Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has delivered a blunt warning that Europe has entered a "pre-war era" and if Ukraine is defeated by Russia, nobody in Europe will be able to feel safe.
"I don't want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past," he told European media. "It's real and it started over two years ago."
His remarks came as a fresh barrage of Russian missiles targeted Ukraine.
Poland said Nato aircraft were scrambled to protect its airspace.
Mr Tusk, a former president of the European Council, said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already blamed Ukraine for the jihadist attack on Moscow's Crocus City Hall without any evidence and "evidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine".
He pointed out that Russia had attacked Kyiv with hypersonic missiles in daylight for the first time earlier this week.
He used his first foreign interview since returning to office as Polish prime minister at the end of last year to deliver a direct appeal to Europe's leaders to do more to bolster its defences.
Regardless of whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump won November's US presidential election, he argued Europe would become a more attractive partner to the US if it became more self-sufficient militarily.
It was not about Europe achieving military autonomy from the US or creating "parallel structures to Nato", he said. Poland now spent 4% of its economic output on defence and every other European country should spend 2% of GDP, with the European Union as a whole mentally prepared to fight for its security.
Since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, relations with the West have reached their lowest ebb since the worst days of the Cold War, although President Putin said this week that Moscow had "no aggressive intentions" towards Nato countries.
The idea that his country would attack Poland, the Baltic states and the Czech Republic was "complete nonsense", he said. And yet he also warned that if Ukraine used Western F-16 warplanes from airfields in other countries, they would become "legitimate targets, wherever they might be located".
This is not Mr Tusk's first warning of a pre-war era. He gave centre-right European leaders a similar message earlier this month.
However, he revealed that Spain's Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, had asked fellow EU leaders to stop using the word "war" in their summit statements, because people did not want to feel threatened. Mr Tusk said he had replied that in his part of Europe, war was no longer an abstract idea.
Appealing for urgent military aid for Ukraine, he warned that the next two years of the war would decide everything: "We are living in the most critical moment since the end of the Second World War."
FULL WARNING AND DANGEROUS REPORT AT: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68692195
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