What Russia Is Really Up To in Europe
Russia is increasingly utilizing 'hybrid warfare' tactics, such as sabotage and cyberattacks, to destabilize Europe and discourage support for Ukraine. While avoiding direct conventional conflict with NATO, these clandestine operations are escalating in frequency and severity.
Why it matters
The shift toward hybrid warfare complicates traditional defense strategies and increases the risk of accidental escalation between Russia and Western powers.
Moscow doesn’t want a conventional war but is busy fighting a hybrid one.
Mikhail Metzel / Pool / AFP / Getty September 10, 2026, 11 AM ET Share Save On Russian state television, the Kremlin’s propagandists have for years threatened to bomb European capitals, even while the country’s diplomats insist that no such war is imminent. Lately, the denials have gotten hard to sustain, as European intelligence agencies have ascribed hundreds of clandestine sabotage operations—cyberattacks in Italy, arson in the United Kingdom, undersea-cable ruptures in the Baltic, severed pig heads left outside French mosques—to Russia.
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