Open war against NATO would be suicidal, while harassing it below the threshold is cheap, effective, and goes unpunished.
By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 6 September, 2026
On August 6 of this year, at Leipzig-Halle Airport, a drone collided with an aircraft , and German authorities found a second drone carrying explosives. Leipzig is not just any airport: it is one of the logistical hubs through which supplies to Ukraine pass and a significant portion of NATO’s cargo traffic in Central Europe. No one called it an act of war. A police investigation was launched, a cautious statement was issued, and the continent went on holiday. I am writing this article to support an uncomfortable thesis: Russia has been at war with Europe for years, Europe knows it, and Europe does not treat it as such. Europe remains clinging to a binary distinction between peace and war that our adversaries have unilaterally abolished. While we debate whether railway sabotage, a severed submarine cable, or a disinformation campaign constitutes “an attack” for the purposes of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the aggressor has already achieved what it sought, which was precisely to place us in this paralyzing state of doubt. The figures no longer allow for benevolent interpretations.
On August 11, the Congressional Research Service published a report on Russian hybrid activity in Europe, which compiles the two available data sets: attacks attributed to Moscow quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, and an independent count has documented at least 151 incidents between February 2022 and March 2026. These include infrastructure sabotage, arson, assassinations and attempted assassinations, airspace violations, interference with the Global Positioning System, cyberattacks against hospitals and power grids, opaque party financing, election interference, and migration coercion. The High Representative of the European Union, Kakha Kallas, described it last November with a phrase no diplomat uses lightly: Russia is committing “state terrorism . ” The main theater of operations is the Baltic Sea, where more than a dozen data and power cables have been damaged since October 2023 by ships dragging their anchors along the seabed, almost always veteran oil tankers from the so-called shadow fleet, flying flags of convenience with their transponders turned off. In April of this year, the British government made public something even more serious: an operation by Russian submarines from the General Directorate of Deep-Sea Research mapping critical infrastructure in UK waters. The then-Defense Minister addressed Putin with four words that speak volumes: we see you, and we will not tolerate it.
None of this is improvisation. It stems from a perfectly rational calculation. In a world with nuclear arsenals, interdependent economies, and Western public opinion allergic to its own casualties , open war against NATO would be suicidal, while constantly harassing it below the threshold is cheap, effective, and practically unpunished . Therein lies the asymmetry that is defeating us: our adversaries have understood that they don’t need to win a war if they can wear us down without fighting one. Nor is this a recent idea. The West has spent a decade debating a supposed “Gerasimov Doctrine” that doesn’t exist—the label was coined by a British analyst in 2014, and he himself refuted it four years later—and in doing so, it has ignored the true history. The theorist who best anticipated all this was Yevgeny Messner, an officer in the Imperial Army and a White exile writing from Buenos Aires. In 1960 and 1971, he published two books on what he called subversion warfare, arguing that
future wars would not be fought by armies for territory, but by small cells for the moral cohesion of the adversary, and that the psychological front would be the main one. Banned in the Soviet Union for being anti-communist, it is now core reading in Russian military schools. Alongside his work, the theory of reflexive control, developed in Moscow since the 1960s, formulates the objective with chilling elegance: it is not about deceiving or forcing the adversary, but about furnishing the ground for their decision so that they freely choose what one has decided for them.
It is worth pausing to consider the most significant operational development of the last three years, because it explains how everything mentioned above was materially implemented. Following the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, European intelligence services expelled Russian officers operating under diplomatic cover: at least
750 diplomats and suspected agents across the continent between 2022 and 2024 , according to estimates by the British security service. It was the largest European counterintelligence operation since the end of the Cold War, and it worked. The residencies (KGB stations abroad dedicated to espionage and subversion) were dismantled. Moscow didn’t close them; it rebuilt them and added others that were outsourced.
German counterintelligence technically calls them “low-level agents,” and common parlance has coined a much more expressive term: “Wegwerf-Agenten,” disposable agents. These are people who don’t belong to any service, recruited through social media or messaging apps for a specific task and for ridiculously low sums—a recent report put the typical fee at $500 and a trip abroad—directed through chains of intermediaries designed to make the end client invisible. Many don’t even know who they’re working for. A researcher at the Royal United Services Institute aptly dubbed it: sabotage in the era of the gig economy.
