“Hybrid War” Thinking Hobbles Europe’s Response to Russian Sabotage

For Ukraine’s European backers, mid-2024 will likely be remembered as a summer of sabotage. A spate of arsons,[1] explosions,[2] assassination plots,[3] railway disruptions,[4] GPS jamming,[5] and other subversive activities have prompted the US, NATO, and EU to raise the alarm and urge increased vigilance in the West – suspecting, if not directly attributing, Moscow’s hand behind the chaos.[6] Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, went so far as to call out Russia’s military intelligence service – the GRU – in particular, as the organization behind a "staggeringly reckless campaign" on the continent.[7]

The Kremlin all but foreshadowed these activities, having lobbed thinly veiled threats of retaliation against Ukraine’s military supporters since its full-scale invasion in early 2022.[8] The more recent spate of subversion also coincided with Ukrainian strikes and advances deeper into Russian territory – aided in part by relaxed US and UK restrictions on Kyiv’s use of provided weaponry – as well as the Kremlin’s increasing bluster about nuclear weapons.[9] It is clear that president Vladimir Putin aims to link two things in the minds of Western decisionmakers and publics: support to Ukraine and a precarious escalatory spiral.

This blatant attempt to cow the transatlantic community might even be working in some respects. At a minimum, it has accompanied – if not helped to catalyze – a gradual fraying of Western enthusiasm about sustaining support to Ukraine’s war effort.[10] It has also sparked some degree of panic among European capitals, as each new unexplained incident draws almost reflexive suspicion that shadowy GRU operatives are at work.

But in many ways, the West’s renewed sense of urgency raises deeper questions about why Europe remains on the back foot against such brazen acts of Russian subversion – particularly when it has arguably been the norm, not the exception, for over a decade. The answer may partly lie in a doggedly persistent – but ultimately misguided – way of thinking about both the threat and the response. The time has come to rethink “hybrid warfare,” to disaggregate the discrete threats Russia poses to European interests, and to map them to specific, national-level entities, tasked and resourced to address them.

European officials have used the umbrella term “hybrid warfare” to characterize the entire gamut of Russian subversion – applying it variously to cyberattacks, propaganda, and even classical espionage – since 2014. A decade later, it seems that neither NATO nor the EU – umbrella entities with a circumscribed range of capability – have been able to stem the most lethal and disruptive activities.

To be clear, Moscow has never really strayed from the path blazed by its Soviet forebears – the KGB pioneered what would become known as “transnational terrorism” in the 20^th century.[11] A (since-declassified) US intelligence estimate from 1986 outlined how Moscow’s historically zero-sum thinking fuels the Kremlin’s expectations that terrorism – including that which victimizes innocent civilians – should have a “destabilizing effect” on both European security and the pivotal role the US military plays within it. As a result, whatever reservations Russian leaders may have harbored about terrorism as a tactic had “less to do with propriety than with utility,” the memo notes.[12] Almost forty years later, not much seems to have changed.

While Western commentators may cast the Kremlin as reverting back to Cold War-era tactics, the truth is that the Yeltsin-era lull in mischief was not a new normal, but merely a brief reprieve. From the early years of Vladimir Putin’s reign in the 2000s, domestic repression, aggression abroad, propaganda blitzes, targeted murders, and shady politics ramped up – punctuating Russia’s steadily deteriorating relations with the West. Much of the policy focus and institutional heft the trans-Atlantic community once dedicated to countering these dark arts – so called “active measures”[13] – had gradually fallen away, ceding funding, tradecraft, and organization focus to the demands of the Global War on Terror.[14]

An Ownerless Concept

It is from that very era that “hybrid warfare,” as a concept, was born. Initially used to characterize the broad range of irregular, coercive, and criminal tactics of Hizballah in the context of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, “hybrid warfare” has since been applied, at various spots around the globe, to almost any conceivable subversive activity short of formally declared military conflict. It remains to this day the official term-of-art in NATO capitals for thinking about the Russian threat.[15]

Particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s initial incursion into sovereign Ukraine in 2014, European strategists began to draw heavily on this nebulous tagline – driven as much by the need to goose flagging defense budgets and waning NATO cohesion as to analyze Moscow’s behavior.[16] Indeed, the “little green men” that occupied the Crimean peninsula and the propaganda blitz that accompanied them shone a bright light on how vulnerable European borders, critical infrastructure, and information environments truly were.[17] Unfortunately, whatever successes “hybrid warfare” achieved as a politically animating narrative over the following decade, it has clearly failed as an operationalizable concept.[18]

In fact, the narrative space is perhaps the only domain in which thinking about “hybrid threats” coalesced most readily and effectively, to both detect and counter Russian propaganda. Governmental and civil society initiatives like the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force, EU DisinfoLab, and other such initiatives sprang into action, aiming to inoculate Western publics against disinformation campaigns and Moscow’s formidable state-backed media apparatus. Impressive though this work has been, the more physically destructive and violent threats have proved comparatively difficult to blunt.

