An armed drone conveniently located near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig airport in Germany. Russian drones breaching the airspace of Romania and the Baltics, forcing both to scramble combat aircraft. A Russian airstrike landing dangerously close to a checkpoint near Poland’s border with Ukraine. An assassination of a dissident in the Spanish city of Villajoyosa. Arson attacks from the United Kingdom and France to Estonia. The list of Russian-sponsored gray-zone attacks on the European continent is long and growing by the day, and nobody in Europe seems to have a good idea of how to stop them.
The only thing the Europeans agree on these days is that Russian President Vladimir Putin, with few territorial gains on the ground in Ukraine, is increasingly expanding the conflict to Kyiv’s military supporters. French President Emmanuel Macron gathered the top candidates of the 2027 French presidential election for a meeting on the issue this month, warning that Putin’s attacks are bound to get worse before they get better. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that Russia could soon lob missiles and drones into NATO territory to undermine the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense clause. The Danish intelligence service went a step further, assessing that there’s a possibility of Moscow attacking a NATO member state within a few months.
Diagnosing the problem is the easy part. Finding a solution, however, is much more difficult. Indeed, Russia’s gray-zone operations, which include everything from burning down warehouses storing defense equipment bound for the Ukrainian army to meddling in Europe’s parliamentary elections, are designed to cause havoc on the continent without the risk of launching a full-blown conventional conflict that, at its worst, would kill hundreds of thousands of people and possibly involve the use of nuclear weapons (three of NATO’s members are nuclear armed states). As much as Putin enjoys inciting the Europeans, he’s not insane enough to pick a fight with a military alliance in NATO that holds conventional and technological superiority – particularly when tens of thousands of Russian troops continue to lose their lives in Ukraine. The same can be said of NATO, an alliance that hasn’t fought a great-power war since its establishment in 1949.
Author
Events on Ukraine-Russia
