PARIS — This week’s hacks of European refrigeration systems underscored for many analysts the stunning breadth of Russia’s hybrid war effort — a campaign that has added attacks on food supply chains to arson, bomb plots, undersea cable threats and airspace incursions across the continent.
Moscow’s campaign of disruption is growing more brazen and destructive by the day, European leaders are warning, just as Washington examines possible changes to its military presence in Europe.
Monday’s wave of supermarket sabotage followed last month’s attempted arson attack on a Starlink communications station in Lithuania. In Britain, the Royal Air Force began using drones in September to track suspicious Russian ships loitering above the nation’s vital undersea communication cables in the English Channel. And in Poland and Estonia, officials have renewed their charges that Russian intelligence services are targeting equipment and manufacturers.
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The prospect of fewer American troops on the continent at such a critical juncture is fueling interrogations about NATO’s ability — and perhaps more importantly, its willingness — to respond if Russia decides to escalate further.
Ukraine allies hit
On Sept. 23, arsonists set fire to power equipment at a Starlink ground station south of Poland’s capital, Warsaw. Two Turkish nationals suspected of carrying out the attack were later arrested in Germany.
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Unsurprisingly, Polish investigators believe the operation was masterminded by Russia.
In Estonia, an Aug. 15 fire damaged premises belonging to Milrem Robotics, a company that manufactures unmanned ground vehicles for Ukraine. Three Latvian citizens were arrested. Estonia’s government said Sept. 29 that its intelligence service had traced the attack to Russian security agencies.
Moscow, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied involvement in any sabotage operations.
“Right now, Russia’s number one priority is Ukraine. What Russia is doing in Europe is connected to that,” Marek Kohv, who heads the Security and Resilience Program at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security, told The Washington Times.
Mr. Kohv, a former Estonian military intelligence officer, said Russian operatives increasingly target defense and armaments factories and the infrastructure used to transfer weapons and military equipment to Ukraine.
The executives heading those companies have, too, faced credible threats.
In 2024, U.S. intelligence uncovered an alleged Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, chief executive of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. Washington warned Berlin, which then moved to protect him.
Western officials said other European defense industry leaders had also been targeted.
Russia adapts
After Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, European governments expelled nearly 1,000 Russian diplomats and suspected intelligence officers, temporarily disrupting Moscow’s clandestine networks and hampering their ability to conduct operations in Europe.
Yet Russia’s intelligence agencies were quick to adapt, turning to social media and criminal intermediaries to find new, cheap and disposable recruits, all the while retaining plausible deniability.
The Milrem investigation showed how easily suspected operatives can cross borders inside Europe’s Schengen zone, while Russian recruiters use local intermediaries to operate far from Moscow without exposing established intelligence officers.
Britain’s MI5 chief, Ken McCallum, warned on Oct. 13 that Russia was increasingly relying on proxies and escalating attacks, all the while trying — and so far succeeding — to remain below the threshold of NATO’s collective-defense clause.
Estonia, hit by extensive cyberattacks in 2007, has long treated Russian covert operations as a national security threat. Mr. Kohv said the immediate priority should be better protection of infrastructure, including privately owned facilities vulnerable to drones and sabotage.
Border defense
Estonia recently made headlines by moving the headquarters of its 1st Infantry Brigade from Tapa to Johvi, about 30 miles from Russia. The redeployment puts troops closer to the border under a strategy that calls for confronting invading forces immediately, rather than yielding ground while waiting for NATO reinforcements.
“We have to start from the border and win from the first battles,” brigade commander Col. Tarmo Kundla said.
The Baltic states are putting their money where their mouth is: Estonia has budgeted 5.4% of gross domestic product for defense this year; Lithuania has allocated 5.38% and Latvia 4.73%. The three countries have also started the construction of a common line of border fortifications, while Poland is strengthening its own frontiers with Belarus to the east and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the north.
Mr. Kohv, however, cautioned that Estonia’s recent redeployment follows a doctrine developed years ago, and should not be construed as indicative of an imminent invasion. Russia currently lacks the forces and the will for a conventional confrontation with NATO, he said.
Sabotage and attacks on infrastructure remain the more immediate danger.
Those attacks, he added, demand a response from domestic security services as much as from the military.
Washington reassesses
The Pentagon launched a review of U.S. troop deployments in Europe this summer, part of an effort to shift greater responsibility for the continent’s conventional defense onto European NATO members.
The United States has already announced reductions of roughly 5,000 troops in Germany and 700 in Romania. Its rotational deployment to Estonia was temporarily suspended, although Tallinn said in September that an American contingent of comparable size would return in November.
Estonian officials regard the deployment as a vital part of NATO deterrence, whose credibility has been shaken by President Trump’s repeated criticism of European allies, his overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and growing doubts about Washington’s willingness to defend its NATO partners in a crisis.
The review has drawn fierce criticism in Congress. Asked about its implications by The Washington Times, the office of Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, referred to an August statement warning against withdrawals from NATO’s eastern flank.
“Putin’s reckless probing of Polish and Romanian territory coincides with the decision to withdraw U.S. brigade combat teams from each country over the last nine months,” Mr. Wicker said.
He supported President Trump’s push for NATO allies to spend 5% of GDP on defense and related security needs by 2035 but cautioned that higher budgets would not immediately deliver new forces.
“It will take time to translate this spending into military capability,” he said.
A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis identified European dependence on U.S. intelligence, aerial refueling, logistics and command systems as capabilities that cannot be replaced quickly. This uncertainty is especially acute for the Baltic states, whose defense planning hinges on rapid allied reinforcement.
Dangerous calculation
Denmark’s military intelligence service warned on Sept. 24 of a “low but growing” risk of a limited Russian attack on a NATO country bordering Russia, even while Mr. Putin’s forces remain bogged down in Ukraine.
While it considered a full invasion highly unlikely, it raised the possibility of limited strikes, false-flag attacks or incursions by unmarked troops, recalling Russia’s “little green men” during its 2014 illegal seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
The agency warned that Moscow might gamble on a limited attack if it doubted Washington would come to Europe’s defense.
In a June interview with The Times, Denys Kapustin, the far-right commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, an anti-Kremlin unit fighting alongside Ukraine, imagined a wave of attacks on European train stations and drone disruptions at airports to distract NATO ahead of a ground incursion into the Baltics.
“And then I will attack Baltic countries. While you’re distracted,” he said, speaking hypothetically from the perspective of a Russian planner.
Mr. Putin could then march armed men in unmarked uniforms across the Estonian border and offer himself as a mediator between those “local self-defense groups” and Western governments, he suggested.
“In exchange for those ’little green men’ to put down their weapons and give back the territory they seized in Estonia, you, the Europeans, you stop helping Ukraine. That’s it.” Mr. Kapustin offered the scenario as a stark warning, not as evidence of a Russian operational plan.
For his part, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte rejected claims that the alliance lacked answers. “We have all the response options we need,” he said in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, on Oct. 14, noting that NATO’s responses to hybrid attacks would not always be public.
But military readiness is only part of the problem. Mr. Kohv acknowledged that security services cannot stop every act of sabotage. Moscow, he said, hopes each new attack will frighten voters into blaming their governments’ support for Ukraine and backing politicians who promise to “go back to business as usual.”
“What about the society?” Mr. Kapustin asked, leaning back in his chair in the deserted lobby of an Odesa hotel one warm June evening.
“Will your society support your army? Will your society support the military taking part in war, especially far away in some Eastern European lands where you have never even been to?”
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