When Is A War Not A War? Russia’s Hybrid Attacks Could Divide NATO | Opinion
Newsweek · C · trust 46/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. The Doomsday Clock was started in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War to signal impending global disaster. Today, it stands at a precipitous 85 seconds to midnight – capturing the dangers of nuclear warfare, climate change, and technological progress in the modern age.
One wonders whether NATO should set its watch by the same clock. With rising hybrid and shadow warfare from Russia directed at its European neighbors, the bloc is now facing a new kind of confrontation.
The destabilizing tactics used against the bloc’s members – which are ambiguous, involve acts between war and peace, have uncertain perpetrators and disrupt society – test NATO precisely because they are not conventional warfare . They raise questions about the acceptable use of its famous Article 5, which considers an attack on one country an attack on all, and may precipitate military defense of the bloc. Particularly, these tactics also test commitment – especially from countries becoming increasingly skeptical of NATO, such as the U.S., which has already questioned the triggering of other NATO Articles in cases of gray zone warfare. And they raise questions of risk in retaliation.
Hybrid attacks in recent years – and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – are targeting both individuals and national infrastructure, and demonstrate the problem. Most recently, a brazen plot to kill a US-Ukrainian citizen in Warsaw was uncovered – the first attack of an American inside a NATO country. There have also been cases of assassinations of anti-Russian figures in Europe, including of artist and caricaturist Semyon Skrepetsky, who died in Poland in June.
Military sites are also being targeted. Earlier this year, nuclear sites in Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands were reportedly targeted by Russian drone spies over a 15-month period, with the drones allegedly launched from shadow-fleet tankers. Russia has also routinely sent drones into NATO airspace, including over Romania, where a drone struck a residential building and injured two people in May; Poland, where in September 2025 the country’s and NATO’s air defenses were scrambled to shoot down drones; and Latvia, where a drone exploded at an oil-storage facility in Rēzekne.
The Polish prime minister claimed the incursions meant Poland was closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War”. After the Poland incursions, the country invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, which prompts consultation over military matters in case of emergency, when a country is threatened in its integrity, independence, or security.
The same article was also invoked by the Estonian government in the same month, after the incursion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace for 12 minutes. The Estonian prime minister Kristen Michal called on NATO to be “united and strong” in its response. President Donald Trump responded to the Article 4 invocation by saying: “I don’t love it. I don’t like when that happens.” This reveals the fundamental uncertainty surrounding NATO’s response to gray-zone threats. NATO Allies nevertheless met this month to discuss airspace violations and are planning strengthened integrated air and missile defenses across the alliance to deter further incursions.
Related Story What Vladimir Putin’s Shifting Vocabulary Reveals About Russia’s Ukraine War There have also been attacks on infrastructure, mostly notably the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, which left the gas pipelines between Europe and Russia inoperable, with no specific perpetrator identified. There has been sabotage on numerous undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea, which have caused outages, as well as attacks to railway lines in Europe, including in Poland, which arrested a network of foreign citizens on suspicion of spying on transport for Russia three years ago.
Cyberattacks have become more common, including an attack on American satellite communications provider Viasat, on the same day as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which impacted both the Ukrainian military and internet connection for thousands across Europe. A plane carrying the EU Commission president in September 2025 was also jammed over Bulgaria, and resulted in the pilots having to use paper maps to land. The Bulgarian authorities blamed Russia. A similar case of jamming also targeted a plane bringing the former UK defense secretary, John Healey, back home after a visit to British troops in Estonia, in May.
Such acts of hybrid warfare are the new security problem facing NATO: of ambiguity rather than direct attack. It is uncertain how much the alliance will tolerate if the security and sovereignty of its members are being repeatedly threatened by incursions by air or sabotage of infrastructure, and if perpetrators are impossible to identify. Moreover, these attacks also have the effect of breaking up European security by sowing domestic fear and international response, and hence undermining support for Ukraine.
But vitally, they also raise questions about the ability of NATO to defend itself. Like in the Cold War, when there were fears that nuclear weapons, combined with mistrust, might lead superpowers into a conflict through a misunderstanding, here the dangers of miscalculation are still active. Too weak a response and Russia’s activity might continue. Too strong and it might precipitate a global war.
While NATO last year created a Special Coordinator for Hybrid Threats to organize the alliance’s response to such attacks, and alliance members have strengthened their resilience, for example in cyber defense, there are fears that the next test of NATO may come from these acts of shadow or hybrid warfare. There are possible responses beyond Article 5: including reinforcing an ally’s air defenses,…
Read the original at Newsweek →
Open in TruthVane →