On Russian state television, the Kremlin’s propagandists have for years threatened to bomb European capitals, even while the country’s diplomats insist that no such war is imminent. Lately, the denials have gotten hard to sustain, as European intelligence agencies have ascribed hundreds of clandestine sabotage operations—cyberattacks in Italy, arson in the United Kingdom, undersea-cable ruptures in the Baltic, severed pig heads left outside French mosques—to Russia.
U.S. intelligence assessments conclude that a conventional Russian attack on a NATO country is likely to happen sometime from this fall to 2029. But another possibility is that Moscow will remain content with sabotage and intimidation. This hybrid campaign is all the war Russia wants or needs—and stoking fear that Moscow just might directly strike Ukraine’s European allies is part of it.
If this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin is really up to in Europe, then he was telling the truth when he assured Trump this week that Russia has “no aggressive intentions against European statehood.” Moscow has not massed troops on any NATO member’s border. Rather, it has been sending a carefully calibrated message meant to persuade Europe to stop supporting Ukraine.
[Read: Putin’s explosive message to Trump]
For Moscow, this has been a summer of setbacks in Ukraine. Russia stalled on the battlefield and sustained damage from thousands of Ukrainian long-range drones that plunged the country into fuel shortages. And so it escalated elsewhere in Europe: Fires broke out at ammunition plants in Italy, Bulgaria, and Estonia last month, and explosive-laden drones were discovered near a German power plant and at an airport in Leipzig, apparently intended to destroy Ukrainian cargo planes.
From the Kremlin’s point of view, Europe has been deepening its involvement in Ukraine. At the beginning of the full-scale war, Europe donated weapons to Ukraine from its own stocks. Within two years, European governments were paying Ukrainian factories to manufacture arms. Last year, Fire Point, a Ukrainian missile-and-drone manufacturer, announced that it would establish a solid-fuel production plant in Denmark, making it the first such arms company to expand production abroad. Today, Europe provides the bulk of financial assistance to Kyiv. It has also become Ukraine’s secure production base—Ukrainian weapons are manufactured in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France, Romania, and Spain.
Because Kyiv is attacking Russia’s rear, it’s logical to worry that Moscow will attack Ukraine’s. Russian security services are almost certainly capable of carrying out a lethal attack on European soil. And Western war games have entertained many possibilities along those lines. Among them are a limited Russian incursion into a small Baltic town that has a Russian-speaking population; a full-scale invasion of the Baltic states, launched simultaneously from Belarus and Kaliningrad, Russia’s European exclave, to cut them off from the rest of Europe; the rapid creation of an impenetrable drone “kill zone” on European soil; and a strategic blockade of the Baltic Sea. Some of these scenarios are plausible; others would require hundreds of thousands of Russian troops to crisscross Europe.
Russia has not visibly prepared for any such scenario, however. Instead, it continues to wage its hybrid war—which European security services continue to thwart. Such are the headlines: Drones carrying explosives are discovered in Leipzig, improvised explosive devices are found near a German power plant, and flying objects are spotted near airports.
Moscow may not much care that these operations get foiled. In a way, the effect is similar to that of Russia’s harassment of journalists and embassy workers stationed in Moscow: Things in their apartment get rearranged, signs of eavesdropping are deliberately made obvious, or a window is left open in the middle of winter. Such interference conveys a sinister message: We’re watching you. We have access to you. You are not in control. But it’s still different from blowing up the apartment.
Putin has generally chosen to fully engage the Russian military only in conflicts that he feels (rightly or, in the case of Ukraine, wrongly) assured of winning. This does not describe any hypothetical attack on the Baltic states, which have heavily fortified borders, conduct regular military exercises, and spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense.
That’s not to mention the thousands of British, German, and Canadian troops stationed near the Baltics as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. Moscow may be willing to wager that the United States won’t intervene should Russia attack Estonia. But Russia would then find itself at war with numerous European states armed with submarines, aircraft carriers, fifth-generation fighter jets, long-range cruise missiles, and even nuclear weapons—all while it was still fighting in Ukraine.
Russia’s hybrid war has not succeeded in its likely purpose: stopping weapons, money, and intelligence from flowing into Ukraine from Europe. Kyiv has more arms, funds, and—judging by its strikes on Russian soil—intelligence than ever before. Neither has the Russian campaign taken out a European satellite that supplies Ukraine with intelligence, say, or destroyed a shipment of Patriot missiles.
But Putin persists in this campaign for a reason. Through inexpensive means, expendable operatives, and a steady stream of chilling leaks, the Kremlin has millions of Westerners braced for it to wage a full-scale war against Europe. Regardless of whether that war is likely, Putin will be demanding concessions in exchange for bringing it to an end.
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