We pulled every statement, speech and press release from eight Western archives since January 2022 and counted how often a government said, in so many words, that it was concerned about Russia. The answer is 296. The more interesting answer is who has stopped.
“Deeply concerned” is the noise diplomacy makes when it has decided not to do anything yet. It is the register of the démarche and the OSCE Permanent Council, of the Friday spokesperson statement that nobody will quote on Monday. Which made me wonder: how often does the West actually say it about Russia, and has the habit survived four years of full-scale war?
So I counted. Not with a search box (more on why in a moment) but by pulling the full text of 11,766 statements, speeches and press releases from eight official archives: the UK government, the US State Department, the EU’s External Action Service, the Council of the EU, the Commission press corner, NATO, the German Foreign Office and the French foreign ministry. Then I asked one question of every text. Does it contain an explicit expression of concern in the same sentence as Russia, Moscow, the Kremlin or Putin?
The answer is 296 times since 1 January 2022. And the curve is not what you would expect from a continent that keeps telling itself it is finally waking up.
🔍 How you count a feeling
You cannot do this with the archives’ own search boxes, because each one has a different idea of what “concerned” means. gov.uk stems the word, so “concerning the situation in Georgia” is a hit. The EEAS search box returns the entire archive if you type nonsense into it. NATO’s does not stem at all. So the sites were used only to list the statements; the counting was done on the downloaded text, with one rule applied to all of it.
The rule is deliberately strict. A statement counts if an explicit concern phrase (deeply, gravely, seriously or extremely concerned; concerned by, about or at; deep, grave or growing concern; expresses its concern) sits in the same sentence as a Russia-term. Loosen that to any concern-word within a couple of hundred characters of “Russia” and the figure is about 1,150. Swap “concern” for “condemn” and it is 876. French texts were scored with the French set (préoccupé, vive préoccupation, s’inquiète de) and German ones with the German (besorgt, mit großer Sorge, Besorgnis). One statement is one count, per archive that published it, so a G7 leaders’ statement can appear in the Commission, Council and German tallies at once. The question is how often each institution put the words out, not how many distinct texts exist.
📉 Front-loaded
The count runs 119 in 2022, 48 in 2023, 69 in 2024, 35 in 2025 and 25 in the first nine months of 2026. The 2024 bump is the year of hybrid sabotage, Navalny’s death and the Moldovan and Romanian elections. Otherwise it is a slope, and the slope is steeper than the fall in the amount the West talks about Russia at all: the UK’s Russia-mentioning output roughly halved between 2022 and 2025, while the US State Department’s fell by nine-tenths.
Who actually says it:
The UK: 168. More than every other archive combined. 111 of them are filed as speeches, which in practice means statements delivered at the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna, the UN in New York and the IAEA Board in Vienna, where “the United Kingdom remains deeply concerned” is the house style. 38 are press releases, 17 of those from No.10.
The EEAS: 39. The EU’s diplomatic service, which condemns Russia three to four times as often as it worries about it (140 condemnations in the same period).
The Council of the EU and European Council: 26, against 201 condemnations. We will come back to these, because most of them are the same sentence.
Germany: 21. Almost all G7, Weimar or joint statements that the Auswärtiges Amt republishes in translation. Fourteen date from 2022. None from 2025 or 2026.
NATO: 13 in official texts and news releases. Another 37 in Secretary General transcripts, but those include journalists asking “are you concerned?”, so they are kept apart.
The US State Department: 12, across 3,210 press statements.
France: 10, with the caveat that 2022 is effectively missing (the Quai d’Orsay dropped its pre-2025 archive when it relaunched its site, so the count relies on the French Embassy in Washington’s English digests).
The Commission press corner: 7, all of them von der Leyen statements.
🪦 Who stopped
There are two ways to lose the habit, and the archives split neatly between them.
By sheer number, the UK fell furthest: 72 in 2022 to 27 in 2025, a drop of 45 statements, which is more than any other archive managed in its best year. But look at the rate rather than the count and the UK has not changed at all. In 2024, 21 per cent of its Russia-mentioning items contained the phrase. In 2025 it was 22 per cent. Britain is saying less about Russia, not saying it differently. The Vienna and New York machine still runs.
By habit, the United States and NATO went to zero. The State Department managed 7, 2, 3, 0, 0. Its Russia-mentioning press statements collapsed from 196 in 2022 to 21 in 2025 and 11 so far this year, so since January 2025 it has barely said anything about Russia at all, concerned or otherwise. NATO is the sharper case because its volume held up: 71 official texts mentioning Russia in 2025, 38 so far in 2026, and not one of them concerned. The switch flips on 1 October 2024, the day Mark Rutte took over. Germany follows the same path a year earlier: 14, 1, 6, 0, 0.
The single steepest cliff is the EEAS. Eleven in 2024, when 13 per cent of its Russia statements carried the phrase, to one in 2025, at the same volume of output. That is the Borrell to Kallas handover almost to the week. It has bounced to six in 2026, but half of those are the Council’s human-rights boilerplate wearing an EEAS URL, not anything the High Representative said.