The European harvest of this subcontracting is already extensive. The fire at the Marywilska shopping center in Warsaw in May 2024, which destroyed some 1,400 shops and which the Polish government attributed to Russian special services. The incendiary devices detonated in July of that year at logistics facilities in Leipzig, Birmingham, and Warsaw, which, according to investigations, were part of a plan to bring down cargo planes in flight. The conspiracy to assassinate the president of the major defense company Rheinmetall. The two simultaneous railway sabotages in Poland on November 16, 2025, attributed to Ukrainian citizens recruited by the Russian Federal Security Service who later fled to Belarus.
A study published this year on 145 of these agents qualifies the stereotype with a disturbing fact: they are not always single-use, and are frequently employed in several successive operations.
It’s important to emphasize that a considerable number of those recruited are Ukrainian. This isn’t opportunism; it’s a disinformation and manipulation strategy (a central element of gray warfare) incorporated into the operation. This includes “fake news,” manipulation and disinformation, indoctrination, and the use of propaganda agents among us (including journalists, analysts, academics, and television pundits).
Because the effectiveness of this war doesn’t lie in material damage, it’s a central element of hybrid warfare . Each expendable man forces the attacked country to open a police investigation, initiate criminal proceedings, mobilize its counterintelligence, and lodge a diplomatic protest, at a cost that multiplies infinitely from the cost of the operation itself. The objective is to drain the continent’s investigative resources.
Anyone who thinks this happens far away should review Spain’s record. In February 2024, Russian pilot Maksim Kuzminov, who had defected to Ukraine with his helicopter, was found riddled with bullets in the garage of a residential complex in Villajoyosa. That crime wasn’t a settling of scores between criminals: it was an execution on European soil, and whoever ordered it deliberately chose the most peaceful setting possible. Spain doesn’t appear in the tallies of hybrid incidents because Spain believes itself to be safe, and that belief is precisely the vulnerability that a hostile service seeks. The European response remains late, insufficient, and fragmented. NATO activated the Baltic Sentry mission in January 2025, and the Commission allocated €347 million in February 2026 to protect underwater infrastructure: figures that reveal how late we have begun to monitor an area we had taken for granted for 30 years without protecting it. The EU has sanctioned a handful of entities and well over a hundred individuals. And that’s where the inventory ends.
There is no European doctrine of response below the threshold of belligerence, nor an automatic catalog of consequences, nor a continental cell that treats all these episodes as what they are: a single campaign, and not a collection of common crimes investigated by police who do not speak to each other.
It is crucial to understand that the ongoing negotiations on Ukraine have created a perception in Moscow that it has time and leeway , and this perception is itself an incentive to escalate hybrid pressure while negotiations continue. A transactional diplomacy that treats gray aggression as dispensable background noise in the pursuit of a larger agreement will not ensure stability; it will create the conditions for new hybrid or gray warfare campaigns.
Four proposals to combat the gray war. First: publicly name and attribute each operation, with evidence and without euphemisms, because ambiguity is the aggressor’s asset and publicity its first cost . Second: prosecute the perpetrators and their commanders with the same severity with which we pursue terrorism, which is what Estonia demands and what Europe avoids, inspired by appeasement. Third: establish in advance a graduated catalog of automatic consequences—expulsions, consular closures, sanctions, restrictions on the shadow fleet—so that the response does not depend each time on a deliberation by 27 parties. Fourth: finally equip ourselves with the intelligence, industry, and legal framework that this war demands, instead of continuing to fund the fiction that peace (which is actually a state of permanent tension, even if war does not directly affect us) is the natural state of the world.
Sun Tzu wrote 25 centuries ago that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. The phrase is often quoted in Europe and has never been fully understood. They are the ones applying it, not us. The contemporary version is being in a state of permanent war, suffering constant attacks, and not being fully aware of being immersed in a relentless conflict.
*Gustavo de Arístegui is a diplomat and was ambassador to India, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (2012-2016) gustvodearistegui.substack.com