Europe is under attack from Russia. Why isn’t it fighting back?

Western countries have shied away from reacting to Kremlin acts of sabotage and terror.

By LAURA KAYALI, DIRK BANSE, WOLFGANG BÜSCHER, ULRICH KRAETZER, UWE MÜLLER
and CHRISTIAN SCHWEPPE

^{Illustrations by Ricardo Tomás for POLITICO}

If not for a delay in a connecting flight, the incendiary bomb would likely have burst into flames in the belly of a plane flying high above the European Union. 

Instead, it ignited on the ground in Germany’s Leipzig airport, setting fire to a DHL air freight container. 

Western intelligence officials believe the attack, which took place in July, was a trial run by Russian agents who planned to place similar bombs on flights to the United States. 

“We have been observing aggressive actions by the Russian intelligence services for some time now,” said Thomas Haldenwang, who recently stepped down as president of Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency. 

“Russia is using the entire toolbox, from influencing political discussions to cyber attacks on critical infrastructure to sabotage on a significant scale,” he said. 

The Kremlin has long carried out so-called hybrid warfare against European countries, including disinformation campaigns, hacking, cyberattacks and election interference to destabilize European societies and, in the past few years, push them to decrease military support for Ukraine.

Last week, Germany said that two undersea telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea were severed as a result of sabotage.

“We have to conclude, without knowing exactly who did it, that it is a hybrid action and we also have to assume — without knowing it — that it is sabotage,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

Days earlier, a Russian spy ship, the Yantar, was escorted out of the Irish Sea by the Irish navy after it entered Irish-controlled waters and patrolled an area containing critical energy and internet pipelines and cables.

Russia’s actions have also escalated into outright violence.

Russian tanks may not be rolling into Poland or Estonia, but Moscow’s aggression is getting harder to dismiss. A second parcel bomb similar to the one in Leipzig burst into flames in a warehouse near the British city of Birmingham in July, and German anti-terror police are investigating links to cases elsewhere in Europe.

Nils Andreas Stensønes, the head of Norway’s foreign intelligence service, said in September that he expected the Kremlin to ramp up efforts to sabotage oil and gas infrastructure. 

Western officials suspect Moscow was behind arson attacks in Poland, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania and Latvia. And German and U.S. officials say they foiled a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, a German arms manufacturer and a major supplier of artillery shells to the Ukrainian army.

While some governments — especially in Nordic and Baltic countries — have tried to raise the alarm, the collective response from the EU and NATO has so far been notably tame.

“We are simply too polite,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on the sidelines of a NATO summit in July. “They are attacking us every day now.”

Part of the reason for Europe’s passivity can be attributed to fears in Western capitals about being drawn into a conflict for which they’re not prepared, said Daniel Byman, an expert in terrorism and unconventional warfare at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

“Most countries don’t want to be openly confronting Russia more than they already are,” he said. “They’re worried about escalation, a back-and-forth cycle that will make things worse.”

Even the words used to talk about the attacks are reflective of Europe’s timidity, said Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s outgoing foreign minister. 

“Why do we call it hybrid? Because basically when you call it hybrid you don’t need to do anything about it,” Landsbergis told a security conference in Riga last month. “If you call it terrorism, then it implies reaction.” 

The limits of NATO

The Kremlin’s brand of hybrid warfare was developed by the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, now the chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces,  according to the Austrian security expert Gerhard Mangott. 

“It never just means disinformation and propaganda, but a broad arsenal of instruments, from sabotage to the infiltration and financing of parties in the West to the violation of the airspace of NATO states by Russian fighter planes,” said Mangott. 

In Lithuania, Moscow is using disinformation to undermine the planned deployment of a German armed forces brigade, part of a NATO effort to shore up its eastern flank. 

“A lot of fake news is being spread, for example that German soldiers raped women and wanted to occupy Lithuania,” said Darius Jauniškis, the head of the Lithuanian secret service. “Russia wants to sabotage the project. We take this very seriously.”

In October, Poland temporarily suspended — with the backing of EU leaders — asylum rights for migrants entering the country from Belarus, with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk blaming a spike in arrivals on an effort by Moscow to destabilize Warsaw.

Even at their most dangerous, however, Russia’s destabilization campaign seems carefully calibrated not to trigger a collective response from NATO under the Western military alliance’s mutual defense provision, known as Article 5.

Instead, the Kremlin appears to be slowly ratcheting up the pressure to see what it can get away with. “Russia is testing the limits of Article 5 to stir up uncertainty,” Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker and former general staff officer in the German military, said earlier this year.

NATO countries have discussed a collective response to Russia’s hybrid war, a senior NATO official told reporters ahead of a summit in Washington in July. Even if the attacks don’t qualify as acts of war in the traditional sense, countries could invoke Article 4, which calls for consultation when a country’s security is threatened. 

“I don’t think [we can] rule that out in the future,” the senior NATO official said. “Particularly if we were to see a continued worsening and intensification of that kind of activity.” 