This is because both the EU and NATO superstructures have limited purviews, legal standing, and resources to do so, particularly without the express invitation and robust cooperation of member-states themselves. After all, national-level surveillance and counterintelligence – including the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution of Russian operatives and their co-conspirators – are foremost the remit of domestic security services and law enforcement agencies, less that of a military alliance or a single-market economic bloc.

This conceptual-operational mismatch has been clear for some time. Despite then-Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis’ entreaty that NATO members should “recognize the need for a comprehensive approach to Alliance security” in 2010, the practical constraints toward this goal revealed themselves over the ensuing years.[19] A shared lexicon did not translate into more fulsome intelligence sharing within NATO, which is most often a byproduct of fleeting circumstances and incentives.[20]“Any Member State is first a state and then a member,” wrote Dutch military strategist Jan Ballast; “as long as nations are unable to multilaterally share secret intelligence on (homegrown) terrorist groups and threats, NATO, without a clear and present danger, will not witness structured and transparent intelligence sharing.”[21]

By spring 2024, as the specter of sabotage operations became ever more acute, NATO messaging was clear: “The primary responsibility to respond to hybrid threats or attacks rests with the targeted country”[22] —some of which were in the midst of investigations into their own elected officials, who were suspected of acting as Russian recruits.[23] In other words, as military scholars John Deni and Sten Rynning wrote last August, “NATO is taking the threat seriously but may not always be well poised to do something about it. Domestic policing and intelligence agencies may be better suited for the task.”[24]

True enough, at least in theory. A string of audacious attacks by Russian operatives and agents over the past decade indicate that even at a national level, respective European security agencies have struggled to catch up. From a spate of bombings at weapons depots in Bulgaria and Czechia to a murder in broad daylight in Berlin – the more widely adopted the “hybrid war” concept became, the less distinguishable from transnational terrorism it seemed. Meanwhile, the European continent remained a generally permissive environment.[25]  

Europe’s “Diplomatic” Playground

For example, the attempted poisoning of Sergey Skripal in the UK by Russian operatives in 2018 finally prompted long-overdue collective action to expel over 130 suspected Russian intelligence officers from NATO countries.[26] Since 2014, the (publicly known) number of such expulsions by the US and European allies numbers over 700 (nearly half the total of Soviet officials expelled during the entirety of the Cold War).[27] Why Moscow’s diplomatic presence in Europe was allowed to balloon to a degree so clearly incommensurate with the demands of a fraying diplomatic relationship with the West remains an open question.

To wit, in Norway, Moscow has become more aggressive in recent years – openly questioning Oslo’s sovereignty over its Arctic regions, ratcheting up air and sea patrols, staging provocations around World War II memorials, and implicitly threatening Norway’s crucial undersea gas pipelines.[28] Russia’s senior diplomat on the Svalbard archipelago is widely suspected to be a covert GRU officer.[29] Nevertheless, Russia somehow maintains nearly triple the number of accredited diplomatic staff in Norway than the latter does in Russia.[30]

Brussels, the host city for EU and NATO headquarters – and roughly 25,000 registered foreign diplomats – is charitably described as a den of spies. Belgian authorities, meanwhile, are vastly understaffed and ill-equipped to even begin tackling the problem, while there are no legal requirements lending foreign lobbying any degree of transparency or oversight.[31] 

Meanwhile, in Poland, a major throughfare for Western materiel bound for Ukraine, authorities last year disrupted a GRU-led effort to enlist locals, who were first “tasked with scouting Polish seaports, placing cameras along railways and hiding tracking devices in military cargo.” Gradually, the assignments became more deadly: “derail trains carrying weapons.”[32] Social media offers anonymity and discretion to the recruiters, who often promise payment in exchange for intelligence collection and other activities, using cryptocurrencies to compensate both witting and unwitting co-conspirators.[33] (Unfortunately, the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority – the bloc’s first ever collective effort to counter the flows of dirty money on the continent – will not be operational until early 2025.[34])

