Europe Struggles to Counter Russian Attacks Falling Short of War

A day after Germany blamed Russia for a failed drone attack on cargo planes at its Leipzig-Halle airport, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a tacit admission that the continent was not responding quickly enough to the threat.

“We have to step up,” she said last week, alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “And that means being ready to respond to Russia’s recklessness faster and better.”

The attack on the airport, a key hub for NATO military support for Ukraine, was part of what Western officials say is the Kremlin’s increasingly brazen campaign of so-called hybrid warfare — assassinations, industrial sabotage and other deniable tactics — aimed at eroding European support for Ukraine amid the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion. Russia denies it’s conducting such operations.

Read more: Russia’s Escalating Hybrid Attacks Put Europeans in a Bind

They also appear calculated to exploit growing divisions between the US and European nations at a time when President Donald Trump has pushed European allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to do more for their own defense and recently had what he said was a “great conversation” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The problem is only getting worse. Bloomberg Economics analysts identified at least 20 incidents of Russian hybrid warfare in August — the most in a month since October last year and the third highest since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And yet the relatively muted reaction from the European Union and NATO highlights why Russia has continued to push, with European leaders divided over how to respond and the transatlantic alliance weakened by US hostility.

The attempted attack on the Leipzig airport saw the discovery of an armed drone near Ukrainian aircraft and a mid-air collision with a cargo plane that could have resulted in fatalities. The EU response consisted of threats of new sanctions, tightened entry requirements for Russians, and Berlin’s move to shutter diplomatic and cultural facilities over espionage concerns.

“Reactions have been too slow, too reactive, not sufficient,” said Seth Jones, a former Pentagon official with extensive US special operations experience now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Just last week, the EU’s top military official warned that Russian hybrid attacks were the bloc’s “most significant strategic threat.” But that was hardly the first time Western officials had sounded the alarm about the Kremlin’s increasingly brazen campaign.

In October 2025, von der Leyen warned of a “coherent and escalating campaign” after a series of drone and fighter jet incursions into the European airspace. The next month, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said they were “dealing with an escalation” when an explosion damaged a railway route linking Poland with Ukraine. In February, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas characterized Russia’s actions as “reckless and deliberate escalation.”

‘Stronger Tools’

European and US intelligence officials have warned the attacks are likely to increase, with Moscow hoping to pressure the EU over its support for Ukraine amid long-range drone strikes that have pummeled Russian energy facilities.

The challenge from Russian attacks comes as EU and NATO remain divided over the right approach in a deadly conundrum: trying to balance a response that’s forceful enough to dissuade Russia while avoiding a broader conflict with Moscow that draws in more countries.

“The simple reason why we aren’t reacting stronger is that it’s very difficult to find stronger tools,” said Teija Tiilikainen, director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. “We are targeted, we look helpless, and we don’t necessarily have the countermeasures because we don’t want to have a full-scale war against them.”

Read more: Russia Is Already Waging Hybrid War in Europe, Latvia Says

Perhaps the most serious episode of European pushback came in September 2025, when Poland and Estonia separately invoked NATO Article 4 — a request for consultations over a threat to territorial integrity or security — after Russia violated their airspace. Yet the only tangible result was Eastern Sentry, an open-ended operation to bolster air defenses on NATO’s eastern flank.

On Thursday, Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics told the Riga Security Conference that “we must find new ways how to actually respond to this new wave of provocations.”

The threat of a larger confrontation limits a meaningful European response even as intelligence reports suggest Russia — bogged down in its grinding war with Ukraine — is not ready for any new military confrontation with the West.

Moscow has repeatedly said it had no plans of attacking Europe. In a phone call on Tuesday, Putin assured Trump that Russia had no “aggressive plans” toward Europe. But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a TV appearance the same day, appeared to allude to Russia’s nuclear arsenal when he warned that any conflict with Europe would be “completely different and very short.”

The Trump administration’s antagonizing foreign policy toward the EU and NATO — as well as the rise of far-right parties across Europe which Russia has strategically supported — are deepening the intra-alliance divide, said Lieutenant Colonel Thilo Geiger, a hybrid warfare researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg.

Lost ‘Credibility’

“NATO lost its credibility with the Trump administration messaging that they might not support a NATO nation if it doesn’t pay enough,” Geiger said.

The Kremlin likely intends its grey-zone hybrid campaign to sow doubt among European leaders about how best to respond, in order to paralyze decision-making about greater support for Ukraine and amplify public anxieties over the risks of a military conflict with Russia.

Moscow’s friendship with EU-skeptical, nationalist politicians has a long track record. And in Germany, the far-right, pro-Putin AfD party just secured a major state election victory.

But the rising frequency and widening geographic scope of the attacks is also pushing disparate European nations to come up with a more cohesive approach.

Countries “that did not see Russia as a threat or didn’t experience hybrid threats, are now experiencing or learning about these things,” Tiilikainen said. “If we had been told five, six years ago that Russia is going to execute these kinds of operations against our societies, we would have been shocked — and thought that maybe we are really approaching a full-scale war.”

Top photograph: Mark Rutte and Ursula von der Leyen during a news conference in Brussels, on Sept. 2, 2026; photo credit: Omar Havana/Getty Images