But for now, there is little appetite in the alliance for confrontation. 

“NATO is a defensive military alliance that thinks in terms of peacetime and wartime,” General Thierry Burkhard, France’s chief of the defense staff, told the French newspaper Le Figaro earlier this month. NATO’s tools simply aren’t designed for the gray zone in “the world of competition and contestation.”

The “big problem” with invoking Article 5 in the current situation is that “there is no clear definition among allies about what hybrid warfare means,” said Marek Kohv, a former defense and intelligence official who is now with the Estonia-based International Centre for Defence and Security think tank.

“The other main issue is attribution,” Kohv said. “It’s usually coming a little bit later.” 

For example, more than three months after France’s railroads were sabotaged ahead of the Paris Olympics, the country’s intelligence services are still investigating whether Moscow is behind the attack, according to Le Monde.

Another obstacle is the membership in NATO of countries like Hungary and Turkey, “countries that have shown sympathy to Russia,” said the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Byman, making it more difficult for the consensus-based military alliance to make meaningful decisions against Moscow.  

Nonetheless, European governments are showing an increasing willingness to attribute acts of sabotage to Russia. 

Doing so, according to Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur, is the first step in fighting back. “When something happens, just go public,” Pevkur said. “Go show that these guys were hired from Russian services, and these guys conducted these attacks getting the money from Russia.”

Striking back with sanctions

While shying from direct confrontation, EU and NATO countries are gradually ramping efforts to counter Russia’s hybrid war.

In 2021, in response to a Russian effort to undermine the 2017 French presidential election, Paris set up a government agency called Viginum to counter foreign digital interference. 

Since then, the French government has accused Russia of being behind an online campaign to create panic about the proliferation of bed bugs in Paris and linking the outbreak to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees. 

French intelligence services also suspect Moscow of having tasked Bulgarian and Moldovan nationals to draw antisemitic graffiti in the streets of Paris, to stoke domestic tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas. 

In Sweden, the government has set up a special “agency for psychological defense” to identify and counter disinformation.

Protecting critical infrastructure has also become a new priority for NATO and the EU. 

In February 2023, after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, NATO created a new Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell to assess vulnerabilities and coordinate efforts between NATO governments and the private sector. A new EU-NATO Task Force on Resilience of Critical Infrastructure was also created in March 2023.  

Last month, ​​the defense ministers of Germany and Norway, Boris Pistorius and Bjørn Arild Gram, said on the sidelines of NATO defense ministers meeting that they want allies to create five regional centers to monitor and protect subsea infrastructure like telecom lines, gas pipelines and electricity interconnectors.

European countries are also trying to fight back with sanctions. In October, the EU officially set up a new framework that allows the bloc to target individuals and entities involved in Russia’s hybrid warfare — including election interference, sabotage, disinformation, cyber attacks and the instrumentalization of migrants. 

The possible sanctions include asset freezes and travel bans. “The EU’s response remains united and determined,” Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in an emailed statement. “Russia will not succeed in undermining the resilience and stability of the EU and its member states.”

Disposable agents

So far, however, the EU and NATO have had little success in deterring Russia.

Sanctions directly linked to the war in Ukraine have had a limited impact so far, so it’s unclear whether the new regime will be effective.

“The Europeans need to respond in a much more united, forceful way,” said Byman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Military aid [to Ukraine] should be stepped up to show that Russian efforts are having the inverted effect.” 

In addition to boosting defense spending, countries need to ramp up internal security, including police, domestic intelligence services and information sharing between allied governments, said Kohv, of the International Centre for Defence and Security. 

“If we miss this opportunity, Russia will only gain more traction,” Kohv said. “We have to remember that they’re basically mimicking the Soviet Union Cold War sabotage doctrine.” 

One of Europe’s most forceful responses has, perversely, made it more difficult to trace the crimes back to the perpetrators. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European governments have expelled more than 700 Russian spies posing as diplomats. 

In response, the Kremlin has turned to recruiting so-called disposable agents, sometimes via Telegram channels. They are mostly Russian-speaking, IT-savvy young men between 20 and 30, often with a criminal background. Some are ideologically motivated, others do it for money, paid in cryptocurrencies. 

Intelligence officials said that the parcel that caught fire in Leipzig may have been planted by a disposable agent who may not have even known he was planting an incendiary bomb. In April in the U.K., a British man was charged with conducting hostile activities for the benefit of Moscow. 

The important thing, said Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former German ambassador who served as NATO’s first chief of intelligence, is that Europe wakes up to the threat and makes Russia pay a price.

“We are asleep,” said von Loringhoven. “Aggressive behavior has to have political costs.”

Charlie Duxbury and Stuart Lau contributed reporting from Stockholm and Brussels. Dirk Banse, Wolfgang Büscher, Ulrich Kraetzer, Uwe Müller and Christian Schweppe are journalists with Welt, POLITICO’s sister publication in the Axel Springer group.