Western governments are struggling to respond to what they say is a growing Russian campaign of sabotage attempts including arson at military bases and civilian infrastructure across Europe.
The goal of these “grey zone” attacks, which security officials said were often led by Russian GRU military intelligence, is to promote disunity among Ukraine’s allies, disrupt military supplies to Kyiv and test western resolve.
“Russia is trying to send a message that it is omnipotent and can disturb our societies . . . to instigate fear and to find ways to make our lives more miserable,” Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkēvičs told the Financial Times. “It is also testing our response, because if we don’t respond these attacks are going to increase.”
He said Nato allies were “trying to figure out” how to respond short of invoking the military alliance’s mutual defence clause known as Article 5. “We are not going to fire missiles at Russia because of a rather small-scale incident,” he added.
The issue has risen to the top of the agenda of Ukraine’s western allies following recent incidents.
These have included an alleged Russian-backed arson attack on a Ukrainian-linked warehouse in the UK, a sabotage plot against US-military bases in Germany, attempts to disrupt Europe’s railway signal networks, and the jamming of GPS civil aviation navigation systems in the Baltics. Microsoft has warned that Russia is directing “malign disinformation” against the Paris Olympic Games.
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, last week said “virtually every ally” at a Nato meeting of foreign ministers in Prague raised the issue of “the Kremlin . . . intensifying its hybrid attacks against frontline states, Nato members, setting fire and sabotaging supply warehouses, disregarding sea borders and demarcations in the Baltics, mounting more and more cyber attacks, continuing to spread disinformation”.
“We know what they’re up to, and we will respond both individually and collectively as necessary,” Blinken added.
Dutch defence minister Kajsa Ollongren said Moscow was trying “to intimidate us” and it was crucial that “we do not allow this to happen”.
The unresolved question is how. Russia, said one western defence adviser, has a highly developed lexicon for hybrid warfare and applies it systematically across all potential weapons, be that “information, psychological operations or things that go bang”. The west, by contrast, was so behind it even “lacks a vocabulary of what hybrid war means”.
Moscow “is also constantly observing our reactions, and testing to see which of their actions works — before following up with more”, the adviser added.
One problem is the incidents often appear to be random and against targets unrelated to Ukraine — such as a fire that broke out in an Ikea store in Lithuania last month which Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, suggested could have been the work of foreign saboteurs.
Another problem in formulating an appropriate response is that the incidents are often carried out by proxies, making it harder to attribute them directly to Russia. The Kremlin has consistently dismissed European governments’ accusations of hybrid warfare.
One western counter-intelligence officer said Moscow’s increased used of proxies flowed from Europe’s recent mass expulsion of hundreds of Russian diplomats and spies. Many alternative operatives are now drawn from criminal gangs, the officer said, which was a sign the west had succeeded in limiting Moscow’s options, although this also brought new risks.
“There is a greater chance of collateral damage and casualties as the proxies are not skilled in tradecraft, such as explosives,” the officer said.
Poland has been a particular focus of sabotage efforts, as it is a hub for western military supplies being delivered to neighbouring Ukraine. Authorities over the past month have arrested a dozen people on spying and sabotage-related charges. Most of them were recruited from organised crime, and Tusk has said they were “directly implicated in the name of Russian [intelligence] services”.
Officials said Moscow has been deploying similar, so-called “active measures” since the 1920s, and how to best counter them is a subject as old as the tactic itself. But current thinking, as explored in a recent EU-Nato report and an inquiry by the UK Parliament, typically involves a three-step process.
The first is to recognise that the attacks are happening and to call them out. The second involves building national resilience — by hardening critical infrastructure, cyber-proofing computer systems, and building media literacy among the public against disinformation campaigns.
The third step, how to respond, is the hardest as it requires a deterrence strategy that contains credible retaliation but that also avoids, as one senior western military official put it, “unethical or illegal means of the kind that Russia uses”.
One possible measure, as proposed by Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský, is to restrict the visas of Russian diplomats so they cannot travel outside the country they are accredited in. “We really need to act,” he told the FT. While Prague expelled most Russian diplomats in recent years, with only seven remaining in the Czech capital, hundreds continue to be accredited in Vienna from where they can travel anywhere in Europe “and I cannot stop that”, he said, adding: “Russian influence is not welcomed in Prague.”
A more aggressive response might involve a tit-for-tat information campaign inside Russia that rams home the costs of the Ukraine war.
“If you are an average Russian not a day should go by when you are not reminded of the huge number casualties that Russian troops have suffered,” suggested Eliot Cohen, a former US state department adviser now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
Either way, western officials said, the central problem remains that Russia’s grey zone attacks are unpredictable, come in multiple forms and are asymmetric so that retaliation in kind risks escalating the confrontation with Russia.
Rinkēvičs cited the example of a subsea cable being cut in the Baltic Sea. One approach, he said, would be to increase Nato marine patrols. A more extreme one would be to close the sea to Russian vessels, even though that would be tantamount to “a declaration of war”.
“We should be able to discuss all kinds of [retaliatory] instruments,” Rinkēvičs said. “I’m not saying that all of them can be used. But if we restrict ourselves, without any discussion, we just invite further creative actions by Russia — and they are the masters of hybrid war.”
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