbor means

Polyansky’s account of Russia’s peace terms is maximalist requirements dressed in minimalist language — and his assessment of the OSCE is that the institution designed to prevent this moment has already failed it.

Asked about a pathway to settlement, Polyansky offers what he calls a simple formulation: Russia wants a “normal neighbor” on its border. Unpacked, this requires three things. First, recognition of Russian sovereignty over the four Ukrainian regions Moscow has annexed — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — whether through military control or Ukrainian consent. Second, a Ukrainian state that does not threaten Russia, meaning demilitarized, non-aligned, and unable to serve as a platform for Western power projection. Third, formal protections for Russian speakers, including reversal of what he describes as Ukraine’s prohibition on the Russian language, which he calls unique in the world.

Each of these terms is, from Kyiv’s perspective, a demand for capitulation. The territories Russia claims include areas it does not fully control militarily. The demilitarization demand would leave Ukraine defenseless against future pressure. And the language question, while reflecting real legal disputes — Ukraine has restricted Russian in official settings — is overstated: describing it as a blanket ban misrepresents a more complex legislative record.

His assessment of the OSCE itself is correspondingly bleak. The organization, he argues, was designed as an alternative to bloc mentality — a forum where all European states could address security collectively regardless of alliance. Instead, in his account, it has been captured by NATO member states who use it as a vehicle for anti-Russian messaging while preventing any member from stepping out of line toward a different approach.

The irony Polyansky does not address: Russia’s own actions — the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the full-scale invasion in 2022 — demolished the confidence-building mechanisms the OSCE had spent thirty years constructing. The conventional-forces treaties, the inspection regimes, the notification protocols: all required a basic willingness to accept shared constraints on military movement. The body that is “on artificial breathing” in Vienna was already compromised before 2022 by the gap between what its founding documents required and what its largest military power was doing in Crimea and Donbas.

What Polyansky leaves genuinely open is whether his “any moment” framing reflects a real military assessment or functions primarily as a deterrence message aimed at Western audiences — an official register of the same calculation Karaganov makes more bluntly. A diplomat always performs for multiple theaters simultaneously: the Permanent Council chamber in Vienna, the Russian foreign ministry reading his public statements, and the media ecosystem that will clip the most striking formulations.

What is not open is that the Baltic incidents are real, escalating, and happening at a pace that has already cost Latvia a defense minister. The gap between Latvia’s account — straying drones, Russian electronic interference, no permission granted — and Russia’s account — deliberate passage, planned launches from military bases — is not resolvable by the parties making the claims. What both accounts share is the conclusion that something serious is happening in Baltic airspace in ways that neither NATO’s collective structures nor the OSCE’s dialogue channels are currently equipped to manage.

The ledger Polyansky is building, week by week in Vienna’s Permanent Council, is a document of preconditions. Whether the moment he describes will arrive in weeks or not at all, a reader who understands what is in it understands the current European situation in a way that the headline-level framing — “Russian aggression,” “NATO provocation” — does not quite capture.