Europe Is Asking the Wrong Question About Russia’s Hybrid War

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Europe is asking the wrong question about Russia’s hybrid campaign. As the attacks escalate, the debate has turned to what to call them—acts of war, state-sponsored terrorism, or something else. This talk about terminology reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat.

Over the past months, Russia’s pressure on Europe has changed in two ways. First, the attacks have become more frequent and moved toward the kinetic end of the spectrum: drones, explosives, sabotage of critical infrastructure. Second, Moscow has become visibly less careful about preserving plausible deniability, which has long been considered a defining feature of hybrid operations.

Europe is asking the wrong question about Russia’s hybrid campaign. As the attacks escalate, the debate has turned to what to call them—acts of war, state-sponsored terrorism, or something else. This talk about terminology reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat.

Over the past months, Russia’s pressure on Europe has changed in two ways. First, the attacks have become more frequent and moved toward the kinetic end of the spectrum: drones, explosives, sabotage of critical infrastructure. Second, Moscow has become visibly less careful about preserving plausible deniability, which has long been considered a defining feature of hybrid operations.

On Sept. 1, Germany announced that Russia was behind a failed attempt to strike a Ukraine-bound cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport with explosive-laden drones in August. Days later, a Russian frigate fired flares at a Danish military helicopter in the Baltic, and a drone likely carrying explosives was shot down over Lithuania. On Sept. 13, a Russian drone hit a train at Yahodyn, a village just on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, minutes after another train carrying former European leaders—including former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt—had pulled out. A strong case can be made that these actions were an openly aggressive answer to Berlin. The message to Germany and Europe is simple: Moscow does not care about being named. It wants Europe to know it is responsible, because it is betting that Europe’s response will only highlight its weakness.

Two factors explain the shift. The previous phase, built mostly on cyber-operations and disinformation, drew a European response that Moscow read as feeble. The course of the war, meanwhile, makes it more urgent to wear down European support for Kyiv through public opinion.

The result has been widespread alarm. Hybrid threats, a niche subject until recently, are on the front pages, and intelligence services warn of worse to come. Some fear the next step could be a limited move at NATO’s edge: Russia seizing a small section of territory in one of the Baltic states and brandishing nuclear threats on the bet that no ally will risk escalation over such a limited incursion. The aim would be to test Article 5 and break the credibility of allied deterrence.

Many politicians and commentators have responded by calling for an end to the term itself. Wolfgang Ischinger, who chairs the Munich Security Conference, argues that drones, explosives, and sabotage are acts of war and should be called that. Kaupo Rosin, head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, dismisses “hybrid” as a euphemism for state-sponsored terrorism. Others argue that describing Russian belligerence as “hybrid” is a convenient way for European leaders to avoid confronting their publics with the reality of the threat.

But the label is not what stands in the way of an effective response.

Hybrid campaigns rest on a precise calculus: The impact of each single attack is never enough to cross the threshold that triggers a serious response. That threshold is not technical, but rather political, and Russia has spent years patiently raising it. The Kremlin’s strategy is sound: In 21st-century liberal democracies, building the political capital needed to confront a threat that looks more like a slowly rising tide than a raging fire is a daunting task. And so the tide keeps rising.

Renaming the problem does not change the dynamic. If the trend continues, even a move on NATO territory could remain below the rising threshold—regardless of whether the actions are called hybrid war, real war, or something else. Moscow’s turn to kinetic means is best read as a test of how far the line has already moved. The real target was never physical: it is cohesion, political will, and credibility of Western institutions. Once the idea of a constant drone threat settles in public consciousness, the attacker gains regardless of the outcome of any single strike.

Attribution alone does not change this calculus. When naming Russia is where the response ends, it only exposes the gap between the violence of the act and the weakness of the reply. Every action sets a rule and sends a message, and Moscow reads those messages very well.

The task for Europe is to reverse the equation and prove Moscow wrong. That requires a common European deterrence doctrine for hybrid threats that makes the cost of each attack tangible, predictable, and higher than its benefit to the attacker. The levers exist. Energy sanctions are one; while they come with costs for Europe, they are accessible and powerful. Seizing frozen Russian assets is another: The legal and political dilemmas are serious, yet the instrument is in European hands. Military aid to Ukraine is a third lever in a war where fear of escalation has too often dictated the timing and pace of Western support.

None of this is easy. The rule of law complicates action on assets, and governments accountable to voters hesitate over measures that raise energy prices. These levers are Europe’s strengths and, at the same time, vulnerabilities that Moscow exploits.

This matters in Washington as much as in Berlin. A line Europe fails to draw below the Article 5 threshold requiring defense against an attack is a line that the alliance—and the United States with it—may eventually have to defend above that threshold.

The spotlight on hybrid threats is also a significant opportunity. Few themes are better placed to give European security the cohesive push it badly needs. It is up to Europe’s leaders to make Russia’s move toward more destructive attacks a miscalculation rather than one more step toward Western fragmentation.