In retaliation for this sabotage-for-hire, Warsaw recently moved to shutter the Russian consulate in the city of Poznan and introduce limits on Russian diplomatic movements within the country.[35] While doubtlessly warranted and likely to put a crimp on Russia’s ability to sow chaos on neighboring territory – history is nevertheless repeating itself: Warsaw had already expelled several Russian diplomats in April 2021, followed by a whopping 45 of them a year later, on suspicion of espionage and subterfuge. At the time, Polish leaders proclaimed that “further tolerating this type of illegal activity…would create a particular threat to Poland’s security, [and] also to our NATO and European Union allies.”[36] By the spring of 2023, Russian deputy security council chair Dmitri Medvedev deemed it useless for Moscow to maintain any diplomatic relations at all with Poland – a state which, in his words, “should not exist for us.”[37] As of early 2025, two additional Russian consulates remain open in Gdansk and Krakow.

An EU-wide effort to curb the free movement of Russian “diplomats” within the bloc was finally proposed last spring.[38]Confoundingly, Budapest (which harbors warmer relations with Moscow than its EU and NATO partners) countered by introducing a new fast-track visa system for Russian and Belarusian citizens, enabling them to enter Hungary – and thus, the broader EU – with few restrictions or background checks at all.[39] That a single holdout can put the entire coalition at greater risk of subversive activity only underscores the degree to which Europe’s response to Russian sabotage will inevitably need to take root at the national level – branching out to willing regional partners only as capacity and initiative dictate – rather than waiting on some consensus-based EU or NATO prowess that is unlikely to materialize in the short term.

Deterrence (By Denial) Begins at Home

The hard truth, as historians Jill Kastner and William Wohlforth detail, is that subversion is an immutable feature of geopolitics precisely because deterrence by the fear of punishment is seldom effective – recent EU sanctions against GRU operatives notwithstanding.[40] This leaves deterrence by denial – “operational obstacles [that] act as a straightforward constraint” – paired with bounce-back resilience, as the only strategically viable response.[41] As is true in cyberspace, numbering and branding subversive behavior “intolerable” may be morally satisfying.[42] But after repeated breaches (and recoveries), the more accurate signal to send to Moscow is that it is ultimately ineffectual and, with some work on our end, unrepeatable.

For instance, whether Moscow has any culpability in the recent severing of Baltic Sea subsea communications cables may never be established – fuzzy attribution is precisely what lends interstate subversion its allure. What is eminently more discernable, however, is the ultimate impact. In this case, according to Carnegie scholars, “although some internet traffic had to be rerouted…there were no reports of widespread connectivity outages in Germany, Finland, Lithuania, or Sweden.”[43]

In this regard, as Ukrainians have amply demonstrated since early 2022, broadcasting a steely resolve is more productive than reflexive public panic. Despite what Moscow has long told itself, disrupting the life of ordinary citizens usually sparks more anger than anxiety, more resolve than resignation.[44] Covert Russian operatives – particularly those in the GRU who need to be seen “doing something” to avoid being sent to the front lines in Ukraine – are likely driven as much by sheer opportunism than by any grand strategic plan. Insofar as Western leaders hope to keep Moscow from stoking or capitalizing upon Western war fatigue by commanding limited focus and resources – they should avoid lending Russia undue credit. While attribution is difficult, timely, and sometimes impossible, speculation that any given series of catastrophes “cannot all be coincidences” may serve only to needlessly mythologize Moscow’s entrepreneurial operatives, while strangely echoing Soviet-style conspiracism.[45]

After all, the GRU is just as accurately described as bumbling and cartoonish – seizing open windows of opportunity rather than practicing any deft operational tradecraft.[46] Closing these windows should take first priority – even among sub-groups and bilateral partners in Europe. However much progress NATO and the EU might make on protecting critical infrastructure collectively, joint collaboration can only be as strong as the initial capabilities and contributions of respective capitals.[47] Better intelligence sharing among allies and partners will prove of limited use if not matched by improved domestic collection and investigative processes and procedures – backed by updated legislation, where necessary. For instance, Nordic and Baltic leaders have proposed a joint naval policing program among Baltic Sea states to secure their sub-sea cables and surface traffic from interference.[48] Such efforts neither require nor demand any say-so or nudging from Brussels.