So: Britain accounts for most of the fall in the number. Washington and NATO account for the fall in the habit. They did not reduce it. They dropped it.
🎤 The people at the top
Institutions say it. The people running them, it turns out, mostly do not.
Ursula von der Leyen: 7 in 1,048 statements and speeches since January 2022. Five of the seven are joint texts she signed with other leaders (the G7 statement of 24 February 2024, two EU-Japan summits, the EU-US and EU-Canada statements of March 2022). Only twice is it her own voice at a podium: April 2022, conveying “Europe’s deep concerns about Russia’s war”, and July 2023, “deeply concerned about Russia’s move to terminate the Black Sea Grain Initiative”. None of her 412 speeches qualifies. She is a condemner, not a worrier.
Kaja Kallas: 10 in the 473 items published in her name since she took office on 1 December 2024. Two of those are journalists asking whether she is concerned. Three are read-outs of strategic dialogues with Japan and Korea. One is listed twice. In her own words it happens twice: a doorstep in January 2026 (”we are also concerned about Russia and the economic coercion that comes from China”) and the Ukraine stakeout of September 2026 (”deeply concerned by Russia’s escalation against civilians and civilian infrastructure”). Like for like with her predecessor on the Russia-tagged statements, Kallas has 2 against Borrell’s 7, and 5 condemnations against his 47. The EEAS under Kallas simply issues fewer adjectives.
Mark Rutte: none. Not one of the 145 official NATO texts and news releases since he took over says the Alliance is concerned about Russia; Stoltenberg’s 443 managed 13. Rutte’s transcripts give six, but three are questions from the floor, one is a joint statement with Japan about China’s support for Russia’s defence industry, and one is Rutte describing the Russia-China relationship as “a great concern” in January 2025. He has also cut the condemning: ten texts in 145 against 53 in 443. The vocabulary of worry has been retired at NATO without a successor.
António Costa: one, and it is the best sentence in the dataset. 1 October 2025, after the informal summit in Copenhagen: “European citizens are justifiably concerned about Russia’s increasingly provocative and reckless behaviour.” Note the move. The citizens are concerned. The President of the European Council is reporting it.
🤖 The concern machine
One EU body bucks the trend entirely. The Council of the EU has produced between four and seven of these a year, every year, 2022 to 2026, as steady as a metronome. This is not because the Council is more worried than everyone else. It is because of one sentence.
“The EU remains unwavering in its condemnation of human rights violations and repressions in Russia, and is deeply concerned about the continuing deterioration of the human rights situation in Russia.”
That line, or a near relative, sits in the press release for every human-rights sanctions listing the Council adopts. Eleven of the Council’s 26 are that sentence, republished each time a new batch of judges and prison governors is added to the list. The EU’s steadiest expression of concern about Russia is a paragraph of boilerplate that a desk officer pastes beneath a new set of names. Concern as copy-paste.
Put that beside the UK figure and a pattern falls out. Concern is the register of the multilateral forum: the OSCE Permanent Council, the UN Security Council, the IAEA Board, the sanctions annex. It is what you say when you are speaking for the record, in a room where the Russian delegate is also sitting, and the form requires you to express something. Where the register is operational, where the output is a package, a listing, a deployment or a joint press conference, the word has quietly gone. The institutions that still say it are the ones still filling in forms.
That is the charitable reading. The less charitable one is that “concerned” was the vocabulary of a period when the West still described Russia as a problem to be managed, and that the people who now run NATO and the EEAS have decided the word is beneath the job. On the numbers, both are true at once. What the numbers do not show is “concern” being replaced by anything stronger. Condemnation fell too. The successor to the statement of concern is not the statement of outrage. It is the press release announcing a measure, which has no adjectives in it at all.
📎 Caveats, and the data
The rule is mechanical and it has edges. A sentence counts if the concern phrase and the Russia-term share it, so Costa’s March 2026 remark that leaders “expressed our concern at the decision of the United States to partially lift sanctions” on Russia is in the 296, and it is not a worry about Moscow. NATO’s 37 transcript hits are reported separately because a third of them are reporters asking the question. France before 2025 rests on the Embassy mirror, and 2022 is thin. Not covered at all: the European Parliament, defence ministries other than the UK MoD, and the White House. Joint statements count once per archive that published them; de-duplicate on title if you want distinct texts, which takes roughly ten off the total.
Everything was crawled on 6 and 7 October 2026 from the archives’ own listings and APIs, scored on the downloaded text, and is reproducible. The dataset has every one of the 11,766 statements with its flags, a second file with just the 296 and the matching sentence quoted, the same two cuts for the named principals, and the scripts.
If you want the one-line version: since 2022 the West has told Russia it is concerned 296 times, and the two institutions that used to lead the chorus, Washington and NATO, have not said it once since the start of 2025. Make of the silence what you will. The Kremlin certainly will.