Russia is directing a multi-front challenge at Western states, deploying arson, explosions, assassination schemes, and cyber offensives.
Western intelligence agencies are reportedly alarmed by Moscow’s intensified plans to strike at European defense leaders, with reports highlighting assassination attempts against top figures in the defense sector. This comes mere weeks after an explosion at an Italian factory producing munitions for Kyiv’s fight against Russian forces and after arson strikes on industrial sites in Bulgaria and Estonia. Earlier, officials blamed Russia for a failed drone strike on Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport. While the European Union and NATO are not openly at war with their eastern neighbor, Putin’s regime is waging a destructive and deadly campaign against Western allies that insiders describe as “hybrid warfare,” a tactic that complicates and tests the responses of European and transatlantic security structures.
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Stalemate Breeds Assassination Attempts and Other Covert Attacks
“Western intelligence agencies have warned Europe’s defence bosses that Russia is stepping up efforts to assassinate them, prompting companies to increase personal security around their top executives,” according to a story in the Financial Times. “With progress on the battlefield deadlocked in Ukraine and Russia’s economy struggling, the Kremlin has ordered an expansion of sabotage and ‘hybrid’ operations in Europe as it seeks to fatally weaken support for Kyiv in the coming months.”
“Stalemate” is the word U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used last week, in answer to a question about the Russia–Ukraine war.
“Stalemates only end one of two ways,” he warned. “Number one, you have a negotiated settlement, one in which each sides have to give up something in order to get peace….The other way that stalemates end is through escalation.” Rubio added that such escalation could be “very dangerous in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, because that – that escalation could wind up being a sabotage campaign in neighboring countries that are members of NATO.”
Just the day before, Rubio had urged Europe to “awaken from its long slumber” and defend itself and its interests or else resign itself to “a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
Whether or not Europe is rousing itself is open to interpretation. But all members of NATO now rank as meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense—only three did so in 2014 (including the U.S.). With 52 percent of the alliance’s GDP but 60 percent of its defense expenditures, America still carries a disproportionate burden. But the U.S. has global interests that account for part of the expense, and the ratio is improving. And Europeans do recognize that they’re under threat.
The Daily Target of Hybrid Warfare
“We’re not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare,” Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters after the drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. “Espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks, or covert operations by foreign powers aimed at destabilizing Germany or inflicting direct harm are a constant reality.”
“In the EU, we have seen an increasing number of hybrid activities including cyber-attacks, foreign information manipulation and interference campaigns, acts of sabotage, incendiary devices in aircraft, damage to undersea infrastructure, airspace violations, assassination attempts, and the weaponisation of migration,” agrees the European Union’s diplomatic service. “These activities belong to a broader pattern of Russia’s increasingly aggressive behaviour.”
Rebuilding Defense Capability, but Dithering Over a Covert Conflict
What to do about that aggressive behavior is the next question. When a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that European factories producing arms for Ukraine are “potential military targets,” E.U. Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius responded that such a strike would invoke NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause.
But an aide to Kubilius told Politico that the warning applied “specifically to an aerial bombardment or missile attack on a factory.” If, instead, Russia continues to send covert operatives or hire local criminals to burn, bomb, kill, or otherwise sabotage military and industrial targets in Europe as an extension of its war against Ukraine, the western allies are in a quandary. Do they respond with military force that most are still rebuilding after years of atrophy? Do they answer with their own covert strikes inside Russia?
The NATO alliance and the growing military ties within the European Union didn’t really evolve with “hybrid” threats in mind that leave room for barely credible deniability. It’s one thing to revive previously moribund armies and navies; it’s another to decide how to respond to attacks that are deliberately kept just below the threshold that would trigger an open response. And while Europe dithers, the Russians are constantly adjusting their perception of where that threshold lies.
“Until recently, Russia’s hybrid attacks against targets in the West have mainly been aimed at creating fear and weakening public support for aid to Ukraine,” Denmark’s intelligence agency cautioned last month. “The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) assesses that Russia will intensify its hybrid war by carrying out more frequent attacks against the West and NATO, with greater consequences for the targeted countries than in the past.”
Europe Can Defend Itself. Will It?
In fact, Europeans are perfectly capable of defending themselves against a threat from Russia. Germany alone has an economy nearly twice the size of Russia’s in GDP terms. The members of NATO and the European Union possess more advanced technology than Russia and have access to American arms, even as the United States distance itself from the alliance. But are they prepared for a conflict that may not resemble a traditional war after decades of planning for a 20th-century scenario?
The Russia–Ukraine conflict has proven revelatory for military and political leaders, reviving conventional trench warfare and armored engagements while combining them with rapid deployment of high-tech, cost-efficient innovations. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported on NATO exercises in Latvia focused on applying the lessons of how warfare has been reshaped by the drone revolution on Ukraine’s battlefields—though with mixed results thus far.
Equally significant is the shift toward a world where conflict can arrive without uniforms and with official deniability, even as the responsible actors are widely known. This is not the kind of war that conquers territory, yet it kills people, destroys property, devastates economies, and can sway political choices.
As the United States pivots to other concerns, Europe is rebuilding its militaries and reclaiming the capability to defend itself. Yet the continent still seems ill-equipped for a form of conflict that is not only looming but already present.