Granted, some incidents will require a unified front. But last year’s “summer of sabotage” offers a wake-up call for EU and NATO member-states: The “hybrid war” catch-phrase – drawn upon to spur collective action but largely untethered to any individual member’s initiative or resources – has long outlived its usefulness. Framing subversion this way has, in practice, primarily served to offload the burden of domestic national security onto supranational coalitions – thus kicking the can down the road and leaving windows of opportunity open for a vengeful Russia. In the most extreme cases, the concept merely serves to distract from and dilute the implications of a far more accurate portrayal of Russia’s behavior: transnational terrorism.

Endnotes:

[1] Amy-Clare Martin, “British Man Accused of Arson Plot for Russia’s Wagner Group,” The Independent, April 26, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/dylan-earl-arson-russian-spy-allegations-b2535337.html.

[2] Chris Stevenson, “Suspected Spies Arrested in Germany over Plot for Sabotage Attacks on Ukraine Aid,” The Independent, April 19, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-spy-ukraine-war-germany-b2530870.html.

[3] Ido Vock, “Man Arrested in Poland over Alleged Russia Plot to Kill Zelensky,” BBC News, April 18, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68848317.

[4] Isabel Van Brugen, “Mysterious Accidents at US, Ally’s Defense Facilities Spark Sabotage Fears,” Newsweek, April 19, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/us-nato-defense-facilities-ukraine-russia-sabotage-1892099.

[5] Thomas Nilsen, “Russian Jamming Is Now Messing up GPS Signals for Norwegian Aviation Practically Every Day,” February 26, 2024, https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/security/russian-jamming-is-now-messing-up-gps-signals-for-norwegian-aviation-practically-every-day/163663.

[6] Julian E. Barnes, “Russia Steps Up a Covert Sabotage Campaign Aimed at Europe,” The New York Times, May 26, 2024, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/us/politics/russia-sabotage-campaign-ukraine.html.

[7] Michael Holden and Gabriel Stargardter, “UK Spy Chief Says Russia behind ‘staggeringly Reckless’ Sabotage in Europe,” Reuters, November 29, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-behind-staggeringly-reckless-sabotage-europe-uk-spy-chief-says-2024-11-29.

[8] Annabelle Timsit, “Russia Threatens Retaliation after U.S., Britain Agree Ukraine Can Strike Back,” The Washington Post, April 28, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/28/putin-russia-retaliation-blinken-ukraine.

[9] Felicia Schwartz and Isobel Koshiw, “US and UK Discuss Easing Restrictions on Ukraine’s Use of Western Weapons,” Financial Times, September 11, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/5795fe98-283d-47b0-9c7d-3a729b50500e; Reuters, “Putin Issues Nuclear Warning to the West over Strikes on Russia from Ukraine,” September 25, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/25/europe/putin-nuclear-warns-west-missile-strikes-ukraine-intl-latam/index.html.

[10] Marie Grand and Camille Dumoulin, “Staying Power: Securing Peace in Ukraine While Balancing European Interests,” European Council on Foreign Relations, November 28, 2024, https://ecfr.eu/article/ukraine-at-a-crossroads-securing-peace-while-balancing-european-interests/.

[11] Nick Lockwood, “How the Soviet Union Transformed Terrorism,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/how-the-soviet-union-transformed-terrorism/250433.

[12] Director of Central Intelligence, “National Intelligence Estimate: The Soviet Bloc Role in International Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence” (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, August 14, 1986), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90T00155R000200050001-6.pdf.

[13] Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Profile Books, 2020).

[14] Philip Davies, “Back in Black: The Return of Sabotage as a Challenge for Western Counterintelligence,” Intelligence Studies Review, May 4, 2024, https://intelligencestudiesreview.blog/2024/05/04/back-in-black-the-return-of-sabotage-as-a-challenge-for-western-counterintelligence.

[15] Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies 2007), 14; Michael Kofman and Matthew Rojansky, “A Closer Look at Russia’s ‘Hybrid War,’” The Wilson Center Kennan Cable, no. 7 (April 2015): 6, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/7-KENNAN%20CABLE-ROJANSKY%20KOFMAN.pdf; Élie Tenenbaum, “Hybrid Warfare in the Strategic Spectrum: An Historical Assessment,” in NATO’s Response to Hybrid Threats, eds. Guillaume Lasconjarias and Jeffrey A. Larsen, (Rome, Italy: NATO Defense College, 2015) 95–112.

