European Centre for Counter terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Germany & Netherlands – ECCI
A New Kind of War Has Come for NATO—And Russia Has the Upper Hand
NEWSWEEK ـ While peace in Ukraine remains an elusive prospect, signs of progress from the White House’s diplomatic initiatives already have officials discussing what a postwar security landscape may look like when the guns quiet in Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
Far from ushering in a new era of stability and calm, however, the next chapter for the continent is likely to be dominated by a new kind of battle already taking place on several unconventional fronts, from unmarked drones and hard-to-trace cyberattacks piercing through NATO defensive lines to rising popularity of political parties sympathetic to Moscow and buoyed by discontent over mass migration, some of it emanating from the border with Belarus.
In each case, European leaders have identified a concerted campaign by Russia and its allies to pressure the trans-Atlantic bloc from within. Yet experts with ties to NATO and the European Union also argue that, in each theater of the emerging bout, NATO’s collective defense, rooted in Article 5, has demonstrated major vulnerabilities that may only incentivize rather than deter enemy action.
“There is movement to respond to hybrid war in particular by developing cyber capacities and drones and the ability to protect critical infrastructure,” Nathalie Tocci, former adviser to EU High Representatives now serving as director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali think tank in Rome, told Newsweek. “However, there are problems that revolve around shifting from a culture of deterrence, that applies best to the military domain, to that of resilience, that factors in the fact that hybrid attacks are ongoing on a daily basis and in order to protect ourselves we need to focus also on more offensive postures too.”
“Reacting to hybrid attacks also requires discussion and decision of when to react when attacks are deniable and fall under the threshold of Article 5,” Tocci said. “To date, Russia sees there is no reaction and just keep testing and pushing the envelope further.”
The Triple Threat
Following major missteps in the initial large-scale invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin in February 2022, one of Russia’s most successful battlefield breakthroughs in the long war has manifested in the implementation of a “triple chokehold” strategy.
Through combining infantry and mechanized ground assaults with waves of artillery and first-person drone attacks and volleys of precision-guided glide bombs, the Russian military has managed to wear down already undermanned Ukrainian defender lines to score significant gains over the past year.
And when it comes to what many view to be a gray-zone effort to erode European unity in support of Kyiv, Tocci said Moscow had another kind of “three-pronged strategy,” rooted in “military, hybrid and political” tactics.
“The military dimension for the time being is limited to Ukraine,” Tocci said. “So long as Ukraine resists it will continue to represent the front door preventing larger war to spillover elsewhere. [Russia] then pursues hybrid warfare, including cyber attacks, attacks on critical infrastructure, sabotage, drones flying into NATO airspace, etc. These attacks are concentrated but not limited to Eastern and Northern Europe.”
“Finally, it pursues a political strategy, revolving around disinformation and political meddling in order to support far right and nationalist forces, which are either explicitly pro-Russian or are ‘only’ Eurosceptic,” Tocci said. “By empowering them (across Europe and the U.S.), it seeks to weaken Europe and reduce its resolve to deter Russia and support Ukraine. This final element seems to be the most effective part of its strategy so far.”
Whether through aid from Moscow or more indigenous factors fueling frustration with establishment parties, the rise of Europe’s right has produced historic election victories for a number of movements, many of them nationalist and populist in orientation.
The trend is welcomed by some within NATO and the EU, like Hungary, whose conservative government is engaged in its own ideological feud with the predominantly liberal continental leadership, which sees the phenomenon as a potentially existential threat.
A number of these parties also openly question the utility of maintaining open-ended aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, viewing domestic issues to be a greater priority.
Outside the political space, more explosive developments have driven concerns of kinetic consequences to the hybrid war, notably the mass incursion of drones tied to Russia into Polish airspace in September and an ongoing series of drone sightings that has followed across a number of nations including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, sometimes leading to airport closures and flight cancellations.
Jamie Shea, former NATO deputy assistant secretary-general for emerging security challenges, identified three accompanying goals for these actions, the first being “disruption.”
“Russia is happy to sow chaos and make European governments look like they are losing control over the normal functioning of their societies,” Shea, now associate fellow with the Chatham House think tank’s International Security Program and professor at the College of Europe Natolin, told Newsweek. “A single drone near an airport can shut down Brussels or Munich airports for days stranding tens of thousands of passengers and costing airlines millions in extra costs.”
“It’s low cost and high impact with Russia able to deny any involvement and blame other actors (such as Ukraine or domestic protest groups within Europe itself),” Shea said. “The aim here is to undermine citizens’ trust in government and polarize further European societies (a particular aim of disinformation campaigns).”
