Russia’s Hybrid War Has Entered a Dangerous New Phase

Foreign Affairs | Julianne Smith

Russia has escalated its hybrid warfare campaign across Europe into a dangerous new phase that threatens to breach the threshold of collective Western defense. These hostile operations include cutting undersea communication cables, planting incendiary devices in commercial cargo packages, and executing targeted arson attacks against European weapons factories and military depots.

During her tenure as U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO from 2021 to 2024, Julianne Smith observed these deniable, small-scale provocations systematically expanding across the continent. Moscow relied on plausible deniability. To counter the threat, NATO allies implemented defensive measures by reinforcing critical infrastructure, increasing maritime patrols in the Baltic Sea, and expanding multilateral intelligence sharing. However, these scattered, defensive reactions have done far too little to deter the Kremlin, leaving the alliance highly vulnerable as Moscow continues to exploit the strategic gap below the threshold of a unified military response.

Comment

The expansion of Russian sub-threshold sabotage across Europe exposes a fundamental vulnerability in the collective deterrence framework of the North Atlantic Treaty. By targeting European infrastructure through deniable, non-attributable actions, Moscow exploits the legal and political ambiguities of Article 5. This grey-zone campaign demonstrates that NATO's conventional deterrence fails to address distributed, non-kinetic threats that deliberately avoid triggering a military response.

The mechanism of this vulnerability lies in the consensus-driven attribution process within the North Atlantic Council. The 2023 damage to the Balticconnector pipeline highlighted how difficult it is for member states to coordinate a unified retaliatory policy when the threshold for armed attack remains undefined. Consequently, the lack of a standardised attribution protocol within the North Atlantic Council ensures that individual European states remain isolated in their response to Russian GRU sabotage operations.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the 2023 damage to the Balticconnector pipeline represents the new baseline for deniable aggression, how can the North Atlantic Council adapt its Article 5 threshold without diluting the credibility of its conventional military deterrent?

The pattern of grey-zone operations suggests that the North Atlantic Council is unlikely to lower the Article 5 threshold, as doing so risks overcommitting the alliance to ambiguous crises. Instead, the trajectory indicates that NATO will rely on decentralised, state-level resilience measures and bilateral intelligence sharing to counter incidents like the Balticconnector sabotage. My assessment is that this decentralised approach will keep the burden of response on individual coastal states, leaving the collective deterrence gap unresolved.

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