[16] Murat Caliskan and Michel Liégeois, “The Concept of ‘Hybrid Warfare’ Undermines NATO’s Strategic Thinking: Insights from Interviews with NATO Officials,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 32, no. 2 (February 17, 2021): 295–319, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2020.1860374.

[17] Daniel Fiott and Roderick Parkes, Protecting Europe: The EU’s Response to Hybrid Threats, Chaillot Paper, 151 (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the Euopean Union, 2019).

[18] Ofer Fridman, Russian “Hybrid Warfare”: Resurgence and Politicization, (Oxford University Press, 2018), 2.

[19] James Stavridis, “The Long Road,” Turkish Policy Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2010), 26, http://turkishpolicy.com/files/articlepdf/the-long-road-spring-2010-en.pdf.

[20] Judy Dempsey, “NATO’s Intelligence Deficit: It’s the Members, Stupid!,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 25, 2017, https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2017/05/natos-intelligence-deficit-its-the-members-stupid?lang=en.   

[21] Jan Ballast, “Trust (in) NATO: The Future of Intelligence Sharing within the Alliance,” ETH Zurich, September 22, 2017, https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/articles/article.html.

[22] “Countering Hybrid Threats,” NATO, May 7, 2024, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_156338.htm.

[23] Nada Wilson, “Ireland Officials Report Russia Recruited Parliament Member as Agent,” Jurist News, October 9, 2024, https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/10/ireland-officials-report-russia-recruited-sitting-parliament-member-as-agent; Pierre Emmanuel, “Probe Opened into Latvian MEP Accused of Spying for Russia,” Politico, January 29, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-investigation-latvia-mep-accused-kgb-fsb-russia-spy.

[24] John Deni and Sten Rynning, “The NATO Strategic Concept on Its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary,” Military Review, August 2024, 12, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JA-24/NATO-Strategic-Concept/NATO-Strategic-Concept-ua.pdf.

[25] Bellingcat Investigation Team, “How GRU Sabotage and Assassination Operations in Czechia and Bulgaria Sought to Undermine Ukraine,” Bellingcat, April 26, 2021, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2021/04/26/how-gru-sabotage-and-assassination-operations-in-czechia-and-bulgaria-sought-to-undermine-ukraine; Thomas Escritt, “Who Is Vadim Krasikov, Russian Hitman Freed from German Jail in Prisoner Swap?,” Reuters, August 1, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/vadim-krasikov-russian-hitman-sprung-german-jail-prisoner-swap-2024-08-01.

[26] Robin Wright, “With Expulsions of Russians, the West—En Masse—Confronts Putin,” The New Yorker, March 26, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/with-expulsions-of-russians-the-westen-masseconfronts-putin.

[27] Kevin P. Riehle, “Soviet and Russian Diplomatic Expulsions: How Many and Why?,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence37, no. 4 (October 1, 2024): 1238–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2023.2272216.

[28] Atle Staalesen, Thomas Nilsen, “Russian Diplomats Stur Up Emotions in Norwegian Border Town Kirkenes,” The Barents Observer, May 9, 2023, https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/security/russian-diplomats-stir-up-emotions-in-norwegian-border-town-kirkenes/164970; Tom Costello, “Norway Watches as Russian Subs and Aircraft Step up Arctic Patrols,” NBC News, March 28, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/norway-russian-submarines-planes-military-ukraine-arctic-rcna76368.

[29] Ben Taub, “Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic,” The New Yorker, September 9, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war-in-the-arctic.

[30] Thomas Nilsen, “Three Times More Russian Diplomats in Norway than the Other Way Around,” The Barents Observer, October 18, 2024, https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/news/three-times-more-russian-diplomats-in-norway-than-the-other-way-around/418777.

[31] Barbara Moens, “The EU Has a Spy Problem — Here’s Why It’s so Difficult to Catch Them,” POLITICO, December 1, 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-spy-problem-heres-why-its-so-difficult-to-catch-them-espionage-russia-china/.

[32] Greg Miller, Loveday Morris, and Mary Ilyushina, “Russia Recruited Operatives Online to Target Weapons Crossing Poland,” Washington Post, August 18, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/18/ukraine-weapons-sabotage-gru-poland.

