How to Defeat Russia’s Shadow War
The Kremlin-directed attacks on Europe are a sign of weakness. Europe must craft a robust new response to raise the pressure on Russia.
Europe’s response to Russia’s increasingly ferocious attacks on Ukraine and a widening shadow war campaign against European NATO has been familiar: strategic restraint.
That strategy is increasingly outdated. Something new is needed.
Hybrid warfare operates in the space between strategic necessity and military constraint. Both Putin and his entourage are faced with a stalling front line, an unfolding fiscal crisis, and Ukrainian strikes reaching ever further into Russian soil that, in autocratic regime logic, demand an aggressive response, not the negotiating table. Putin must escalate, driven by the realities of regime survival, whether Europe shows restraint or not.
Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland nearly three decades ago, argued on September 13 that the Kremlin’s escalating reaction to Western pressure was “a sign of success” and that Europe should not “take its foot off the gas”.
While the shadow campaign against Europe does not prove Russia is buckling, it does reveal that it is willing to up the ante.
In that case, restraint will not bring an autocrat like Putin to the table. Powell’s experience offers a useful principle: adversaries rarely negotiate seriously until the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of settlement. Getting to this point, through generating a real crisis for Moscow, must be Europe’s principal objective.
The correct response is no longer strategic restraint, but to see the Kremlin’s increasing hybrid activity as an opportunity by using Russian hybrid attacks to strengthen Europe’s strategic position, not be weakened by them.
The Kremlin’s escalation will not, as of yet, head toward direct military confrontation with NATO despite all the recent rhetoric. Putin will continue to operate in Europe’s so-called grey zone: a strategic campaign of coercion, subversion, and sabotage designed to stay just below the threshold that would trigger a conventional response. Putin calculates he does not need direct military confrontation. He just needs Kyiv’s allies to lessen their support for fear of the consequences. That’s even more important given the Kremlin’s planned aerial offensive against Ukrainian power and water systems in the winter months.
That is the real message behind incidents such as August’s drone attack on Leipzig airport: supporting Ukraine carries real, potentially violent costs, so restraint looks like the responsible choice.
Europe’s response so far has been completely inadequate. Statements, diplomatic expulsions, and sanctions that follow each incident are not consequences the Kremlin fears. They are costs it has long learned to absorb. Indeed, the same airport was targeted in 2024, when an incendiary parcel ignited at its DHL logistics center as part of a wider European sabotage operation linked to Russia.
The pattern extends well beyond one German airport. In Slovakia, authorities foiled an attempted arson attack on Skyeton, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. In Estonia, investigators are examining Russian involvement in a fire at Milrem Robotics, which supplies unmanned ground vehicles to Kyiv. Poland’s energy grid has been hit directly: cyberattacks targeted two combined heat and power plants and the systems managing renewable generation for nearly half a million customers.
Alongside sabotage sits open coercion. Moscow recently threatened “the most catastrophic consequences” for the United Kingdom for handing Storm Shadow cruise missile blueprints to Ukraine. Drone incursions in NATO airspace are increasingly routine: in May, a Shahed drone struck an apartment block in Romania, injuring civilians and forcing Bucharest to divert resources to guard its own territory instead. NATO jets shot down a drone over Lithuania on September 15, the latest of more than a dozen incursions into the Baltic states in recent weeks.
Fear of miscalculation in responding to such aggression has shaped Western strategic caution on Russia for a generation. Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has challenged this aversion directly, warning that the West continues to “paralyze” itself for fear the Kremlin will go “rogue”.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s response to Leipzig went further than most: consulate closures, an expanded sanctions list, a shuttered cultural center. Yet it does not significantly break with the policy tradition. In fact, Putin boasted about it at the BRICS conference: a badge of pride, not a source of dread.
Europe has to change the calculation. A response that punishes an operation but does not alter the next decision in Moscow is not deterrence.
Europe must respond by increasing both the cost of attacking Europe and increasing the cost of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Statements, criminal charges, diplomatic expulsions, and sanctions all have their place. But if they repeatedly respond to Russian attacks without changing Moscow’s calculus, the Kremlin will keep treating it as the cost of doing business.
Europe needs policies that actually raise the price.
One needs to be put in place urgently: intercepting Russian drones and missiles over western Ukraine. Radosław made the case explicitly this week, arguing it is “far better to shoot it down in self-defense while it is still in Ukrainian airspace” than to wait for debris to fall on NATO territory, a shift that would also let Lviv’s airport reopen. Dmitry Medvedev has warned that NATO downing drones over Ukraine “will mean only one thing: NATO’s war with Russia.” Russian threats are inevitable, but they are also familiar. Any such action by European states would be wholly justified under international law and very low risk if carried out from NATO territory. Extending the logic of self-defense past the border is not a new war. It is closing the gap between the risk Europe already accepts on its own soil and the risk it has so far refused to accept on Ukraine’s.
Beyond drone interception, sharper tools exist. Seize, not just freeze, Russia’s frozen sovereign assets. Interdict shadow-fleet tankers in real time instead of sanctioning them after the fact. Lift the remaining restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range Western weapons to strike deeper and harder into Russia itself.
Some will argue Putin’s shadow war reflects long-practiced Russian strategy, not a sign of weakness: that Moscow has treated sabotage and subversion as legitimate instruments of state power for decades, and current escalatory events in Europe are continuity, not signs of desperation. This objection misses what has changed. The new wave of attacks (attempting to shut down power networks, as in Poland, or blow up aircraft, as in Germany) represents higher rungs in the escalation ladder.
Russia has always had a hybrid playbook; what has changed is that Putin now needs it more, since the alternatives — a battlefield breakthrough, a fractured Western coalition, a Washington able to pressure Kyiv into concessions — have not yet materialized. It’s also important to understand the scale and impact of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure and arms manufacturers. Putin is being made to appear weak in front of his own people. It’s not a great look for a despot.
Europe’s task is to make the shadow strategy, alongside the conventional war, more and more costly.
It can no longer treat Ukraine’s sovereignty and Russia’s increasingly widening response as two separate problems: one grand strategy, the other a matter of domestic resilience. It must apply the same calculation on every front where the Kremlin is still testing whether escalation is worth it.
By Maksym Beznosiuk and William Dixon. Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst and writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues. Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.
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