There are also military benefits to such actions. He argued that “Moscow is learning many valuable lessons” regarding “how did these organizations respond? Where did divisions and different interpretations of what happened occur? What are the delays and gaps in NATO’s military response and which precise procedures and tactics did NATO use?”
Finally, he saw a third objective being “to divert European countries away from supporting Ukraine,” particularly by forcing powers to prioritize homefront challenges over foreign aid. Additionally, he pointed out, “there is also the argument that this is the way Russia is hitting back at us for Europe’s support for Ukraine. So, if we stop supporting Ukraine, Putin will be less angry and leave us alone. Don’t provoke him further by using Russian Central Bank assets frozen in Europe to fund Ukraine.”
“This is the narrative Russia seeks to create,” Shea said, “and there are signs that it is working in terms of recent public opinion polls in France, Germany and Italy that show that more respondents want less support for Ukraine vis-à-vis those who are in favor of more.”
Newsweek has reached out to NATO and the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment.
Undermining Article 5
The high tempo of unclaimed events attributed to Moscow has inspired European officials to take some direct action. In one such move, the European Commission announced on Monday new sanctions against a dozen individuals—including nine Russian analysts, intelligence officers and officials as well as one French citizen, one dual U.S.-Russian citizen and one dual Ukrainian-Russian citizen—along with two entities, the International Russophile Movement and the Russian military’s 142nd Separate Electronic Warfare Battalion.
The designated individuals and entities were said to be involved in executing “Russia’s hybrid threats,” including “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” and “malicious cyber activities.”
Defense against hostile cyber operations has also long been enshrined in NATO doctrines and training, including the establishment of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence in Estonia in 2008. Cybersecurity, along with measures to counter other “hybrid tactics,” including election interference, were featured in the alliance’s latest strategic concept adopted in June 2022, months after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, as well.
But the nature of such shadowy combat has also exposed some challenges in mounting an efficient and unified front among Europe’s two leading multilateral institutions, NATO and the EU, which share 23 member states. As for NATO, Shea noted that the bloc’s “main focus is at the high end of military operations and particularly collective defense in response to a conventional Russian attack, whereas “many responses to hybrid warfare are in the civilian domain where the alliance is less well equipped.”
This includes areas of border security, managed by the EU’s Frontex. Since August 2021, months before the war in Ukraine began, Poland has accused neighboring Russian ally Belarus of waging an effective “hybrid war” through allowing the passage of large-scale migration across their shared border.
EU institutions also lead the charge on efforts to manage the information space, an issue that has proved controversial in its own right among many citizens, as well as on funding efforts to shore up physical and cyber infrastructure resilience.
“So, the task is to determine the best, complementary division of labor between NATO and the EU and to ensure optimal coordination between them where they are running similar programs (counter drone, cyber defense) to avoid duplication and use resources effectively,” Shea said.
“The problem for NATO is not so much better defense and more protection—everyone agrees to that—but rather how robustly to respond to Russia,” he added. “For instance, shoot down Russian jets violating NATO airspace, offensive counter cyber operations, more sanctions against Russia, more asset freezes, larger exercises on NATO borders, etc. Some allies want to see tougher responses to restore deterrence while others fear the consequences of escalation.”
Oscar Jonsson, senior fellow at NATO Defense College and associate senior lecturer at the Swedish Defense University, said such fears also speak to one of the central objectives of Russia’s calculus regarding the broader tensions with NATO.
“There are two overall aims that unite all these unconventional methods: subversion and deterrence,” Jonsson told Newsweek. “The subversion effect is a long-term game that are like the drops that hollows out the stone and aimed at Western cohesion and capability. Deterrence comes from, as the word denotes, terror and fear.”
“The Russian thinking is that: the more Western leaders are worried about Russian ‘escalation’ the more hesitant they will be to impose more sanctions, seize Russian assets, or deploy troops to Ukraine,” he added, “all of which are more pertinent by the day.”
The ‘Polite’ Fight
Moscow also views managing escalation as a key goal. Since the opening days of the war, Putin has repeatedly warned about the high stakes associated with a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, particularly given the risk of nuclear weapons use.
NATO members have tested Russia by gradually stepped up military assistance to Ukraine throughout the conflict, including longer-range missile systems, main battle tanks and even fighter jets, but few have openly threatened to send troops short of a potential postwar peacekeeping mission to enforce security guarantees for Ukraine.
And even the nature of such guarantees remains uncertain as Moscow sees an opportunity to enhance its position in the European security architecture and Kyiv’s backers are now faced with direct pressure on several fronts.
