Interesting piece, frightening too, in The Irish Times on Saturday by Daniel McLaughlin, the newspaper’s newly appointed Eastern Europe Correspondent.
A divided Europe fears ‘escalation’ as Moscow’s unacknowledged attacks become more reckless
There have been assassinations, cyber attacks, election interference and plots to put firebombs on cargo planes. Undersea cables have been cut and GPS signals for airliners scrambled. Western security services say a long Russian campaign of unacknowledged aggression is becoming increasingly reckless and destructive. Are Russia and the West already fighting an undeclared war?
“No, we are not at war. But we are certainly not at peace either,” new Nato secretary general Mark Rutte said last month. “Hostile actions against Allied countries are real and accelerating. Malicious cyber attacks on both sides of the Atlantic. Assassination attempts on British and German soil. Explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Czechia. The weaponisation of migrants crossing illegally into Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland. Jamming to disrupt civil aviation in the Baltic region.
“These attacks are not just isolated incidents. They are the result of a co-ordinated campaign to destabilise our societies and discourage us from supporting Ukraine. They circumvent our deterrence and bring the front line to our front doors.”
Since the murder in central London of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in 2006, up to the severing of power and communications cables in the Baltic Sea in recent weeks, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been accused of using an array of “hybrid” or “grey zone” attacks to undermine and intimidate the West while retaining a degree of deniability and avoiding a conventional act of war.
“They’ve always been doing this sort of stuff, and most of the time the West has substantially ignored it. What was Britain’s response to assassination attempts on its soil? Pitiful, really,” says Lukas Milevski, an assistant professor specialising in military strategy at Leiden University in the Netherlands, recalling London’s expulsion of Russian diplomats after Litvinenko’s death and the attempted murder of another ex-Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
“The whole point [for Moscow] is to figure out a way for Russia to achieve its international political objectives by bypassing traditional war ... and if possible to only rely on non-military means,” he adds. “They tried to do this for 20 years with Ukraine and ultimately failed and it became a traditional war.”
Multiple objectives
Rory Cormac, a professor of international relations at Nottingham University, says Russia uses unacknowledged attacks to pursue “multiple objectives” against individual western states and organisations such as Nato.
“One is to disrupt supplies of weapons to Ukraine,” he says. “They also want to undermine the resolve to support Ukraine and increase the political and economic costs of supporting Ukraine. It’s not necessarily about winning or ending wars but about a slow, sapping, draining, subversive process.
“They also want to push and test the limits of Nato’s Article 5, to see what they can get away with, to stoke divisions in Nato and undermine consensus and co-operation,” he adds, referring to the mutual defence clause that binds the 32 countries in the alliance.
“They want to spread uncertainty, paralyse western international institutions and their ability to respond and make decisions.”
While Nato states such as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania seek a strong collective response to hostile Kremlin actions, other members such as Hungary and Slovakia back a softer approach, criticising sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine and arguing that confrontation with Moscow must be avoided at all costs.
Russia’s use of unacknowledged operations to attack the West takes advantage of these divisions and of the need within Nato to establish consensus between divergent members, while Putin’s authoritarian regime acts without constraints.
“Any ambiguity or doubt makes the response [to attacks] much more difficult and induces paralysis,” says Cormac. “Even a small element of doubt will be exploited by those who are more sympathetic to Russia. That grain of doubt and lack of acknowledgment impedes response.”
While sending substantial military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s full invasion in 2022, western powers have been at constant pains to avoid what they call “escalation” with Russia, leading to delays and limits on support for Kyiv that have compromised its defence.
Armed attack
Fear of confrontation with the Kremlin also inclines Nato to treat its covert attacks as less than acts of war, so avoiding the possible activation of Article 5, which would oblige all members to join forces against an enemy. International law is also unclear over what constitutes an armed attack and on other issues, making any such judgement political.
“This threshold is a mutually agreed or constructed thing. Something is sub-threshold because we in the West say that it is sub-threshold, because we are worried about escalation,” says Cormac. “A lot of western counties and leaders want it to be sub-threshold and don’t have the political willingness to fight back.”
Experts say this vagueness is only expanding the “grey zone” in which Putin feels free to act with impunity; last year, for example, Russia was allegedly behind the dispatch of incendiary devices to cargo hubs in Germany and Britain, which could have started fires onboard aircraft flying to North America, western security officials say.
“It’s all very well being ‘deliberately vague’ when signalling to Russia what the threshold for invoking Article 5 is, but the challenge for the new secretary general of Nato is that 32 Nato states need to have clarity ... on what constitutes an armed attack in today’s hybrid war,” says Charlie Edwards, senior adviser for strategy and national security at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Russian attacks are becoming more frequent, bolder and more reckless. So there is a genuine question to ask of Nato and western capitals, about what more they should do to respond, in the absence of meeting the Article 5 threshold.”
The West may be doing its utmost to avoid escalation with a bellicose nuclear power, but what if Russia already thinks and acts like it is fighting a wider war?
“Western governments are still making the basic mistake of thinking that Russian sabotage operations in Europe are part of a different campaign from the conventional war that is playing out in Ukraine – when in fact it is all part of the same war the Russians are fighting,” Edwards says.
Tapping into centuries-old Russian tropes, the Putin regime now justifies its increasingly extreme actions – from sweeping domestic repression to the ruinous war on Ukraine – by claiming to be defending the motherland from devious and aggressive western states that want to rip it apart.
Great power
“All the revolutions since the late 1980s in ex-Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact countries . . . are seen by the Russians as western-backed coups that constitute aggression against Russia and its interests and its sphere of influence as a great power,” Milevski says.
“So Russia thinks it is at war with the West in a non-military way. They believe they see a sustained campaign of successful western aggression against them and they are trying to turn the tables.”
Europe claims that its mild response to Russian hybrid attacks shows it favours peace over conflict, but if Moscow thinks it would never use force under any circumstances, “then we’re really not choosing to be peaceful, we’re choosing to be harmless”, Milevski warns.
“And that is a terrible state of affairs, especially when you’re next to Russia.”