[33] Ivan Klyszcz, “Shadow War: What Estonia and Poland Tell Us About Russia’s Clandestine Operations in Europe,” Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy, July 4, 2024, https://csds.vub.be/publication/shadow-war-what-estonia-and-poland-tell-us-about-russias-clandestine-operations-in-europe.

[34] Geert De Clercq, “EU’s New Anti-Money Laundering Authority to Be Based in Frankfurt,” Reuters, February 22, 2024, sec. Europe, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-says-new-anti-money-laundering-authority-be-based-frankfurt-2024-02-22/.

[35] “Poland Alleges Russian Sabotage and Is Closing One of Moscow’s Consulates,” Washington Post, October 22, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/22/poland-russia-ukraine-hybrid-war-sabotage/4e3ea198-908a-11ef-b5b1-75167840d9f3_story.html; “Poland to Limit Movement of Russian Diplomats,” Reuters, May 27, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-introduce-restrictions-movement-russian-diplomats-2024-05-27.

[36] “Poland Orders Expulsion of 45 Russian Embassy, Trade Mission Staff as Threat to Country, NATO,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 23, 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/poland-russia-diplomats-expel/31766470.html.

[37] “Medvedev Sees No Point in Maintaining Diplomatic Relations with Poland,” TASS, April 29, 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1611613.

[38] Henry Foy, Raphael Minder, and John Paul Rathbone, “West Grapples with Response to Russian Sabotage Attempts,” Financial Times, June 4, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/bf128ebf-2e3f-40a3-b7ec-bcd1b477ab9a.

[39] Tony Wesolowsky and Balint Szalai, “Brussels Frustrated With Hungary Over Russian Visa Decision That Could Let In Spies,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 10:27:21Z, sec. Hungary, https://www.rferl.org/a/hungary-russian-visa-spies-eu/33059208.html.

[40] AFP, “EU Sanctions Russian Military Intelligence over ‘Hybrid Attacks’”, The Moscow Times, December 16, 2024, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/12/16/eu-sanctions-russian-military-intelligence-over-hybrid-attacks-a87356.

[41] Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2025).

[42] “Up to 100 ‘suspicious Incidents’ in Europe Can Be Attributed to Russia, Czech Minister Says,” Reuters, December 4, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/up-100-suspicious-incidents-europe-can-be-attributed-russia-czech-minister-says-2024-12-04.

[43] Sophia Besch and Erik Brown, “A Chinese-Flagged Ship Cut Baltic Sea Internet Cables. This Time, Europe Was More Prepared.,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 3, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/12/baltic-sea-internet-cable-cut-europe-nato-security?lang=en.

[44] Gavin Wilde, “Russia’s Countervalue Cyber Approach: Utility or Futility?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessed December 17, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/02/russias-countervalue-cyber-approach-utility-or-futility?lang=en.

[45] Raphael Minder, Richard Milne, and Laura Pitel, “Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Likely to Be Sabotage, Germany Says,” Financial Times, November 19, 2024, sec. Germany, https://www.ft.com/content/33cd110b-e071-4b97-9af6-b6bde261515a. A 1937 article in the Soviet state-run newspaper, Pravda, stated: “We know that engines do not stop by themselves, machine tools do not break down on their own, boilers do not explode on their own. Someone’s hand is hidden behind these events.” See Gabor Rittersporn, Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 34.

[46] Jamie Dettmer, “Blunder Unmasks 305 Russian Spies,” Voice of America, October 7, 2018, https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-gru-operatives-unmasked/4602595.html; Andrew Roth, “String of Own Goals by Russian Spies Exposes a Strange Sloppiness,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/05/string-of-own-goals-by-russian-gru-spies-reveals-new-trend-of-sloppiness; Dan Sabbagh, Dan Sabbagh Defence, and security editor, “Russia’s ‘Illegals’: The Deep-Cover Spies Who Can Be Both Clumsy and Dangerous,” The Guardian, June 16, 2022, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/16/russia-illegals-deep-cover-spies-icc-infiltration.

[47] “Norway, Germany Put Critical Underwater Infrastructure on NATO Agenda,” The Barents Observer, October 18, 2024, https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/news/norway-germany-put-critical-underwater-infrastructure-on-nato-agenda/418850.

[48] Besch and Brown, “A Chinese-Flagged Ship Cut Baltic Sea Internet Cables. This Time, Europe Was More Prepared.”