The Russian concept of using unconventional techniques to support military goals has often been credited to Chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov and is sometimes referred to as the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” or “new generation warfare.”
Yet Jonsson argued that Moscow’s success in this realm has not been necessarily rooted in any masterful innovation, but rather an accurate reading of the limits to NATO’s collective resolve to respond with force.
“Russia’s unconventional warfare has worked well not because it is novel, but rather because it has exploited the Western lack of determination in countering it,” Jonsson said.
He cited an example from 2014; the year Ukraine’s unrest first began with the toppling of a Russia-friendly government in favor of new pro-West leadership. The uprising was answered in the Donbas region by an insurgency from Moscow-aligned separatists as well as the direct seizure of the Crimean Peninsula by unmarked Russian military units, popularly referred to as “little green men.”
The relatively bloodless nature of the takeover of Crimea by these units, later reported to be a mix of Special Operations Forces and elite Spetsnaz units attached to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), earned them another nickname, “the polite people.”
The moves spurred a massive mobilization of NATO forces to assemble across the alliance’s eastern flank with Russia and sparked new sanctions against Moscow, but the Kremlin was correct in calculating that the seizure of Crimea and its subsequent annexation of the peninsula in an internationally disputed referendum would not draw any direct intervention.
Eight years later, in the midst of a full-scale war, Russia replicated the strategy of holding votes to redefine the status of four more fully or partially occupied Ukrainian provinces—the two Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk along with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—in a bid to ensure their annexation in a negotiated settlement.
With Russia have cemented its grip on Crimea, the fate of the four regions annexed in 2022 and still subject to ongoing clashes have become a primary area of contention in the ongoing peace process led by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has yet to publicly recant his stated commitment to winning back the entirety of Ukrainian territory, a position largely echoed by European partners. But the White House has indicated a consistent push for concessions, including in a 28-point plan released last month.
As the debate plays out and both U.S. and Russian officials signal a deal is within reach, Jonsson argued NATO’s unwillingness to back rhetoric with action was once again on display.
“The unmarked soldiers in Crimea were not a military innovation, it was a political challenge, saying, ‘We know that you know it is us, but you will not do anything about it, so you have the option to call it unidentified troops,’ which worked for a few days until Crimea was taken,” Jonsson said.
“This goes for other forms of subversion as well,” he added. “There is a clear legal basis in both international and national law for countering them, but in many cases, the appetite to take action has been lacking.”
A Two-Front War
This appetite for response has also proved uneven among NATO member states, laying bare familiar fault lines that have also come to light when it comes to U.S.-led demands for greater military spending.
Douglas Lute, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who also served as U.S. ambassador at NATO and senior White House adviser, pointed out that both geography and recent experience with direct or satellite rule from Moscow have pushed front-line NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states to emerge as some of the most vocal advocates of shoring up deterrence to hybrid threats.
Such divisions can prove devastating for the broadly democratic organization of NATO, which usually requires unanimity to proceed with military action.
They serve Moscow’s objectives as well, he argued, as Russian hybrid warfare tactics are “designed not to bring down the alliance, but they’re designed to confuse the alliance, impose debate in the in the among the inside the North Atlantic Council, the political body of the alliance, to cause political concern inside allied capitals, causing that allied capital to be self-absorbed and less concerned about NATO business and more concerned about national disruption, and, quite frankly, because both NATO and the European Union take most of their big decisions on a consensus basis.”
“So, in NATO today, a vote of 32-0, for example, to launch a military operation, that consensus basis actually plays to it,” Lute told Newsweek. “It’s an advantage for Russia’s use of hybrid tactics. Because they don’t have to break the alliance, they only have to splinter off one or two members, and they can essentially gridlock the decision-making process.”
And NATO’s schisms are not limited to Europe, either.
In a perhaps even more challenging development for those in Europe looking to ramp up countermeasures against the Kremlin, Lute said that Washington’s pivot toward rolling back soft power operations across the continent in the form of shuttering outlets like Voice of America, along with an array of critical references to European allies in the White House’s latest National Security Strategy, has effectively opened up a new front for the bloc.
“They’re now feeling it on the second front,” Lute said. “They’re feeling it from the United States as well, with the statements of the president, with the publishing of the new National Security Strategy and the difficulty they see in trying to trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s approaches to Ukraine.”
“So, in a way, the Europeans are fighting what everyone always wants to avoid, and that is a two-front war,” he added. “And it’s not a war with regard to Washington, but there’s no question they feel squeezed between what’s happening to the east and what’s happening to the west.”
