As Putin Wages Shadow War, Europe Looks for a Way to Hit Back
New York Times · LC · trust 40/100
Moscow has used tactics of fear and ambiguity to try to divide NATO and limit support for Ukraine. But how should Europe retaliate? And how hard?
Listen · 8:46 min Share full article 250 Gathering evidence at the Leipzig-Halle airport, Germany, in August after an explosive-laden drone was found. Credit... Axel Schmidt/Reuters By Steven Erlanger
Steven Erlanger, based in Berlin, writes about European diplomacy and security.
European officials say they do not expect a major Russian invasion of a NATO country; in that sense, traditional deterrence has worked. But countries are grappling with how best to counter this heightened pattern of Russian attacks. What officials say they fear most is that, by accident or by intention, one of those attacks will cause a significant loss of life.
Moscow is “trying to break the will to support Ukraine and trying in a broader sense to change the security architecture of Europe,” said David Cattler, a former NATO intelligence official now at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank. Operationally, he said, the Russians are using tools “that are hard to attribute, that they believe are big enough to matter and yet small enough not to trigger” a larger war.
Internally, the debate among European officials, they said, is whether and how to retaliate by taking the fight to Russia. The first response should be to maintain calm and not fall into a Russian trap by overreacting, said Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official, while not being so complacent as to ignore reality. The Russian campaign is a continuation of a pattern, he said, but “the growth in the number and nature of the events is significant, and the dangerous nature of them.”
Europe is trying to increase deterrence against hybrid warfare — aggressive actions that fall short of direct military conflict — on three levels: first, by calling out Russia’s attacks and blaming the Kremlin directly; second, by increasing societal awareness and building stronger defenses around potential targets; and third, by imposing consequences on Moscow, whether overt or covert, with clear messaging to President Vladimir V. Putin.
“Any attack should be clearly linked to a concrete measure of response,” said Linas Kojala of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a research group in Lithuania. “To make that work,” he added, “governments would need to have funding and legal authority prepared in advance, so the response is not delayed by a new political debate after every incident.”
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